What golf can learn from NASCAR

Hitting high draws is hard, but driving race cars is harder. Here's what happened to J.J. Yeley, a NASCAR driver, during a practice session at a sprint-car race in 2000, when he was 23: As he was trying to pass another car, his left front tire clipped the other car's right rear wheel. "That sent my car up into the air," Yeley told me during a round of golf at the Brickyard Crossing Golf Course, part of which is enclosed by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. "My car started doing a series of somersaults and barrel rolls, and, unfortunately, at that racetrack there was a junkyard on the other side of the wall."

Yeley's first couple of impacts were like scenes from a "Road Runner" cartoon: He landed on top of a huge pile of old tires, which flipped him over a second fence and into a second junkyard, and then he crashed into the side of a trailer before flipping onto a heap of old car parts and rusting scrap metal. Race drivers are taught to shut their eyes tight as soon as they go airborne, because the force of an impact can cause traumatic globe luxation; that is, it can cause their eyeballs to pop out of their sockets. Yeley did so many revolutions in the air that his eyes swelled shut from the centrifugal rush of blood, and the muscles in his neck became so stretched that he couldn't hold his head up, and his right arm got knocked loose from the steering wheel, which he was trying to hold onto, and he broke his forearm. "My uniform was soaked with hot fluids, and I could smell stuff burning," he continued, "but I couldn't see anything, so I didn't know what was on fire. I popped my belt as soon as I stopped flipping and stood up in the car, and some of my friends pulled me out, and then the ambulance got there." Two weeks later, with his right arm in a cast, he was racing again. "You've got to get back on the horse," he says. More at Golf Digest