Currently happily plowing through sports scribe extraordinaire Dan Jenkins’ latest romp, Stick A Fork in Me where a griseled College Athletic Director looks back on all the crazy and colorful experiences he had coaching college football and navigating University politics as an AD. There’s a hilarious bit about a golfer who met his maker after hitting a ball into the drink by the eighteenth green and then jumping in after it: “that’s when his foot got tangled with other clubs lying on the bottom, having suffered the same punishment for betraying their owners. Dub couldn’t pull himself loose and drowned while his playing partners were lining their putts on the green. Nobody knew he drowned until his straw hat floated to the top of the pond.”
A lot of golfers half jest that a hole-in-one followed by a heart attack would be a helluvah way to go…that way, at least you went out while feeling on top of the world. It’d certainly be a preferable to the demise of the character in the Jenkins book and also these real life course croaks.
SHAFTED
Dateline 1994, Gloverville NY. A teenager was taking his bad shot angst out on bench, whacking it with his 3-wood. The club broke and the resulting jagged shaft flew back and struck his heart. While this might sound like an isolated incident there have been a few other very similar cases so the lesson is rage against your clubs at your own peril.
LIGHTENING
If you hear the horn blare, hightail it to shelter. Last year the Indian Tree Golf Club in Arvada Colorado, a fast moving storm rolled in and a golfer was hit by a fatal bolt.
Felled Tree
A few years back at Alpine NJ' Montammy golf club a crew was cutting down a dead tree in the backyard of a house abutting the course. According To newspaper reports the golfer walked under the tree to retrieve his ball just as a large limb was about to fall. The workers yelled to him to move but it was too late.
FATAL-I-TEE
There’s a golf yarn about a golfer who had an odd habit of chomping on a tee while he played. Anyway, he gets sicker and sicker and dies. Post mortem they find that he ingested pesticide sprayed on the course and that’s what did him in
According to Snopes it’s based on a true story. In 1983 Navy Lieutenant George Prior played
36 holes at the army navy country club in Arlington Virginia. He started complaining of a headache while he was playing and afterwards felt feverish, nautious and had broken out in a rash. Four days later he was hospitalized with a 104.5 degree fever and covered in blisters. He was gone within ten days. A toxic substance had caused organ failure. Apparently he had a hypersensitivity to fungicide so he was more prone to this horrific end. His widow did file a lawsuit against the pesticide manufacturer which was settled out of court.
SHAFTED
Dateline 1994, Gloverville NY. A teenager was taking his bad shot angst out on bench, whacking it with his 3-wood. The club broke and the resulting jagged shaft flew back and struck his heart. While this might sound like an isolated incident there have been a few other very similar cases so the lesson is rage against your clubs at your own peril.
LIGHTENING
If you hear the horn blare, hightail it to shelter. Last year the Indian Tree Golf Club in Arvada Colorado, a fast moving storm rolled in and a golfer was hit by a fatal bolt.
Felled Tree
A few years back at Alpine NJ' Montammy golf club a crew was cutting down a dead tree in the backyard of a house abutting the course. According To newspaper reports the golfer walked under the tree to retrieve his ball just as a large limb was about to fall. The workers yelled to him to move but it was too late.
FATAL-I-TEE
There’s a golf yarn about a golfer who had an odd habit of chomping on a tee while he played. Anyway, he gets sicker and sicker and dies. Post mortem they find that he ingested pesticide sprayed on the course and that’s what did him in
According to Snopes it’s based on a true story. In 1983 Navy Lieutenant George Prior played
36 holes at the army navy country club in Arlington Virginia. He started complaining of a headache while he was playing and afterwards felt feverish, nautious and had broken out in a rash. Four days later he was hospitalized with a 104.5 degree fever and covered in blisters. He was gone within ten days. A toxic substance had caused organ failure. Apparently he had a hypersensitivity to fungicide so he was more prone to this horrific end. His widow did file a lawsuit against the pesticide manufacturer which was settled out of court.
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