Nine shots into the Andalucía-Costa del Sol Match Play 9 tournament in Spain, Clément Berardo finally bent down to pluck his ball from the first cup with a quadruple-bogey to his name.
The 32-year-old golfer, competing on the Challenge Tour, managed to reach par on the next four holes. But Berardo’s round still ended abruptly with a disqualification when he lost his final ball on the 16th hole, at the time 10 over for his round.
After the Auxerre, France, native’s quadruple-bogey nine to open his round, he had two more bogeys to make the turn at 6 over. From there, he ran into trouble on the 10th hole with a double-bogey and then bogeyed the 14th and 15th before his day came to an unceremonious close on the 16th.
Before Thursday’s opening round, Berardo had missed the cut in his last four tournaments, and he ranks 1,909th in the world.
Berardo is not the only professional golfer to lose all his balls — or to come dangerously close to it. At the 2011 Australian Open, John Daly hit a snag on the 11th hole, hitting seven shots into the water and running out of balls. He shook his partners’ hands and walked off the course.
And Tiger Woods, during his historic runaway U.S. Open win at Pebble Beach Golf Links in 2000, nearly ran out of balls once, too. After darkness prevented Woods from working on the practice green following the fog-delayed second round, he took three balls out of his bag and putted around the carpet of his hotel room. The next morning he left the balls in the room, and his caddie Steve Williams hadn’t restocked his bag for the continuation of round two.
Woods rocketed a tee shot into the ocean on the par-5 18th, leaving him with just one ball to finish. And as we all know now, Tiger made it through just fine.
