Hole in One

I’ve been threatening my friends to do this for several years…now I’m going to unleash the beast. Your friendly neighborhood Tired Blogger is mildly sick on top of being profoundly discouraged. I’m frankly just tired of blogging about Stitt. I am almost certain there is a smoking gun somewhere, but I’m just a blogger, not a reporter, and if the reporters don’t care to smoke him out, why am I bothering?

So getting back to writing about something fun, the stunning beauty imaged above from Crystal Chatham’s website (check that place out, the photo’s are awesome, and maybe she won’t try to nail me on copyright violation if I send a bunch of viewers her way) is the “Golfer” Jacqueline Gagne.

I’ve been writing and railing about the abuses of big government and big corporations for quite some time. And lately, I’ve been adding another category: the demise of educational excellence in this nation. I may get back to railing about Stitt and the struggle to improve education in the state of Oklahoma, but for this post, I’m just going to write about what I’m going to call the Dilbertization of education.

In 2016 Trump started to raise a ruckus about how we need to run our country more like a business and less like an empire. He’d gotten the idea from reading a Michael Savage book, I’ve already written enough about that. And I don’t want to debate the idea. On paper, it sounds incredible. Let’s make education efficient. Let’s make it productive. Let’s make education excellent. Let’s make education great again.

It sounds so good, I can feel the tingles. I want to dive into the battle and git ‘er done. But I don’t think, at least in Oklahoma education, that is what has happened. And the practices I’m hearing about, far from making the schools more efficient, productive, or excellent, seem to be leaving us instead with a dumbed-down population that is easily manipulated. So sit down my friends and I’ll tell you a story of deception, intrigue, and lust. Ok, ok…maybe just a story of deception and stupidity.

Several of my friends have been computer techs for as long, or longer than I have been in retail. Several of them ended up employed as techs in the University of Oklahoma Medical Network.

Things went very well for a bit. The Dean was ex-military, he was very much into live and let live. “You know you did you know you did you know you did.”

Say live and let die! Bwahhhhhwahhhhhhh……

Yeah, you knew it. No good thing lasts forever. The good boss was replaced by a dumbass (yeah, I said it out loud…I won’t even say “alleged,” you’ll see why in a bit).

Anyway, said dumbass hired Jacqueline Gagne to supervise the IT team. Her strategy, according to two sources, who until recently worked in that department, was to insult, degrade, and infuriate the staff in the hopes that they would quit and she could replace them with her cronies.

In this case (and maybe just in this case) the strategy failed. You see, when you have an internet trail, techs can dig up the dirt on you (as I’ve attempted but failed to do with some folks myself). Allow me to introduce Gagne (not Lacey) to you folks.

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/gd0711kindred_gagne

https://deadspin.com/jacqueline-gagne-is-as-good-at-commenting-as-she-is-at-309266

https://deadspin.com/jacqueline-gagne-is-as-good-at-commenting-as-she-is-at-309266

This is from the Golf Digest about her purported umpteen holes in one.

“We are to believe that a Pro V1 disappeared into a Southern California palm tree, fell to earth, ricocheted across a green, made its way into the hole, and nobody saw it until the woman who hit it asked someone to look in the hole.

“OK, Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett, so strange things happen. Happens once where a palm tree kicks you into the hole, OK, you’re living right. Happens twice, it’s a minor miracle. Can’t happen again.

But in 2007, Jackie Gagne insists, it happened for her seven times. Seven times she hit par-3 tee shots that could not be found until someone went to the hole, looked in, and expressed one more version of Elvira excitement.”

The Digest continues.

“She’s practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported more holes-in-one in six months than most PGA Tour players make in a career. By one count, she did the 16 in 118 rounds this year. That comes to a hole-in-one once every 30 swings on par 3s, a rate of success that causes Dean Knuth, creator of the U.S. Golf Association’s Slope Rating System and a Golf Digest contributor, to blurt this assessment: “That’s impossible.” David Boyum is a math guy with a Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of What the Numbers Say. He puts the odds of Gagne’s feat at “1 in 2,253,649,101,066,840,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.”

“Gagne lapped up the attention. Her website, jacquelinegagne.com, carried 39 citations of national and international media outlets reporting on her, including Golf Digest, Golf World, USA Today, The London Times and The Wall Street Journal. She hired a Los Angeles public-relations firm. She planned a book, Turning Up Aces. She posted a Titleist feature bragging that she used the Pro V1 ball on every hole-in-one. She waxed enthusiastically about Cobra clubs (the company sent her a set and a staff bag). She did a testimonial for the Q-Link pendant (over the signature, “Jacqueline Gagne, World Record Holder, Most Hole In Ones in One Year”). She agreed to play in certain events as a national spokesperson for a breast-cancer charity.

“Gagne twice appeared on CBS television’s “The Early Show.” Co-anchor Harry Smith began the first segment saying, “Oh, do I love this story.” Later he brought her to New York, where he enlisted golf analyst Peter Kostis. When Gagne revealed that she reads the green from the tee, Kostis declared that “the first clue” to the holes-in-one. Then she made a few swings, and Kostis liked what he saw. His conclusion: “It’s the real deal.”

At the time of the article, Tiger Woods had not had a hole-in-one in five years.

The Digest continues: “The Palm Springs newspaper, The Desert Sun, said in its monthly magazine that she had been vice president of operations for Microsoft in Boston. (But Microsoft says no record confirms her employment.) After moving to the desert, Gagne told friends, she had built a computer company, sold it for a lot of money, retired and took up golf. (Other sources say it was a small company, operated briefly, and then closed.)”

According to my sources, she was still using the same resume years later when she was hired at OU. I guess it makes sense, when I hire someone I don’t think to google Golf Digest about them. But I’d think a simple Google search would behoove most HR dopes on the prowl to hire another incompetent. When the workers revealed to the employees that they had fumbled the ball, and badly, she was terminated. I have the OU information that was given to the public, which only says she was discharged, but my inside sources (who, admittedly are no longer there, but I believe them) tell me she was conducted off the campus in handcuffs.

Dave Kindred of Golf Digest started out as a skeptic, and the more he dug, the more he doubted. When he began his investigation, she had an already stunning seven holes in one. As the year progressed (this was 2007, in the halcyon days before the 2008 market crash, when I still believed my career at People Enraging People Sadistically Ineptly was a road leading somewhere), she ended up reporting ten more.

With each report his skepticism mounted. He strove to get an interview, she kept putting it off with the passive aggressiveness of my ex wife. By her sixteenth hole in one, he had begun to investigate with a vengeance. If Muhammad would not come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Muhammad.

She had wracked up eight claims on holes in one by the time Kindred hit the road. Every place he stopped failed to provide information that convinced Kindred of her veracity. He interviewed a club pro, Dan Brown at La Quinta’s Mountain View Country Club where she claimed to have hit the eighth hole-in-one. Dan Brown stated there was nobody there who could verify she had hit that, she had golfed there, according to her score card she had played two under par, but no hole in one was recorded there.

“Numbers 10 and 11 came in one round, at SilverRock Resort’s eighth and 14th holes. SilverRock general manager Randy Duncan thought it curious the way he found out about the rare two-in-one-round feat. “Not that day, but later a friend of hers sent a fax,” he says. “She requested two plaques for holes-in-one. I said, ‘Holy cow, this lady is amazing. Do you mind if we share this with the media?'”

Her friend provided six names, but no contact information for any of them. Duncan (McLeod of the Clan McLeod) sought to verify the information for two months with the passion of the Kurgan seeking the Prize. But he succeeded no better than the Kurgan (and without any pithy lines about it being better to “burn out than to fade away”).

“Gagne was disqualified from the Mission Hills Johnny Revolta Match Play Tournament in February. She failed to turn in her group’s master scorecard. Instead, she produced a card showing the Gagne/Kreedman team with scores lower than opponents believed they had signed for on the master. Shortly after, Gagne resigned as chair of the membership committee of the club’s women’s golf association.”

Kindred talked to ten witnesses who claimed to have been with her for eleven holes-in-one to verify the validity of their testimony. He believes only one of the witnesses is actually credible, because none of the other witnesses actually saw the ball land on the green, they simply saw a ball in the hole after the shot was made.

“Only one of 10 witnesses saw a Gagne hole-in-one tee shot to land on a green. Twice it happened for Don Balletto, a friend from Canada. His is the most plausible supporting testimony—the only plausible testimony—but even he expresses surprise. He saw Gagne’s ball slide over swales and disappear. “We’d go up there,” he says, “and the damned ball would be in the hole.”

So Kindred believes it is possible (but not verified) that she made two. He never got to interview Gagne, but he did interview her girlfriend psychotherapist Barbara Kreedman. She shared that she never, ever, actually saw the ball go in the hole. She saw the same thing everyone else did. Ball getting lost somewhere, but then ending up in the hole. She even admitted that she “was uncomfortable” with one of the claims. Evidently that was not all she was uncomfortable with. The relationship ended dramatically with a domestic disturbance.

Kindred ends his report with this information: “

“Witness affidavits described an angry confrontation at the Kreedman/Gagne home, followed at the address three days later with what Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Herlinda Valenzuela told me was closed out as a “disturbed subject” call; Gagne, in a voice mail to the Golf Digest office, said she had suffered an epileptic seizure.

“That day late in August, Gagne was hospitalized. When I heard that she had been discharged and had been to lunch at Mission Hills, I asked her friend Judy Scrafford to relay a message that if she wanted to talk, I wanted to listen.

“Gagne’s call was a voice mail in which she proposed a deal of the sort that no reporter can make. She would sit for an interview if I first faxed to her lawyer the name of a source in my reporting along with what that source had said.”

Ok, I had fun, but now I’m done. I just want to drink tea and forget the world is so full of incompetence for a while. Till I get a job supervising my friends at OU, make mine Marvel. Ah heck, make mine Marvel anyway.