By Ryan Herrington
It was all tied at 2-2 in the final of the NCAA Women’s Championship on Wednesday at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale between No. 1 Stanford and No. 2 Oregon, but there was an air of inevitability as well. Cardinal freshman Rose Zhang, the No. 1-ranked women’s amateur who won the NCAA individual title on Monday and the Annika Award for national college player of the year on Tuesday, held a 2-up lead over Sofie Kibsgaard Nielsen with two holes to play in the fifth and deciding match. A miracle comeback would be needed to change the pending outcome.

Instead of a miracle, the Ducks stumbled upon a penalty stroke after a rare rules violation.

As Nielsen, using a push cart in the Arizona heat, was walking up toward her ball in the rough off the tee on the par-4 hole, she mistakenly ran over Zhang’s ball, which was also in the rough. Under the Rules of Golf, Nielsen had to add a one-stroke penalty to her score for violation Rule 9.5b, which states: “If the opponent lifts or deliberately touches the player’s ball at rest or causes it to move, the opponent gets one penalty stroke.”

The rules official informed Nielsen and Zhang of the penalty after both hit their second shots, Zhang on the green but 40 feet from the hole Nielsen short left of the green facing a tricky pitch.

The individual champion delivers the team championship for @StanfordWGolf!

?: Golf Channel | @Stifel pic.twitter.com/jNL1YTm2Wa

— Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) May 26, 2022

Nielsen, now hitting her fourth shot, left the ball 14 feet short of the hole and failed to make what was officially her bogey putt. When Zhang two-putted for par, she had clinched the match, 3 and 1, and earned the winning point for the Cardinal.

“I just reminded Rose that nobody wants a tournament to end that way, but it didn’t,” Stanford head coach Anne Walker said afterwards. “At the end of the day, Sofie made 5, Rose made 4, and I want that to be for both Sofie and Rose to be the focus because no one wants a title to end that way.”

Interestingly, the penalty is only applicable in match play. The penalty was put into place during the most recent update of the Rules of Golf in 2019.

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By Max Adler
Casey Martin is in recovery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. His right leg, or his trail leg as he’s known it in his life as a golfer, was amputated above the knee in a three-and-a-half-hour surgery the afternoon of Oct. 15. That infamous leg afflicted with a circulatory disorder since birth, that won a national championship alongside Notah Begay at Stanford in 1994, that made the Supreme Court debate the essence of competitive golf, that made Jack Nicklaus reluctantly testify against carts, that qualified for two U.S. Opens, that sometimes made him cry getting in and out of the shower, will bother no one anymore.

The night before the surgery, doctors couldn’t say how high they would have to cut. With Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, the potential for excessive bone-bleeding and other complications from amputation are serious, even fatal. And they just wouldn’t know what they could do until they went in.

“The doctors prepared us for the worst-case scenario,” said older brother Cameron, who with their father is at the clinic. “But the report is [the doctors] feel it went well, as they were able to save as much of the bone above the knee as they had hoped. This should give him a good shot at a prosthesis that will be effective.”

Martin broke the leg two years ago. Roadwork outside his house, retrieving the trash bins at night in the dark, the curb suddenly eight or 10 inches lower than his motor skills remembered. Precisely the sort of accidental step he avoided by driving a cart his lone full season on the PGA Tour in 2000. Despite two years in a cast and a series of injections of the kind more commonly used to treat the old bones of osteoporosis, the tibia never healed.

“In many ways I exceeded what my doctors told me as a kid,” Martin told me two weeks ago about his decision to go forward with the operation, a version of a conversation he’s been having quietly for months with those close to him, including an emotional team meeting with his players at the start of the University of Oregon Ducks men’s fall golf season. “I always felt this would be my destiny. So while it’s weird to be here now, about to become seriously disfigured, it’s not unexpected.”

Andrew Redington
Casey Martin hits a tee shot during a practice round at the 2012 U.S. Open.

The coming months will be gruelling for Martin, whose surgical wound must heal before he starts the difficult process of finding and fitting a prostheses. Maybe the personal ordeal of his last two years has girded him for it. In his 15th and 16th seasons as head coach of the Ducks, he has struggled with crutches at practices, through airport security on recruiting trips, up and down the stairs of unfamiliar clubhouses, to and from rental-car centres, everywhere. The lighter travel schedule imposed by the pandemic was a blessing, but not entirely. As he watched his Ducks fall from the level of their national- and conference-championship seasons of 2016 and 2017, he also moved out of his house because of divorce. His main respite has been regular visits to the driving range, where he could hobble from a cart to a pile of balls and still, amazingly, stripe 8-irons for 30 minutes, the broken leg held firmly in place by an ExoSym cast. He “lived on Aleve” out of fear of addiction to painkillers that actually work.

“I’m a stack-and-tilt golfer times a thousand, all my weight on my left side,” Martin said on the range at the Colonial Collegiate Invitational in Fort Worth, his last event as active head coach, where the Ducks finished 13th out of 15 very strong teams. “It’s been a heavy period. But I can laugh about it, thankfully.”

As Martin recovers, assistant coach, longtime friend and 2000 U.S. Amateur champion Jeff Quinney will take over leading the Ducks.

“Although I’ve only been here a short while, I think Casey trusts me to continue what he’s established with the kids, that passion for enjoying the grind of getting better,” Quinney said. “I don’t think any of us can honestly know how much pain he’s been going through. But he’s never once complained or looked for sympathy. Hopefully in the not-too-distant future his day-to-day activities will become a little easier.”

Steve Dykes
After his PGA Tour career, Martin took over as men’s coach at Oregon, leading the team to an NCAA title in 2016.

It will be some time before Martin figures out how he can walk again. Yet the prospect of playing better golf, even tournament golf, with a prosthesis is a dream he has acknowledged. Martin said he was playing some of the best golf of his life immediately before he broke his leg. He turns 50 this June.

“He still makes that special sound of compressing the ball that you notice going down a range,” Quinney says. “Who knows, he might be in a great mental place. He might just be free to let it go.”

But for now, Casey Martin is just happy to be alive.

The post Casey Martin, college golf coach and former PGA Tour pro, has right leg amputated appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

This comes as no surprise to one man who could see Wise’s victory in the AT&T Byron Nelson on Sunday coming from more than a mile away, from 1,600 miles away, as it were, even from two years away.

Casey Martin, Wise’s college coach at the University of Oregon, was at home in Eugene on Sunday watching the inevitability unfold on television.

“When you look back at the spring of his sophomore year [2016], he was toe to toe with Jon Rahm,” Martin said. “They were One-A and One-B. You see what Jon’s doing, and if Jon can do it, Aaron can do it, too.”

Rahm, two years older than Wise, took the express to No. 2 in the World Ranking and won for the first time on the PGA Tour, the Farmers Insurance Open, at 22.

Wise is only 21, the latest in the youth assault on the tour and a winner in only his 18th event of his rookie season. He entered final-round play at Trinity Forest Golf Club tied with Marc Leishman, shot 65 and won by three only two weeks after tying for second in the Wells Fargo Championship. He should be a senior at Oregon, had he not turned professional in 2016 after winning the NCAA individual title at the end of his sophomore season.

Related: Rookie Aaron Wise earns first PGA Tour victory in 26th career start

He was guided by an even keel that presents an inscrutable aura, revealing nothing about how his day might be going. Only a small fist-pump following a par-saving putt on the front suggested he had a pulse.

“Aaron has a lot of self belief,” Martin said. “He’s extremely mature for his age, very poised. He’s just very emotionally stable on the golf course. Nothing phases him, good or bad. It’s a good trait to have to be successful.

“There are so many ups and downs in golf, but he’s always in control of his emotions. He looks like he’s doing what he loves to do. He doesn’t freak out. And obviously, he’s got the shots.”

He’s had them for a while. Wise won five times at Oregon, including the NCAA individual title in 2016. After he turned pro, he won on the Mackenzie Tour-Canada that year and the Web.com Tour the next.

“He was special the day he showed up on campus,” Martin said. “The guy just knows how to win.”

Even a four-hour weather delay was unable to unnerve him. Wise played a bogey-free round. He birdied six of his first 10 holes to open a four-stroke lead, then unflappably parred his way to the trophy presentation for a 65.

“I felt like when it rained today I was really going to tear the course up just because it allowed me to hit driver, which is my strength,” he said. “I hit the ball incredible all week long and it got better as the week went on. That was fun for me to see. It continued today. I absolutely striped it. Hit it incredible.

“I had a talk with my putter there on three a little bit, because I missed a couple chances early. ‘You need to cooperate for me.’ It got red hot in the middle of that round and kind of shot me off to a huge lead.”

Liftoff, would be a more accurate description, for a man headed toward a possible future among the stars.

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