Golf found its newest villain this week in Zach Holland, a former college golfer who resigned his membership at WingHaven Country Club in O'Fallon, Missouri after admitting he faked a hole-in-one during a club tournament. Security footage from a maintenance shed near the 4th green caught him driving up to the hole before his tee time, planting his ball in the cup, then acting stunned when his group found it sitting in the hole later that round.
It's the kind of story that was built for Fore Play. The pod dropped a new episode digging into the whole saga, and the hosts didn't just talk around it, they had actual footage tied to the guy at the center of it.
The Fore Play hosts react live to the exclusive footage, captioned 'HOURS LATER' and 'THAT'S INSANE!' as the scandal unfolds on screen.
Holland's excuse on his way to the green was reportedly that he needed to take a call about his terminally ill grandmother and would meet his group at the hole. When the ball turned up in the cup, his playing partners had no reason to doubt it, until the club's superintendent pulled the security tape and saw him rolling up to the green well ahead of schedule. Holland has since admitted the ball was staged and called it "complete stupidity" rather than anything tied to the tournament's hole-in-one prize pot.
That's the meat of the episode, but Fore Play being Fore Play, the tangents were flying too. At one point Trent got going on a Chinese food bit that had nothing to do with golf and everything to do with why people tune in.
Trent riffs about Chinese food mid-podcast, dropping the "I'm gettin all lubed up" line that had nothing to do with the scandal but everything to do with the show's usual chaos.
Golf cheating stories tend to have a short shelf life online, a viral clip, a few outraged comments, then it's gone. But this one has legs because there's actual video evidence and a guy on record admitting to the whole thing, which is rare. Fore Play landing exclusive footage from Holland himself gives the episode a different weight than the usual pod chatter about a story everyone already saw on Twitter.
Whether WingHaven takes any further action or the story just fades into golf lore is the next thing to watch, but for now it's given Fore Play its biggest storyline of the week and another reminder that amateur golf drama travels just as fast as anything happening on Tour.