For a three-month span in the summer of 2012, the third hole at the Kennett Square Golf and Country Club served as the beginning and end to perhaps the greatest golf story ever told, writes Max Adler for Golf Digest.

It was there where Vic Dupuis – competing in a club ritual, an event that featured six holes of alternate shot, six holes of scramble, and six of better ball – stopped breathing for 10 minutes.

“My first thought was, he was sleeping,” said Tom Henry, Dupuis’s neighbor and partner in the event.

“His face was navy blue,” said William Ashton, a doctor who injected Dupuis with a powerful dose of epinephrine that’s used only for cardiac emergencies. “By a traditional definition, he was dead. We were attempting to reverse it.”

Dupuis eventually began breathing and was rushed to Chester County Hospital. Eventually, he was found to have sarcoidosis, a collection of inflamed white-blood cells that collect in little lumps called granulomas.

[uam_ad id=”58459″]

Advertisement

He was often told by doctors and students that they “only ever get to study cardiac sarcoidosis in cadavers.”

Three months later, when Dupuis was given the green light to golf again, he returned to the Kennett Square Golf and Country Club, to the scene of his “death.” And when he stepped up to the third hole?

You guessed it. He hit a hole-in-one.

“I should’ve retired that 6-iron then and there, because I haven’t hit it anywhere near as pure since,” Dupuis said.

Click here or watch the video below for more of the incredible story of Vic Dupuis in Golf Digest.

[uam_ad id=”73619″]