Golf Becomes Driving Force For Amputee

Gene Clark looks forward to teeing off with classmates during next week’s Sandpoint High 30-year reunion golf tournament.

“I think it will be fun,” the 48-year-old exotic animal farmer says. “I’ve never played golf with anyone I went to school with.”

Actually, Clark just started playing about three years ago. A right-hander, he uses left-handed clubs and averages about 200 yards with a typical drive.

Recently, he shot his first bogey round.

“I’m getting there,” he says. “My whole game’s coming around.”

Clark has come a long way both on and off the greens since losing both legs after a logging accident on Martin Luther King Day in 1988.

“I think God got me back for working that day,” Clark said recently.

He was driving a skidder down a steep hillside north of Clark Fork, when the stumps on the huge logs he was pulling hooked on to the upper bank. The skidder rolled upside down. When he saw the logs coming at him from above, Clark grabbed ahold of the cage and held on. When they hit, the skidder rolled six more times, pinning him beneath it.

Clark spent 3-1/2 hours on the cold hillside before being air-lifted to Spokane’s Sacred Heart Medical Center.

“They cut the left leg off … it was smashed in the boot and just mutilated,” he said. “Then they sent me to the burn ward at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle for irrigation because the wound on the other leg was full of dirt and needles.”

Halfway through his two-month stay, Clark’s right leg was amputated.

“It had been literally ripped off from the cheek of the butt to the ankle,” he explained. From time to time, he still finds green needles working their way to the surface of his injury.

Once a double amputee, Clark wasted no time building his upper body strength. After being fitted with a prosthesis for his left leg, he came home in time to attend the annual Lost in the ‘50s dance.

“I walked on one leg for a year,” he explained. “Then they had to cut off my right leg again to get rid of scar tissue so I could wear a prosthesis. He spent the next two months in Kootenai Medical Center’s rehabilitation ward learning to walk on two artificial limbs.

These days the former dairy farmer spends morning and evenings with the love of his life, Debbie Clark, feeding and caring for 11 varieties of exotic animals on the 280-acre farm south of Sandpoint where he was born.

He gets around on a Polaris 4-wheeler while checking emu nests for eggs or looking after wallabees and wallaroos bounding around spacious runs in his back yard.

When work’s done, the couple heads for local golf courses at least four days each week to play 18 holes of what Clark once thought “was the stupidest game ever invented.”

“It’s a fascinating game,” he now says. “I’m pretty much hooked. I still do my deer and elk hunting, but golf’s number one.”

He gets around in a cart, parks near the green and walks with a cane while executing each stroke. Left-handed clubs work best because Clark discovered early on that right-handed swings caused him to fall on his face.

When it’s time to haul emus or llamas to auctions in Missouri or Texas, golf clubs always go with the load.

“Exotics support my habit,” he quipped.

Clark estimates he’s tried at least 100 courses since getting hooked on golf. He appreciates the understanding attitudes of course managers who extend him special privileges.

Nonetheless, he has a goal.

“I’d like to be able to get to a degree that they don’t have to make allowances because I’m handicapped,” Clark said.