Champions’ Golfer Ken Green To Have Leg Amputated

16/06/2009 05:32

JACKSON, Miss. — - Champions Tour golfer Ken Green, injured in a recreational vehicle crash in Mississippi that killed his brother and girlfriend, will have his lower right leg amputated, his agent said Sunday.

Kevin Richardson said Green, from Danbury, is struggling with the "double whammy" of the deaths and his own career-threatening injuries.

"Initially they were hoping to save the leg, but as the days went on it became apparent there was too much structural damage," Richardson said in a phone interview with AP.

Richardson said doctors will remove his leg below the knee today after determining it would take two years of surgery to repair a limb that wouldn't function well before Green could walk again. He also will need a surgery to repair damage to a suborbital bone in his face. Green, 50, also has a cut about 6 inches long on the left side of his head "that's troublesome."

Green, his brother, William Y. Green of Indiantown, Fla., and his girlfriend, Jean Marie Hodgin of Greensboro, N.C., were traveling east on I-20 last Monday from Austin, Texas, where Green played in a tournament, when a tire blew out near Hickory, Miss.

The RV went off the road, down an embankment and into a large oak tree, destroying the front of the vehicle.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol said Ken Green was driving, but Richardson said Green remembers being in the back of the RV when the tire blew out.

"He was in the back and he heard a noise and felt something," Richardson said. "He got up and was in the process of walking forward, and that's all he remembers."

Green's dog, a German shepherd named Nip, also died in the accident. Green is using a goal to return to competitive golf with the help of a prosthetic limb to get through the ordeal, Richardson said.

"That is his primary, if not his single goal right now — to get back out and play golf, and God willing at a competitive level," Richardson said. "He would be the first."

SWIVEL HIPS SAYS:

What a tragic story. We wish Ken Green all the best and a speedy recovery.