The Kansas men’s golf team opened play at the Big 12 Championship on Tuesday at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, like every team there, spent the preceding weeks looking to build a little momentum.
How does back-to-back eagles sound?
That was exactly what KU sophomore Max Jelinek recorded late in the final round of the Jayhawks’ team championship at the Hawkeye Invitational in Iowa City, Iowa on April 14.
And it came in the craziest way imaginable.
Jelinek, who finished fourth overall at the event that was won by teammate Will King, got hot toward the end of the front nine, carding three birdies in a five-hole stretch from hole No. 7 to No. 11.
But then things took a turn for the worse. He bogeyed 12, triple-bogeyed 13 and recorded another bogey at 14, setting the stage for one of the wildest turnarounds in KU golf history.
“On the 15th, Coach (Jamie) Bermel came up to me and said, ‘I saw you’re having a little rough stretch; let’s bring it back,’” Jelinek recalled during a recent sit-down interview with R1S1 Sports.
"... If they clap, it must have gone in, right?"
The fun-loving Bermel, no doubt, will claim that what came next was all coaching. And Jelinek said those words from his head coach did help calm him down.
“Frustration definitely set in a little bit,” Jelinek said. “When you’re out there, you just can’t forget that golf’s hard. So, I think I did a good job of just shaking it off and thinking to myself, ‘OK, few holes left to the finish, let’s do something special, let’s make a few birdies.’”
Special it was, even better than the birdies he had hoped for.
“Coming off that tough stretch, I just knew I had to do something good coming into the clubhouse,” Jelinek said.
The first part of the equation came on the par-5 15th, a 486-yard hole that played longer that day because of the wind blowing directly in Jelinek’s face.
“Dead into the fan,” was the way Jelinek described the windy conditions.
As if back-to-back eagles wasn’t already wild enough, there was a little added drama after the tee shot on 15. Jelinek’s ball actually hit the ball of his playing partner as it landed in the fairway.
“So, I got robbed a few yards there,” Jelinek said. “But it was still in the fairway, so I wasn’t worried about it.”
From there, Jelinek ripped a low 5 iron 195 yards to the green and it landed 15 feet from the hole.
“It was a trickier putt,” he noted of the final leg of the first eagle. “It was uphill then downhill and it was breaking right the whole way.”
Rather than thinking too much about the result — good or bad — Jelinek stuck to his approach and drained the putt for the 3.
“At a certain point, you just look at the putts and you want to hit this line and good speed,” he said. “You’re trying to make it.”
On the next hole, he didn’t even need his putter.
That’s because, after a 300-yard drive with his 2 iron off the tee, Jelinek holed out from 104 yards with his 54-degree wedge. This hole played down wind, probably about 109 yards from where he struck it, and his second shot landed 3 feet short, hopped past the flag and then spun back into the cup.
“I was trying to hit it pretty much the number, maybe take a few off just because the wind’s down,” Jelinek recalled. “It landed right next to the pin and it looked like it went in and I was like, ‘Oh wow. Did it go in?’”
An unlikely observer confirmed the news for him, as a lady watching play one hole over turned to see his ball go in on the 16th green and then started clapping.
“I'm like, ‘You know, if they clap, it must have gone in, right,’” Jelinek said, laughing. “So, that was really cool. I saw that it kind of disappeared and we were like, that surely must’ve gone in.”
King, who was playing one the hole behind him at the time, witnessed Jelinek’s reaction to the eagle. But given the distance between them, King didn’t know Jelinek’s movement meant positive news.
“He told me, ‘I thought you were just really mad; I saw you yelling in the middle of the fairway,’” Jelinek said of King’s words to him after the round. “And I was like, ‘No, dude. I made it. I was celebrating.’ Everyone was super-enthusiastic about it, as, you know, one would be.”
Even Jelinek’s dad, who was tracking the round online, was confused by what had just happened.
“He text me and when I called him after we were done, he was like, ‘I was refreshing and thinking, ‘Is this right? This can’t be right. He makes triple-bogey and then two eagles? No, they’re doing it wrong,’” said Jelinek, a native of Prague, Czech Republic, of his father Jiri’s first reaction to the news.
Now, here’s the crazy part. On the very next hole, with all kinds of electricity running through his body, Jelinek landed his tee shot on the 195-yard par-3 right next to the flag. Immediately, he thought to himself, “Could this really happen for a third straight time?”
“It was tracking for a bit,” he said. “I mean, I wasn’t slowing down. I was like, ‘All right, let’s keep going.’ You have that momentum and you don’t throw that away.”
There’s a tradition in golf that says a player who records a hole-in-one has to buy drinks for everyone in his group after the round.
But as far as Jelinek knew, there’s no such rule for back-to-back eagles.
“Nothing like that for this,” he joked. “We were just super-thrilled to have won the tournament.”
When told by R1S1 Sports about Jelinek’s accomplishment, former KU great and current PGA Tour star Gary Woodland said he was pretty confident that he had recorded back-to-back eagles at some point in his life but he could not remember a specific time.
Either way, Woodland said the feat is rare and that Jelinek getting it done was “awesome.”
“It’s definitely a rare thing to do,” said Jelinek, who actually had 3 eagles at the 3-round event and carded an eagle on the 15th hole at the same course a year ago. “Sometimes you get it on a par 5, but on a par 4, it really takes a great shot and a little bit of luck, as well.”
Just how rare is it? Odds suggest that recording a single eagle during any given round sit at around 12,000-1.
What's more, an NBC Sports article from 2010, when golf great Phil Mickelson recorded the feat at The Masters, noted that there had been 61 occurrences of back-to-back eagles on the PGA Tour between 1983 and 2010.
A golf enthusiast since the time he could walk, Jelinek said his father, Jiri, got him into the game and that he’s loved every second of his time playing. The ups, the downs, the good holes and even the bad.
“He loves this sport. And I just remember always going out to play with him over the weekends back home,” Jelinek said of his father. “It’s just been engrained in my DNA for a really long time.”
The KU sophomore has two career holes-in-one and is still looking for his first collegiate win. He did win an amateur tournament last December and also won several youth tournaments before coming to Kansas.
While his decade-and-a-half as a golfer has produced several memorable moments, Jelinek said the back-to-back eagles in Iowa “has to be” his favorite memory to date.
Now, he’s riding the momentum of that and the team win into the postseason.
“I think (winning in Iowa) gives us great momentum heading into the Big 12,” Jelinek said. “The guys have worked really hard, we all feel really good, and it was a great thing to win this last tournament. Momentum, you know. A boost of confidence. Everyone’s wondering what it's like to win back to back. We're just looking for the next big thing.”
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