It is the stroke of luck dreamt about by every golfer but one player’s hole in one has proved to be more of a bogey after landing him in thousands of pounds of debt.
Jake Warner’s 202-yard masterstroke earned him a £14,000 top-of-the-range car — or so he thought.
On the tee at Haverhill Golf Club in Suffolk was a new 1.6TDI five-door Vauxhall Corsa, complete with alloy wheels bearing the slogan: “Win this car if you get a hole in one.”
However, when Mr Warner turned up to collect the keys a few days later he was given a basic model worth half its value.
Refusing to accept the car or an offer of £7,000 in cash, he took the club to court but has been left with a huge legal bill after losing the case.
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The judge at Cambridge county court found that he had failed to prove that he played the tournament solely to win the car on display and, without any evidence of other golfers winning that specific car, Mr Warner lost the case.
Although he still received an out-of-court settlement of £7,500, Mr Warner has been ordered to pay £10,000 in legal fees.
The debt has led him to remortgage his house to pay for his wedding to Kirsty Dolby, his fiancée. He has left the £760-a-year club and claims that a dozen friends and relatives have also quit in protest. “I had to borrow some money to get ourselves out of debt. We had to take £10,000 out of the mortgage to pay for it,” the golfer said.
“It was a worrying time and at one point it looked like we wouldn’t be able to pay for our wedding.”
Mr Warner, who was told he had a “very good case” by a solicitor, said: “It has all been a bit of a nightmare. I got lucky and hit a hole in one; it’s the first one I’d ever hit and I couldn’t believe it when it landed on the green. I was elated on the day and then I was devastated when I found out I wasn’t going to have the car that they had advertised.
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“Our argument was that the car was on the tee, written the way that it was. There’s no real hiding from that.
“I was told I could not have had that car purely and simply because I didn’t see it before I started the round.”
Mr Warner, who now drives a ten-year-old, grey Ford Focus Zetech worth £1,500, said that it had been a stressful few months.
He added: “In hindsight, I wish I had just accepted the money. It would have been a lot easier than going through a long legal fight.”
Haverhill Golf Club said that it had acted properly, had made a generous offer to settle the dispute and that Mr Warner’s claim was always bound to fail.