Golfers Lucky To Be Alive After Driving Cart Off Massive Cliff And Landing In Water Next To Iconic Hole At Missouri Course Designed By Tiger Woods (Video)

Most golf courses have a fleet of carts players can use to get around, and there’s only so much they can do to ensure the people operating them drive responsibly. A couple of guys who recently played a round at Payne’s Valley in Missouri failed to check that box, and they’re lucky to be alive after plunging off a cliff and landing in the water below.

Prior to the 1950s, the vast majority of golfers relied on their own two feet to walk around the course. However, that decade ushered in the widespread adoption of the golf carts that massively shifted the status quo en route to becoming the default method of transportation during rounds.

Those vehicles tend to be a sizable source of revenue for the courses that provide them, but they can also be the source of plenty of headaches. Each year, hospitals in the United States treat more than 15,000 people for cart-related injuries (with alcohol being a factor in more than a few cases), and those incidents also result in around 600 deaths on an annual basis.

Virtually every golf course harnesses governors that cap carts at a maximum speed (some have technology that automatically throttles down on hills to reduce the chance of flipping one over), and many newer ones are equipped with GPS systems that prevent you from driving into restricted areas.

Most clubs also install physical barriers to prevent carts from going places they shouldn’t, and while that was the case with one Tiger Woods helped designed in Missouri, someone was still able to slip through a gap in a fence and plummet off a cliff.

A golfer at Payne’s Valley captured the aftermath of an incident involving a cart that drove over a cliff

Payne’s Valley Golf Course is located at Big Cedar Lodge in Ridgedale, Missouri (just outside of the Ozarks tourist haven that is Branson), and the track (which opened in 2020) was the first public one dreamed up by TGR Designs, the golf architecture firm founded by Tiger Woods.

The course features a traditional 18-hole layout, but people who play a round there also get the chance to take on the 19th hole that was designed by Johnny Morris, the Bass Pro Shop founder who dreamed up the par-3 that’s surrounded by “Lunker Lake,” which is fed by water flowing from the limestone cliffs that surround it.

If you make an ace on the hole, you take home a $1,000 Bass Pro Shop gift card as well as a club and some balls commemorating your achievement.

In 2022, a couple of golfers managed to get a hole-in-one within minutes of each other, and the 19th hole was recently the site of another feat that was almost as impressive for all of the wrong reasons.

Over the weekend, an amateur golfer named Rocky Metcalfe documented the aftermath of an incident that unfolded above the par-3 before finishing at the bottom of it, as he captured a cart sitting in the water and various gear that was littered on the cliffs above it after the people operating it managed to drive off the side.

The video showed there is a fence erected along the path above the hole, but there was (somewhat inexplicably) a gap that the golfers managed to drive through.

The golfers who were in the cart appeared to walk away remarkably unscathed when you consider it looked like they had dropped at least 50 feet, and they were also captured swimming to the submerged vehicle to reclaim some of their belongings.

Something tells me there isn’t going to be a gap there for much longer.