Golf Can Be Deadly, If You Don’t Use Your Head
Justin Tune was doing his buddy a favor — jogging back down the fairway to retrieve a dropped bottle of water — when he was drilled in the head by a ball from the tee 150 yards away.
“It hurt,” the 12-year-old from Twain Harte, Calif., recalls of that day last August. “And then I couldn’t move my right hand all that well.”
What Justin had suffered, the doctors later realized, was a cerebral hemorrhage to the area of his brain that affects muscle control. The good news: After six weeks and many test-filled trips to the hospital, Justin is back to normal.
“Because he was young, Justin healed really fast,” says his mom, Stacy. “What bothered us most was that the golfer came up to Justin and said, ‘You OK?’ And then he just kept on going. There Justin is, dazed and bleeding, and the man who hit him played right on through.”
Each year, nearly 40,000 golfers are admitted to emergency rooms after being injured at play, most by errant golf balls and flying clubheads. It’s accidents like those — and untold other injuries and near misses — that led Golf Digest to conduct the most ambitious golf-safety test project ever attempted. We wanted to find out exactly what kind of damage can be expected from the most common types of impact — and how to prevent it.
Read more at: