Talk about a good walk spoiled. As Mitch Mitchell of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, a man was stabbed with the shaft of a broken golf club during a brawl at the Resort at Eagle Mountain Lake in Fort Worth late last month. 

Clay Carpenter of Springtown, who suffered a punctured femoral artery and heavy blood loss, was released from the hospital earlier this week. 

“People get in arguments every day on every golf course in America,” Carpenter told Mitchell. “But 99.9 percent of the time no one takes it this far.”

According to Terry Grisham of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s department, the brawl began when three golfers on the back nine, including 48-year-old Carpenter, wanted to “play through” a slower group of four in front of them. Carpenter told Mitchell that a course marshall gave them the go-ahead to do so, but the other group did not cooperate. Then the scene turned ugly:

Carpenter said the man who stabbed him “was not willing to defuse anything, nor was he willing to accept ‘please just let us go on.’ “

Carpenter said he believes that the golfer who stabbed him first swung the golf club at his head, but he grabbed it and broke it off at the end.

The Sheriff’s department told Mitchell both groups acknowledge fighting, and there is still an ongoing criminal investigation of the matter. 

Carpenter said that nobody in his group had been drinking, but he did not know if the people in the other group had been consuming alcohol.

In the 911 call, posted by the Houston Chronicle, you can hear the caller, who was apparently part of the slow group, described Carpenter as “bleeding profusely . . . he just passed out . . . this is bad . . . please hurry . . . we’re holding his artery with our hands, man!”

The caller also says that Carpenter “fell on a golf club or something,” at which point a voice in the background can be heard saying, “yeah, he fell right on the golf club.” The caller then begs the 911 dispatcher to send a helicopter, and the dispatcher attempts to give advice on how to continue staunching Carpenter’s bleeding. 

Fox4 in Dallas reported that “investigators said there’s still some question as to whether the man was actually stabbed by someone else because when the 911 dispatcher asked what happened, the caller said the man had fallen on the golf club.”

Grisham told the Dallas Morning News that while it’s clear there was a brawl, beyond that “the stories go off in about eight different directions.”

A marathon runner, Carpenter says he’ll probably never be able to run again, and is still fearful that he might need further surgery—or possibly even lose the leg entirely due to the atrophy from loss of blood flow.