Golfers With the Most Holes in One: Record Aces in Golf

Mancil Davis is generally accepted as the golfer with the most career holes in one, credited with 51 documented aces between 1966 and 2007. Nicknamed the “King of Aces,” Davis had already made 20 by his 20th birthday. Amateur Norman Manley was long cited with 59, but that number is now widely discredited, leaving Davis’s better-documented total as the mark most sources trust.

How the hole-in-one record is measured

There is no official lifetime hole-in-one leaderboard. No governing body keeps a master ledger of every ace made on every course, so the “record” belongs to whoever’s total is best documented and most often repeated. A club pro in his sixties can play more rounds in a decade than a touring pro plays in a career, which is why the names atop golf’s ace lore tend to be lifers rather than major champions.

That volume, more than any single swing tweak, is the through-line. The players with the biggest reported totals combined precise iron play with decades of high-frequency golf, then had enough witnesses and paperwork to make the numbers stick.

The leaders in career holes in one

Mancil Davis is the modern benchmark. A Texas club professional, he recorded his first ace in 1966 at age 11 and his 51st in 2007. Nearly all are well documented, one even witnessed by future major champion Ben Crenshaw, and his career also includes 10 double eagles. His 51 is the figure most outlets now cite as the record.

Norman Manley, a retired California engineer, claimed 59 aces between September 1963 and April 1988. For years he was the default answer to “who has the most holes in one,” but his total has since been set aside because his witnesses were never systematically verified. His most striking single feat, acing two consecutive par-4 holes at Del Valle Country Club in 1964, remains widely repeated.

Art Wall Jr., the 1959 Masters champion, tallied 45 career aces, an unofficial world record for decades. Five came in PGA Tour or Senior Tour competition, spread across events from the 1950 Texas Open to a 1986 Senior Tour round, making his the strongest professional case among the high-volume names.

Mancil Davis’s amateur-era contemporaries and other high-tally players round out the lore, but Davis, Manley, and Wall are the three names that anchor almost every serious discussion of the record.

Career hole-in-one leaderboard

Rank	Player	Reported aces	Span	Status
1	Mancil Davis (USA)	51	1966–2007	Generally accepted record
2	Norman Manley (USA)	59 (disputed)	1963–1988	Widely discredited
3	Art Wall Jr. (USA)	45	1950s–1980s	Long-standing unofficial mark

Figures are lifetime totals across all settings and rest on self-reporting and club records, not a central registry. Manley’s higher raw number is listed second because it is not considered verified.

Holes in one on the PGA Tour

Official competition is the one arena where aces are tracked reliably. According to Guinness World Records, Hal Sutton and Robert Allenby share the PGA Tour record with 10 holes in one each in tournament play. Allenby equalled Sutton’s mark at the 2016 CareerBuilder Challenge, having made his first in 2001 and produced all 10 within a 15-year window. Hubert Green and Gil Morgan follow with eight apiece.

The gap between these totals and the 45-to-51 lifetime figures underlines the point: pros play far fewer rounds than lifelong club players, and competition records exclude the practice rounds and pro-ams where many aces actually happen.

Factors that lead to more aces

• Longevity: players active for 30-plus years simply get more chances at every par-3.
• Volume of rounds: frequency matters as much as skill; the biggest totals belong to people who played almost daily.
• Precision iron play: accuracy on par-3 tee shots is the deciding skill.
• Course type: shorter, more accessible par-3s meaningfully raise the odds.

The live chase in 2024-2026

As of 2026, no active player is realistically threatening Mancil Davis’s 51, and the record is best understood as historical rather than a live competition. Among current tour professionals, the meaningful chase is for the official PGA Tour mark of 10 held by Sutton and Allenby, a total that has not been broken since Allenby tied it in 2016. Because ShotLink now logs every competition ace, any future tour record will be cleanly documented in a way the old lifetime totals never were. For lifetime tallies, verification remains the real barrier: without a central registry, a new claimant would need the kind of witness trail that lifted Davis above Manley in the first place.