Sung Kang makes an ace at Colonial and the not-crowd goes not-wild

Sung Kang recorded the first hole-in-one of the PGA Tour’s mid-pandemic restart with when he jarred this tee shot from 163 yards at the par-3 13th on Thursday at the Charles Schwab Challenge:

As you can see in the video, the reaction – aside from an audible yell when the ball crashed into the hole – was decidedly muted.

Without fans on the course and with players keeping their distance from one another – avoiding congratulatory high-fives, for example – the group of Kang, Tyler Duncan and Brendon Todd simply made their way off the tee box and towards the putting surface.

It turns out no one in the group had any idea the ball was in the hole.

“I had no clue,” Kang said after closing out a 2-over 72.

“We couldn’t really see where it went, so my caddie just told me it’s probably about a foot away in the shadow somewhere – just the shadow for the flag – so I thought it was just close. We didn’t even know it was in. And then we’re walking, walking up there, and one of the media guys asked us: What did I hit? And my caddie said, ‘Is it in?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s in.’”

The hole-in-one was Kang’s second on the PGA Tour, coming nine years after his first Tour ace at the 2011 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

“It would be good if I knew right away after I hit it,” Kang added. “But we were like 50 yards away, and they were like, ‘It’s in the hole.’ I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s in the hole.’ It wasn’t really crazy. Nobody was really up there, only a few people out there just clapping a little bit. I still appreciated it, though.”