America After the party, Homero Blancas slept for a few hours and then set the shortest round ever recorded in golf - 55 shots for the last 18 holes of the 1962 Premier Invitational.
Blancas is an 85-year-old Mexican-American citizen. His 55-stroke record from 62 years ago remains unbeaten in both amateur and professional golf.
Blancas played in the 1962 Premier Golf Invitational amateur tournament when he was 23 years old and a recent graduate of the University of Houston. The event often featured names that would later become international professional golfers or icons such as Ben Crenshaw, Charles Coody, and Tom Kite.
The 1962 tournament was played on a nine-hole Premier course that ran around an oil refinery in Longview, Texas, so Blancas and his fellow competitors had to play two rounds there to qualify.
The night before the finish line, Blancas went out drinking with some friends, breaking up at dawn. On the way home, he got into a traffic accident when he lost control of his car, skidded through a nearby gas station, and nearly hit a fuel pump. "I was swerving, probably on instinct," Blancas later told the Tyler Morning Telegraph .
The scorecard recording his 55-stroke performance and the autographed ball from his impressive 1962 golf round are kept by Blancas in the family heirloom room.
After escaping, Blancas returned to the hotel for a short nap and then continued playing. In the final round, he scored a birdie, then on hole 2 he chipped the ball into the green, which was not as he had intended. But that shot hit the flagstick and fell into the hole, giving Blancas an eagle. From then until the end of hole 9, he scored five more birdies.
Returning to the front of the course for the second half of the round, Blancas continued to birdie six of his first eight holes. The most memorable was the eighth hole, when a 45-foot putt had too much power and led to a lucky bounce. It hit the back wall of the hole, bounced off the lip, and dropped to the bottom.
On the par-5 hole, Blancas thought his shot was out of bounds, but instead got a lucky bounce - the ball bounced back into the fairway after hitting a tree, paving the way for his 13th birdie of the round. Blancas only putted 20 times in the entire match. Such excellent form helped Blancas win the championship, six strokes ahead of the runner-up.
With a 55 at the 1962 Premier Golf Invitational on a course measuring just over 5,000 yards, Blancas was listed in the Guinness Book of Records, but only for a short time because the organization that runs the publication raised its recognition standards. Accordingly, a valid achievement must take place on a course measuring at least 6,500 yards.
Blancas was invited back to play on the same golf course where he set the record in 1962 at the 2012 Premier Invitational. Photo: Golf Digest
Blancas started playing golf professionally in 1965 and retired in 2001. During that time, he mainly competed in the US PGA Tour system, winning four cups on the first-class branch of the same name, and once winning the Champions Seniors branch.
Just over three weeks ago, someone came close to Blancas’ 55-stroke mark. That was 30-year-old Cristobal del Solar, a Chilean, who shot 57 in the first round of the Astara Golf Championship on the 6,254-yard Korn Ferry Tour course in Bogota, Colombia. With that, del Solar became the new 18-hole record holder on the PGA Tour and tied the record for strokes in a professional round set by Irishman Davis Carey on the 2019 Alps Tour.
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