For Brett Boner, the 4-hour drive from Charlotte, N.C., to this week’s U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship at the Kiawah Island (S.C.) Club will truly be a blessing. It’s a miracle that the 49-year-old is competing at all, considering the bizarre accident that nearly took his life two years ago.
On the evening of May 10, 2021, Boner was making the routine trip to pick up his son at soccer practice. The weather was idyllic for late spring. A Jimmy Buffett tune was playing on his radio.
What happened next wasn’t “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”
Out of nowhere, a large tree tumbled onto the street. Although Boner slammed on his brakes, it was too late to avoid contact. Instinctively, Boner closed his eyes as loud noises and chaos engulfed him. The limb had slammed through his SUV’s windshield and rammed the right portion of his chest, creating a fist-sized hole.
Moments later, there was a knock on the passenger-side window.
“Are you OK?” a man asked.
“I think so,” responded Boner. “He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t look down.’ That’s when I noticed a big limb sticking through the windshield right over my steering wheel.”
The man called 911 and asked Boner if he needed him to dial anyone else. Boner’s wife, Lindsay, didn’t recognize the incoming number, so she didn’t pick up. An ensuing text brought news that no wife wants to receive.
By the time she reached the scene, first responders already had placed a protective blanket on Boner to keep the shards of glass and metal from contacting his body as firefighters use the “jaws of life” to extricate Boner from the vehicle.
Boner’s brother-in-law – and partner in this week’s championship – Stephen Woodard and his wife, Carrie, had sat down to dinner when the call came from Lindsay. Carrie went to support her sister-in-law at the accident scene while Stephen drove to Brett’s home to await the arrival of son Henry, 15, and daughter Fran, 12, from after-school practices.
“I was in shock for about 20 minutes,” Boner recalled. “Then the shock started wearing off and the pain set in. I was hurting. Once they got me out, they put me on a hard board to get me in the ambulance. That was the roughest part. It hurt everywhere.”
Once inside the emergency room, Boner said it was like a movie. Staff used scissors to cut off his clothes. Simple questions – name, date of birth, had he been drinking – followed while he was rolled on a gurney into the operating room. Before the anesthesia took effect, he even asked a police officer to have his wife cancel his next morning’s breakfast appointment, a remark that drew laughter because of his awareness at such a dire moment.
The 2018 U.S. Mid-Amateur runner-up had a collapsed lung, four broken ribs, liver and spleen damage, shredded pectoral and latissimus dorsi muscles, a torn bicep and permanent nerve damage. He stayed in the hospital 10 days so the collapsed lung could heal, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Boner’s children couldn’t visit. Zoom calls didn’t raise his spirits much.
One silver lining is that the limb avoided severing the main artery that runs from his right arm to his chest by mere inches, saving Boner from bleeding to death.
