Stat profiles for 1500 golfers
The walking wounded of the Champions Tour, Peter Jacobsen, Scott Hoch, Fred Funk and Bernhard Langer.
Naples, Florida - They looked a little like broken-down stars from a D-Day movie, these four patients of the Champions Tour. They followed one after the other to the interview stand - eye, ear, nose and throat. Or Peter Jacobsen, Scott Hoch, Fred Funk and Bernhard Langer.
Or, bad shoulder, bad wrist, bad knee and bad back. .
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But golf is, nonetheless, a powerful predictor of oncoming troubles way into the future. The golf swing is not natural. And the search for more power, more accuracy, causes the body to finally rebel. Sometimes it takes 15 years, sometimes the lucky ones get 30 years. But mark this down – if you’re going to play successfully, you’re eventually going to wind up with problems – debilitating problems.
First up was Jacobsen, who is the host of this week’s Champions Tour ACE Classic. And no, he can’t play in the tournament. Peter has the shoulder injury (or more precisely, a rotator cuff injury). He’s been down this road many times before, having already undergone hip replacement and knee replacement.
“My hip, knee and shoulder doctors have said it’s all a result of one thing leading to another,” began Jacobsen. “Golf is not a collision sport like football. You don’t go running through the line and someone tries to take your head off. But in golf there is a lot of torque - as we’ve seen with Tiger Woods, which is one of the most famous knee ACL replacements now in sports today.
“When you watch a guy swing like Tiger, when you have your feet planted on the ground and your upper body is turning and torquing from your shoulders there is a lot going on with your ankles, your knees, your hips, your shoulders, your elbows and your wrists. We take that for granted.”
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“Obviously my hip went first, then my right knee and now my left shoulder,” he said, “and as the doctor said, it’s all compensations. When you make a swing with a bad knee, you’re going to compensate somewhere else. It’s inevitable.”
He certainly doesn’t dwell on it, but it certainly could mean the end of his career. He hasn’t planned on it happening with this latest injury, “but if this is the end for me, then it is,” he said. “It has been in the back of my mind. I’m not planning on it, I’m planning on working through this and working hard to get back and play golf. But it makes me wonder, ‘What’s next?’”
Next up was Hoch, who has had a host of difficulties with his hands and wrist. Four or five years ago, it was a wrist ailment that kept him shelved for the better part of two years. Now, the hand is the problem. “It’s not real good,” he confessed.
He still has to take an injection in the wrist yearly. “Last year I got a shot at the beginning of the year and it lasted me all year,” said Hoch. “I could have gotten another one with a month and a half to go and I would have been better off golf-wise ... it was a struggle because my hand was bothering me.
“I thought physically it was better off in the long run if I didn’t have to (have the shot), since the fewer shots you have, the better. This year I had my shot. Even though it’s a different place than what we originally believed, we thought the cortisone would reach it.
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Next was Funk. Fred is no stranger to knee surgery either, undergoing the knife three times before last year’s Players Championship. But his ordeal since then would make even a physician twinge.
“I was getting my knee drained constantly, and after the 16th one, it finally introduced the staff (infection). Then I had two more (draining procedures) in the next 18 hours, and it’s been an ordeal,” Funk said.
“I tweaked it at the Players after knowing I had hurt it last winter. I asked the doctor if I could make it through the whole ’08 season, and he said, ‘No, you’ll never make it.’
“I told him I was going to try, but sure enough I tweaked it in a bunker at the Players Championship and I had it operated on three days later. It left me bone on bone with no cartilage on the lateral side. It just keeps pounding on itself, and to protect itself it produced fluid. I had to get it drained all the time.”
The constant use of needles to drain the knee eventually introduced germs to the area. And hence, the staff infection, which introduced a whole new set of problems.
“If we get back into the cycle,” he said, “I’m going to have to shut it down (his golfing career) and get a new knee. Eventually that will happen, but I’m trying to hold off. “
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“I was totally healthy until I was 18 or 19,” began the German native. “I had to do some military service, which was mandatory in Germany. I was drafted to the Air Force and I had six months of rigorous training. That’s when I had a stress fracture and two bulging disks and I was in the hospital for five weeks on a stretcher.
“It is naturally fused,” he explained. “When I bend over, my lower back doesn’t bend. It’s rock solid with not much movement. I’ve lost flexibility, but I’m not in much pain.”
He’s one of the lucky ones – he’s learned to adapt his golf swing so that there is not the same degree of stress on his back.
“I wouldn’t be playing golf anymore with the reverse C I was taught,” said Langer. “My back would be screaming every time I swing the club. That was the main reason, but then I think there is a better way to play golf.”
Of course, the most famous injury is Tiger’s, which is a tearing of tissue in the knee. And, he has injured it - even undergone surgery - multiple times.
“The one thing I am concerned about with Tiger is that his is a degenerative thing,” said Funk. “He’s at a really young age to have (these) problems. His bone is degenerating to the point that it has caused him some of the problems he’s had with these micro fractures. That’s a big deal.
“He has so much potential and many years in front of him. He has so much power in his golf swing and so much hyperextension in that left knee, and he said he’s really not going to change his swing. He thinks the strength of his knee and his rehab and the structure that they fixed in his knee is going to hold up. But it’s still bone on bone. And no one I know of has played at a high level is with a new knee.”
From the throne room to the surgery room they come. Everyone, it seems, will eventually be there. If you’re a professional golfer, it’s just the cost of doing this business.
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