Louis Oosthuizen plays fourth albatross in Masters history
Albatross is the rarest golf shot, and even though South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen didn’t win the Masters, he certainly made history. On hole No. 2, a 575-yard par 5, Oosthuizen took a long tee shot. He “unleashed an iron from about 250 yards away. The ball hit about 50 yards from the pin, rolled and fell into the cup as the crowd cheered,” reported AOL News. Right before the ball rolled into the hole, an announcer excited blurted out, “Come to Poppa!”
So what exactly is an albatross? It’s simply a hole played three strokes under par; it’s also known as a double Eagle. According to Dean Knuth, inventer of the USGA’s slope rating system for golf courses, in a 2004 article in Golf World, he put the odds of playing an albatross at a million-to-one- much higher than the odds of getting a hole-in-one, which are about 13,000-to-1 for the average golfer.
Oosthuizen’s albatross is the fourth in Master’s history. The most recent Master’s albatross was by Jeff Maggert on the thirteenth hole in 1994, preceding that albatross wasAustralia’s Bruce Devlin on the eighth hole in 1967. The first and most famous albatross was by Gene Sarazen on the fifteenth hole in 1935, a shot that AOL Sports says “put the Masters on the map.”
