Marine veteran wins a new car

Marine Corps Base Quantico -- Eric Ferrell wasn’t even planning to play golf that day. He got a call from Corey Mayberry and John Hooks, friends who were participating in the Marine Corps Recruiting Command (MCRC) fund-raising golf tournament at Medal of Honor Golf Course aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico May 20. They needed another body. So Ferrell, a Marine veteran now employed by the Department of Defense at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, headed his car south from his home in New Jersey—getting hit with a speeding ticket on the way—and was the last of 50 players to arrive at the tournament. It’s a good thing he did, because at 9:36 a.m., shortly after arriving late to the game, Ferrell hit a hole-in-one from 178 yards at hole 9. His feat won him a new 2015 Nissan Murano donated to the tournament by Leckner Nissan of Stafford. Medal of Honor golf course employees said no one has ever won a car for a hole-in-one at the course before. “I’m actually still in shock,” Ferrell said, almost five hours after achieving his feat. “My friends had just been making fun of me for the club I was using,” he said. According to Golf Digest, the odds of an amateur golfer making a hole-in-one are 12,500 to one. Even for a professional golfer, the odds are 2,500 to one. There are 150,000 aces per year from an estimated 490 million rounds of golf. Ferrell said he planned to keep the prize SUV. Adding to the luck of the day was the fact that the Quantico area was enjoying a rare dose of sunshine in what had been nearly a month of soggy weather. “All sorts of goodness came together today,” Sherry Yetter said, an organizer of the tournament. Writer: auphausconner@quanticosentryonline.com