Martin Shows A Video Withered Leg Causes Some To Cringe As Golfer Shows Why He Needs Cart

Casey Martin showed a judge Monday why he needs to ride a cart on the pro golf tour, playing a video where he peels off support hose to reveal a pale, withered stick of a leg that gives him constant pain.

Some in court cringed at the sight of Martin’s right leg, shrunken from a rare circulatory disorder. It is half the size of his good leg and bulges with purple veins that swell with blood when he stands up.

“Every time I walk, I feel it,” Martin said on the tape.

“At the end of the day, it throbs like a person who has just run a marathon,” he said. “There are good days and bad days. Some days I make it through. Some days it’s a nightmare.”

Martin is using the Americans with Disabilities Act as the basis of his lawsuit seeking to ride a cart on the PGA Tour.

While the PGA acknowledges Martin is disabled, it contends walking is a fundamental part of the game and allowing him to ride would give him an unfair advantage.

On the opening day of trial before a federal magistrate who will decide the case, Martin’s orthopedic surgeon gave a detailed explanation of the Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome that has hobbled the 25-year-old golfer since birth.

Martin doesn’t have the vein that runs along the bone in his lower leg. Blood returning to his heart goes through a jumble of veins near the surface. When they get stressed, they bleed into his knee, causing pain and damage to the joint.

He wears two special support stockings to control the swelling and to force the blood up his leg, and a pad to protect his knee from painful jarring.

Dr. Donald Jones said consulting doctors have suggested Martin could have a rod implanted in his lower leg bone to strengthen it, but extended walking weakens it, and if it fails it might have to be amputated.

Martin’s older brother, Cameron, testified that as a child he often heard his brother crying in bed because of the pain in his leg.

Asked to identify a picture of his brother as a child in a wheelchair with a brace on his leg, Cameron Martin’s voice became thick with emotion as he answered, “Yes.” Attorney William Wiswall stopped the questioning.

Casey Martin has already generated an outpouring of support with his Nike “I Can” TV commercial and a Capitol Hill news conference last week where he won the backing of Bob Dole.

Martin attorney Martha Walters said in her opening statement the only moral thing to do is allow Martin to ride, referring to an old PGA Tour slogan that proclaims “Anything’s possible.”

“Use of a cart is not only possible, it is reasonable, it is required and it is right,” Walters said.

PGA Tour lawyer William Maledon said the real issue is whether the tour has the right to establish its own rules. “This is a rule that the evidence will show exists with respect to virtually every major golf tournament around the world,” he said.

Last week, Martin won the first round in the legal battle when U.S. Magistrate Thomas Coffin refused to throw the case out. The PGA Tour had argued that the disabilities act does not apply to the case.

Coffin ruled the PGA Tour is a commercial enterprise, not a private club that would be exempt from the act. He also found that golf courses used for tournaments by the PGA Tour are places of “public accommodation” under the act.

Martin, a member of Stanford University’s 1994 NCAA championship team and a former teammate of Tiger Woods, missed making the PGA Tour last year by two shots.

Given the chance to ride a cart on the second-tier Nike Tour pending the outcome of this trial, Martin last month won the Lakeland (Fla.) Classic and quickly was embraced for his underdog battle against a tradition-laden sport.

“From a public opinion standpoint, it’s a loser,” PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem acknowledged before the trial began. “This is a very unfortunate system we find ourselves in, having to litigate whether a fellow we think a great deal of can play the game.”