I came close to taking one in the face today.

A playing partner is in the trees right on the first hole. He is hitting 3-wood from the light rough. It looks like plenty of room through the two trees in front of him and he has a full swing.

Then the unnerving sound of two hits in rapid succession.

The ball came across the front of my face at eye level missing me by less than a foot, maybe only six inches. Holy ****! I was standing in the fairway behind the guy and his ball ends up across the fairway in the trees on the other side. <heart pounding>


In all the years I have played I have been hit only once. My sister is a lefty and was hitting a full wedge from about 100 yards. Dead shank hits me nearly right on the shin bone and I never saw it coming. Down like a house of cards. I was thankful at least that this was on the 17th hole as the swelling/pain did me in quickly.

OTOH I have hit several people. A few of those stories may come later.

I am interested to hear how many of you have been hit. Or have hit others. Or witnessed any tough hits on the course.

Let's hear it.

pretty simple story unfortunately, my dad hits his ball from the left rough and i begin walking up the right side of the fairway, apparently he finds it amusing to hit a knockdown driver from 100 yds away, bounces a few times i guess before nailing me in the calf

man cant hit a huge green from 35 yds away but a small moving target at 100 yds? no problem

my brother came like 3 inches from hitting like a 10 year old in the head

Like for real?

my golf coach in high school would always play with the last group during practice rounds. the second to last group was playing really slow on the first hole so my coach decided go ahead and hit his tee shot, 280 right down the middle hitting a guy in the back right between his shoulders on the fly. he let out a loud yelp as he dropped to the ground. hardest i have ever laughed on the golf course.

i got hit in Vegas at Angel Park on the fly in the arm from about 200 yards away from some idiot on a different who didn't bother yelling fore. it left dimple marks and a huge bruise. it hurt like ****.

Long, downhill par 3. Dense trees behind the hole and bordering the left side. I snap hook a long iron (rather than my customary lazy 4-wood), just as a golf cart emerges from the trees, seeking a hooked tee shot on the next hole. No time to yell, " fore." Time stops. My heart's in my stomach. My life may be altered, by foul chance, forever. I wish I had never picked up a golf club.

My ball strikes the cart's driver, who collapses, as if he's been shot, and falls out of his moving cart, down a slope. His partner manages to keep the cart from flipping over, stops it on the grade, and rushes to his playing partner's aid.

My foursome stands on the tee, frozen, in shock. We believe the man may be dead.

He gets up. The ball has hit him square on the meat of his forearm, massively swollen, but not broken, and he has escaped further injury as he fell.

I'd never seen him before. Nor heard from him since.

He was a lawyer.

My dad got hit on the fly square on the top of his head from someone's tee shot at his country club. The hole he was on went up the hill, and the hole the tee shot was hit from came back down the hill, so there was a little extra vertical distance for the ball to pick up speed. I've never seen so much blood in my life. We took him to the hospital and he ended up with a couple of staples in his head to close up the wound. He ended up having a pretty massive headache for two days or so, but was back on the course within a couple of days.

The guy who hit him felt so bad that he got my dad a nice bottle of wine and a box of cigars. His new nickname became "the Headhunter" and routinely gets grief from the other members.

Very nearly.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbO3Wlvpp_I

I've never been hit but have certainly had my close calls. A kid I went to HS with took one right on the head, I can't even imagine how bad that would feel.


I have witnessed someone get hit by a golf CLUB before though. At the driving range and a young/wild swinger was next to his sister and blasted her right in the head. Blood all over the place, the ambulance came...it was quite a scene. The range could seriously kill you if you aren't careful, never hit next to someone who looks like a loose cannon.

The 2nd time I played I hit my friend. I rolled one off the tee and he walked up ahead of me (the tee shot was up a steep hill). He was probably 30 yards in front me and in my line. I told him to move. He said "hit, I'll get out of the way if it's coming at me" (based on the way I played this wasn't unreasonable). That was the first time in my life I hit a solid 3-iron. He had no chance to move. He was lucky that I sucked at golf and was a weak 13 year old and that it only hit him in the knee. He couldn't walk for the rest of the day and he had dimple marks in his knee the for while.

I was in a Golfsmiths in NYC trying out clubs in one of their 3 hitting bays, I was in the middle one with the one on the left directly next to mine and the one on the right set at an angle facing into the corner. The stall on the left had a couple guys trying out clubs with a store employee, after a while a guy comes in and and starts hitting drives from the stall on my right. After a few minutes of this I hear a thud and one of the guys in the stall on the left lets out a scream. I look over and he is holding his hand which has a bone sticking out of it. Apparently the guy on the right had pulled a shot left and the netting didnt extend far enough out to keep it from hitting the poor bastard in the stall on the left. I left before they had sorted it all out, but man did it look like it hurt.

I was standing near my ball getting ready to chip on, when the assbag on the next teebox yanked a shot. I had three days growth on my chin, and it grazed my whiskers. By the time they yelled "FORE" I had already hit the dirt. My heart was pounding like I just snorted half a kilo of coke.


I was playing alone a few years back, a foresome of retirees in front of me. I was all over the place with my driver that day and they were 300+ yards away, in the middle of the fairway, so I went ahead and hit. My ball rolled up right underneath their cart. As I made it up to them, I apologized, explaining I didn't think I would reach them. One old man says "Son, when you hit hit a shot like that, you don't apologize, you say "DID YOU SEE THAT SHOT!""

My friend hit me in the calf one time and it hurt like balls. He is a single digit handicapper and hits the ball extremely well for his handicap and deciding shanking one 90 degrees directly into my calf was a good idea.


My grandfather who is a 119 handicap almost hit me in the face. I was probably 20 yards away directly to the right. As he hits it all I see is a blur. It reminds me of my baseball days as a pitcher as well as staring straight at the sun during an eclpise. The blur is circular, but looks to be the size of about a basketball. I duck quickly and non nonchalantly act like it was no big deal.

I hit a ~5 year old one time with a semi shank. It was the freaking city tournament (which means mixed in with the good people are some absolutely terrible people...i wasn't one but the shot was...). I think the ball just grazed him because while he was crying a lot, there was no blood. The dad started screaming at me and i am like wtf, this is a golf course, SORRY. I wasn't trying to kill a 5 year old kid. I tried to apologize but really just got the hell out of there before the father killed me.

my favorite:

I am playing in my "state" tournament with the biggest douchebag in the world. I seriously can't believe this kid. Collar popped, bitching, whining, complaining, attempting to cheat, throwing clubs, throwing balls (when he threw his brand new prov1s off the green and walked off after a HORRIBLE PAR OMG, i picked them up and stuck them in my bag. Free golf balls ftw.

Anyway, we get to hole 17 and am playing terribly, ready to get this crap over with. I am standing behind and to the right of the douchebag when he hits his drive. I think he mi**** it a little bit and it faded into the first cut. He is so angry at this absolutely unfathomable shot that he decides throwing his club aimlessly is a great idea. I see the club helicoptering right at my face and the head of the club passes maybe a foot in front of my face. The grip end hits me in the cheek and falls to the ground. It didn't really hurt, felt more like an inadvertent elbow in a pickup basketball game, but it sure scared the hell out of me. I have the "punch you in the face" reflex as I take one step towards him in ass kicking agression and then I somehow manage to hold back and instead I just rant a little bit about what a freaking bitch this kid is. He apologized maybe 100 times within 20 seconds, probably realizing that I would've kicked the living sh*t out of him during almost any other time except for that.

Anyway, his second shot lands on the green rolls into the fringe, rolls down a hill, onto the cartpath, down a hill while still on the cartpath, and into a lake. He ended up making an 8 on that hole. Then on 18 he hits a drive that is maybe a 5 yard slice. The ball hits a cartpath and ends up maybe 1 foot out of bounds. He tries to claim it is in bounds. I sent him back to the tee in totally angry uncharacteristic fashion (I am very non confrontational usually). He proceeds to 4 putt and make another 8. I believe this left him with a round of 80. Probably the greatest bit of karma I have ever see.

I was hoping you'd go the DQ route, but still wasn't disappointed by the result.

Only incident I can recall was when I first took up golf at about age 14 and used to go down to a local field near my school. A couple of my friends came with me and were kicking a ball around. I went up on a small hill at the back of the field and hit some balls off there with a really old wooden headed 2-wood. Caught a low one and sent the ball shooting towards one of my mates. He jumped to get out of the way after I shouted at him. Ball caught him flush on the inner thigh. The bruise and swelling a couple of days later was very similar to the injury Johnny Knoxville suffered in the first Jackass movie after having someone fire a tail-stablised bag with an air rifle at him. Nearly 15 years later golf ball victim guy is serving a jail sentence for something distinctly distasteful, guess he never quite got the breaks in life.lol.