When doctors argue people cry - 'Fore!'

AMERICA AT LARGE: A recent court ruling in an injuries case left unaddressed a corollary issue: should Dr Kapoor now be crowned the world's worst golfer

A LANDMARK RULING by the New York Court of Appeals handed down a few days before Christmas has produced reams of sports-page copy analysing the burdensome question of whether Dr Azad Anand, who was blinded in the right eye by an errant shot from his playing partner, should have been entitled to legal damages from his former friend, Dr Anoop Kapoor, the author of the misdirected blow.

The appellate justices unanimously ruled he was not, but the postmortem deconstructions of the episode, at least the ones we read, were inclined to get bogged down in the application of golf etiquette to the law (the upshot of which was that while a timely shout of “Fore!” might be an expectable courtesy, it is not a legal obligation), and thus missed the corollary issue, which is whether Dr Kapoor deserves to inherit Angelo Spagnolo’s title as the world’s worst golfer.

Twenty-five years have passed since Golf Digest conducted a competition that has long since passed into sporting lore. The sponsors rounded up four uncommonly bad but persistent golfers and turned them loose on a notably difficult course, the TPC Sawgrass. Paraphrasing the USGA’s defence of its sometimes ridiculously tricked-up US Open courses, the Golf Digest people noted, “We were not trying to humiliate the worst avid golfers; we were trying to identify them”.

Spagnolo clinched his title that day by scoring 66. On the 17th hole alone.

Anyone who’s played it will tell you the tee-shot to the island-green par-three is as daunting as any in golf. Spagnolo had gone through every ball in his bag and half a bucket of range balls without finding dry land before someone – reportedly then-PGA commissioner Deane Beaman, who had come out to watch the group tackle 17 – suggested he putt the ball along the pathway from tee to green.

This route has subsequently been known as “Angelo’s Alley”.

By availing himself of it, Spagnolo managed to complete the hole; the 66 strokes contributed to his aggregate total of 257 and a title that has not been seriously challenged for a quarter century.

Let it be noted that despite his frustration, most of Angelo Spagnolo’s shots were at least hit in the general direction of the green. Sometimes he fell short of it, sometimes he flew over it, and on seven or eight occasions he did exactly what we did the first time we played the hole – which is to say, he landed on the green, but failed to hold it.

This was attributable at least in part to his ball flight. In his Golf Digest account of the competition, Peter Andrews wrote of Spagnolo’s swing: “He settles slowly, slowly down in his stance like a nesting chicken, and just as the egg is about to drop, he lashes quickly at the ball, sending his woods arching straight into the air while his irons rarely get more than shoulder high.”

In other words, not the sort of trajectory likely to stop a golf ball on a target barely 100 yards away.

But if Angelo hit a single shot as bad as the one with which Dr Kapoor conked Dr Anand, at Dix Hills, history has failed to record it.

In dismissing Anand’s personal-injury suit, the court of appeals confined itself to the strict legal question of inherent risk, so seemingly pertinent concerns – such as Dr Kapoor’s handicap – remain unlearned. And while certain facts were in dispute (Kapoor said he shouted “Fore”; Anand and a third playing partner, Balram Venna, said he didn’t), everyone seemed to concur on the essential set-up, which was that Kapoor hooked his drive into the left rough, while Anand’s was in the fairway, approximately 15 to 20 feet beyond him.

Both marched straight to their respective balls. Anand says he had just found his ball in the fairway when Kapoor, without warning, fired a shank that caught him point-blank in the face. (Apparently there is no great demand for one-eyed neuroradiologists; Anand says he has been unable to work since.)

Since it refused to hear the case, the court was not obliged to rule on other issues germane to the controversy, but it strikes us that whether Kapoor is a “worst golfer” candidate, Anand is certainly a contender for the dumbest golfer award.

When a golfer is injured in the course of play in this day and age, more often than not he’s apt to sue the venue, whose insurers can often be counted upon to settle regardless of the merits of the claim.

But Dix Hills, on Long Island, is municipally owned, and trying to bring a suit against a governmental entity entails its own set of complications. And since Dr Kapoor’s insurance presumably does not cover malpractice with a golf club in his hand, we’re just guessing Anand must have had reason to believe his playing partner had deep pockets.

In any case, the ruling included one justice’s interpretation that “the manner in which Anand was injured – being hit without warning by a ‘shanked’ shot while one searches for one’s own ball – reflects a commonly appreciated risk of golf”.

In the end, the dismissal hinged on upholding the ruling of a lower-court judge that Anand was “not in the foreseeable zone of danger”, and that, as a participant in the sport he had implicitly consented to certain inherent risks.

The court, on the other hand, left unaddressed what would seem to be pertinent questions, to wit: what does it say about Dix Hills’ greenkeepers that Anand had to search for a ball on the fairway? Shouldn’t Kapoor’s bad shot off the tee have been ample warning that he was capable of an even worse second shot, and since he was, after all, away, who in his right mind would walk out in front of him? And from a distance of 20 feet, what earthly difference would a shout of “Fore” have made?

And, finally, whether Kapoor’s ball flight came off his club at an angle of 50 degrees (Anand’s contention) or 80 degrees (Kapoor’s), wasn’t it a shot far more execrable than any single blow Spagnolo struck in that fateful round at Sawgrass 25 years earlier?

After all this time, Angelo probably won’t mind giving up his title.