Tracy is an Indy-car driver whose 2006 season ended with a broken shoulder suffered not at 200 miles per hour but at 20.
"Sorry to say, it was self-inflicted," he told The Toronto Star. "I was at a party and had a little too much to drink, and we thought it was a good idea to go out on a golf cart and try and jump some sand dunes with it."
Tracy's good idea conjures memories of the late Evel Knievel, the 1970s motorcycle daredevil who once told Golf Digest's Guy Yocom of the temptation presented by a steep downhill cartpath in Alpharetta, Ga.
"The path has a series of hairpin turns," Knievel said, "and if you ignore them you'll just keep going over a huge ledge. The guys I hung out with down there pointed out that if you gathered enough speed, you could go over the cliff and land where the path resumes farther down the hill."
Uh-oh.
"For days they dared me . . . "
Uh-ohhhhh.
" . . . to make the jump, and when I came to the hole in a foul mood one afternoon--I wasn't playing well--I just went for it. Halfway down the hill I realized I'd made a mistake. You have no idea how unstable a three-wheel golf cart is when it becomes airborne.
"By the grace of God I made a perfect three-point landing, but the tires were like basketballs, and the cart bounced like an SOB. When I got the thing stopped down near the green, I immediately got a royal chewing out from my wife. I couldn't blame her. She'd been in the passenger seat the whole time."
What Knievel needed for a smooth flight was more along the lines of Tom Snook's $29,000 beauty, a golf cart that looks as if Snook one day announced, "Honey, I shrunk the Hummer." Snook lives in a golf-cart metroplex, The Villages, north of Orlando. He guesses the population is 60,000 people and 60,000 carts.
"We drive golf carts to the hospital, to the Wal-Mart, to the grocery, everywhere," Snook says. "We have an outdoor movie where you drive in with your cart and listen to the movie on The Villages radio station." At major intersections, there are cart tunnels under the roads.
Here's how a guy spends $29,000 on a golf cart: Custom-made. Hummer H3 replica body. Alligator interior. Fourteen-hundred watt stereo. XM radio. Headlights, turn signals, brake lights, fancy-schmancy undercarriage lighting. Disc brakes. Seven-grand paint job, black with orange flames, "so it's a smoky look, like a flame floating by."
Snook uses the Hummer for social occasions. For golf, he drives a basic muny jalopy of the sort in which Alice Fryer got upside down in Arkansas. She says her story became "the hospital entertainment, 'The Old Lady & The Golf Cart.' "
Fryer is 87 and describes herself as "not quite five feet tall, a tough old bird." She began playing golf in her 50s after raising five sons. She last won a club tournament at 75 and is a member of the Arkansas Golf Hall of Fame. Last spring at Little Rock's Pleasant Valley Country Club, she turned her cart intending to go fetch her husband. But she bumped against a tee and got sideways in a tunnel.
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