American golfer Mark Mihal sank more than just his ball at Annbriar Golf Club in southern Illinois after plunging into a sinkhole on the 14th fairway.
"I was standing in the middle of the fairway," Mihal told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday. "Then, all of a sudden, before I knew it, I was underground."
The 43-year-old mortgage broker landed 18 feet down with a painful thud, but his friends managed to hoist him to safety with a rope after about 20 minutes, according to Yahoo!
"I feel lucky just to come out of it with a shoulder injury, falling that far and not knowing what I was going to hit," Mihal, from the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, told The Associated Press before heading off to learn whether he'll need surgery. "It was absolutely crazy."
Annbriar general manager Russ Nobbe described the sinkhole as "an extremely unfortunate event, an event we feel is an act of nature."
"We don't feel there is any way we could have foreseen this happening," he told a Tuesday news conference.
Sinkholes are caused when the ground above underground voids gives way - something which is usually triggered by excessive rain or floodwater seeping through the ground and dissolving soft rock.
It's a very common phenomenon in nature, though it's rare for people to be badly hurt: a man recently killed when he was swallowed up by a sinkhole in Florida was thought to be the first death in the US in several decades.
The full report of the incident is over at Mihal's golf website, golfmanna.com, so check that out for even more in-depth scariness.
