On the Comeback Trail After a Calamitous Crash

On the Comeback Trail After a Calamitous Crash

By Leonard Shapiro

My future is where my golf game will take me,” McAvoy said.

Patrick McAvoy still remembers how thrilled he was to get his first set of Ben Hogan junior beginner golf clubs when he was in the second grade, the start of his lifelong passion for the game.

Hogan was the greatest golfer of his generation, a nine-time major champion who survived a near fatal Texas car crash with a bus in 1949 that left him hospitalized for 59 days. Sixteen months later, at age 36, he won the U.S. Open championship at Merion in the Philadelphia suburbs, and six of his major titles came in the years after the accident.

McAvoy, 38, can surely relate to Hogan’s remarkable comeback. He’s a fine player himself who now works part-time in the front office at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville as well as Middleburg’s Brick and Mortar Mercantile. McAvoy also was 36 when he was a passenger in a car that was demolished in a horrific accident only a few miles from his home in Upperville.

A friend was driving and when he leaned over to show McAvoy something on his cell phone, he lost control of his Nissan SUV. The car left the road, hit a telephone pole and a tree and left McAvoy pinned inside with a severe leg injury. He had the presence of mind to use his belt as a tourniquet before the ambulance arrived to transport him to the Reston Hospital, which surely saved him from bleeding to death.

McAvoy was only a few miles from his Upperville home when the accident in this car occurred.

Still, he had three breaks in his tibia, a detached heel pad, detached Achilles, detached tendons to his toes, and a total of 20 broken bones in his foot. It happened on Oct. 4, 2021, and after a dozen surgeries, McAvoy’s lower right leg about four inches below the knee was amputated, with his blessing, ten days later.

“They initially tried to save it,” he said. “But when it came down to it, everything they were describing, the rehab it would need, the complications, I knew the recovery would be a lot faster with a new leg.”

McAvoy loves his golf and his work at Brick and Mortar Mercantile.

The following May, he received his artificial leg, and not long after began his golfing comeback.

"At first, I was worried about my game," he said. "I couldn’t really push off my back leg the way I needed to, and everything was going to the right. But I was able to figure it out. One of my goals in the hospital was to return to competitive golf and last October, I played in the Amputee Open in Danbury, Connecticut.”

Despite battling his nerves and his swing in a so-so opening round, McAvoy ended up finishing second in the tournament when he shot a closing 75. “That was very encouraging,” he recalled, his voice catching ever so slightly because “I get emotional just talking about it. But once that happened, it was all hands on deck with golf again.”

Before the accident, McAvoy, a divorced father of three, had been fully immersed in the game. In his early 20s, he had completed a two-year course at a branch of the San Diego Golf Academy in the golfing hotbed of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He studied its history, golf business and administration, club repair, instruction and much more.

In recent years, he had caddied at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club and also had several pro shop jobs, including work at the Stonewall Golf Club, also in Gainesville right next door to RTJ. That’s where he now goes to play, usually three rounds a week, with another two days devoted to long hours on the Stonewall practice range.

He’s also still working part-time at the Brick and Mortar Mercantile next door to the Middleburg Post Office, a unique gift shop where he said he’d always enjoyed shopping, giving him the flexibility to play and practice whenever he can. These days, he has a 2.8 handicap and can still hit his drives in the 280-yard range, down 20-25 yards from before the accident but still respectable.

He’s planning to play more tournament golf this year, including some amputee events, and other regular competitions run by the Virginia State Golf Association, including the VSGA State Open at Bull Run Golf Club in Haymarket this May.

“My future is where my golf game will take me,” McAvoy said. “I love playing and competing. You can’t ever really perfect it. One day you’ll shoot 69, the next day you have a hard time breaking 80. But it’s therapeutic for me. It’s what I do.”