Peter LeDonne felt fortunate for what the game of golf has brought, and that was before the former local PGA pro found a little extra luck around St. Patrick’s Day.

The 69-year-old shot a 69 in Arizona.

Shooting your age is rare: A quick internet search revealed roughly 9 per million golfers will ever do it. By comparison, maybe 1 out of every 12,500 average golfers will shoot a hole-in-one, though for a low-handicap golfer like LeDonne the ratio drops to 1 in 5,000.

LeDonne has four career aces, by the way — one for each of his grandchildren. Now the scratch golfer has scratched another item off his bucket list.

“I don’t know,” he said by phone Wednesday. “Just something happened out on the golf course. Best I can explain it is everything was falling into place.”

LeDonne should be a familiar name. A native of Pennsylvania, he first stepped into Montana for “a fly fishing honeymoon” that began in Libby in 1978. He and his wife never really left, though they’ve since divorced. He’s spent his post-retirement winters in Florida, then Arizona, but he’s never far from a Flathead Valley golf course in the summers.

“I ran away from home and moved to Montana in my late 20s,” he said. “I built a golf course, a little 9-hole course (adjacent to Lake Blaine) and sold that in 2005 and retired.

“I consider myself a Montanan. I’ve been out there 40-plus years.”

LeDonne’s road to being a golf pro is unique. The first time he thought about it was his second day in Libby, when he played Cabinet View with a local bank vice president. He struck it so well — “‘Power Pete,’ they call me,” he said — that he was asked to replace the retiring local pro.

He begged off; he wanted to work the outdoors in a different fashion. He was employed by W.R. Grace for a time, and the U.S. Forest Service. Then two daughters — Rebecca is a nurse in Kalispell, Sara is a teacher in Whitefish — arrived and he moved the family to the Valley.

Then it happened again: LeDonne played Kalispell’s Buffalo Hills with a couple gentlemen who, before long, suggested strongly that he be the pro at the Cut Bank Golf and Country Club.

“I went, ‘Cut Bank? Where’s that?’” LeDonne recalled. “I ended up being their golf pro, general manager and greenskeeper. Before you knew it — the very next season — I was offered the job at West Glacier (Glacier View). I was there for five years.”

In 1991 he landed at Village Greens, which had just opened its first nine.

On March 3, LeDonne turned 69. A couple weeks later he hit the challenging Saddlebrooke Country Club, about a half-hour from his college alma mater, the University of Arizona,

Golf partner Terry Edwards, a retired Air Force jet pilot and former club champion, saw LeDonne bogey the first two holes. Then came birdies on 5 and 6; a 15-footer birdie putt on No. 15 was part of a closing run of four birdies in the last five holes. “Power Pete” went drive-wedge to birdie 17.

Which leaves LeDonne, who didn’t golf competitively in college, thankful. He looks back to his start in Cut Bank in 1985 and marvels at what’s happened since. “I just got to meet so many class people. I can’t thank them enough for my career,” he says. “I’m really sincere when I say I thank them for supporting me the way they did.”

He’s also thankful for Edwards, a strong competitor who usually gets the best of LeDonne. For this round he served as inspiration for LeDonne. Who knows? It could happen again.

“I’m playing golf with him tomorrow,” he said.

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.