Some golfers play for a lifetime without ever making a hole-in-one.
Les Mouser has seven. Let that sink in for a moment as I tell you how.
Mouser, 79, of Festus is a happy amateur. He joins his friends, including my former boss and Leader co-founder Pat Martin, at Oak Valley Golf Course and Resort in Pevely for league play.
Mouser didn’t even play the sport until he was 21. He and his cousin went to a driving range to see how far they could hit the ball. His golfing journey took an early dogleg left when he was working for AT&T and got drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.
Mouser married his wife Sandy while he was stationed at Fort Bragg (recently renamed Fort Liberty) in North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne along with many Special Operations units. Mouser served with the 35th Signal Group from 1966-68.
Fayetteville, the city right outside Fort Liberty’s gates, is where Mouser made the first of his seven aces, all on par-3 holes.
“My wife was with me,” he said. “After I made it, she asked, ‘What does that count as? She didn’t know how to score it.”
It took more than 10 years for Mouser to record his second and third holes-in-one. He and Sandy had moved home and were raising a family when he fired a pair of aces at Joachim Golf Club.
The fourth came at the sprawling retirement community The Villages in Florida. Mouser said he took a blind shot and didn’t see where the ball landed. A course marshal tracked the ball and had some fun before letting Mouser know his ball went in the cup.
“We were looking for my ball, and the marshal is sitting on the cart path and he says, ‘Have you checked the hole?’” Mouser said. “He said he saw it go in there.”
Later that same year, Mouser was playing in Tunica, Miss. – where casinos almost outnumber golf courses – when he sank his fifth one. No. 6 was at Meramec Lakes in St. Clair and his most recent was last year at Oak Valley.
“Every time I get to a par three, I try to get a hole-in-one,” Mouser said. “You don’t try and miss the hole. I’ve been lucky seven times.”
For a typical 18-hole round, Mouser said he usually shoots 78 to 82, from the senior tees.
“It’s good entertainment and fun. We all have a good time,” he said of league play.
Raising three sons, Rob, Doug and Jeff, the Mousers were always part of the sports-parent crowd. Rob is trying his best to outdo his dad, bowling four 300 games (Les has one of those, too), but so far has only a measly three holes-in-one.
Now for the rest of the story.
Sometimes you talk to someone for the first time and a strange series of coincidences makes you wonder just how connected we all are.
When Les called me, his caller ID popped up as Clyde Mouser, his father’s name. I also knew a different man named Clyde Mouser and had him stored as a contact in my phone. Both men have passed away.
If it had just been that coincidence, I wouldn’t have mentioned it. But this gets even better. The two Clydes actually met! My Clyde, who lived in St. Charles, found out Les’s dad was in a hospital in St. Louis and paid him a visit there and then at his home in Hematite. That sounded exactly like the Clyde I knew, a good-natured, God-fearing, curious fellow. In my mind, I imagined Clyde and his wife, Pauline, pulling up to the Mouser’s home here in the county. Les and I had a good laugh at that curious connection.
It had been awhile since I’d thought of my Clyde. He died at 96 in 2017, 10 years after his namesake. My wife and I rented our first house from him and treasured our relationship with him and Pauline, who passed away at 97, just a few months before him.
There is more. The Villages in Florida, where Les got one of his aces, is where my niece has attended charter school since kindergarten; she’s now a high school sophomore. And the old Fort Bragg, where Mouser got his first hole-in-one, is where I was stationed when I served.
The best part of our conversation wasn’t about athletic achievement, but remembering two people whom we love to talk about and fondly remember.