A golfer has had to be rescued from a
sinkhole that swallowed him up at an Illinois fairway.
Mark Mihal was with three friends playing the 14th hole at
Annbriar Golf Course near Waterloo last Friday.
But when the 43-year-old's buddies looked round he was nowhere
to be seen.
They heard him moaning and followed the noise back to where he
had been standing.
His wife Lori wrote up Mark's words on his Golfmanna.com
website.
"I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so
fast that I couldn't do anything," he said.
"I reached for the ground as I was going down and it gave
way, too. It seemed like I was falling for a long time.
"The real scary part was I didn't know when I would hit
bottom and what I would land on."
The fall had left him with a dislocated shoulder.
The pit that swallowed him up turned out to be 18ft deep and
10ft wide.
A ladder brought from the clubhouse was too short and Mark only
had the use of one arm to pull himself up.
His friend Ed decided he would have to climb into the hole to
get him out, spurred on by the recent death of a man in a Florida
sinkhole.
"The thoughts of being buried alive were
running through Mark's mind because of that horrifying story," Lori Mihal
wrote.
"Dirt was falling on his head the whole time he was down
below."
The mortgage broker from Creve Coeur, in neighbouring Missouri
was eventually hoisted to safety with a rope and taken to a local hospital.
Although he still considers the course one of his favourites, he
is having second thoughts about returning.
"It'd be kind of strange playing that
hole again, for sure," he told the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
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