ESPN commentator Joe Buck and his wife, ESPN reporter Michelle Beisner-Buck, were playing golf on vacation in Mexico earlier this summer when Beisner-Buck suffered a serious ankle injury on the course.
Buck's on September 11 Monday Night Football co-host Adam Schefter reported that Beisner-Buck was in surgery after Buck “accidentally hit a golf ball.” After Schefter announced the news, Buck took to social media to explain exactly what happened. He sat in his car in the parking lot of the surgery with Beisner-Buck by his side and recounted the match.
“We have to [hole] “10 and I said, 'Why don't I do a couple of hits from 10 and then we can go get something to eat?'” he explained that Michelle had been known to “do headstands” throughout their relationship, and continued to show off her skills.
“For good luck, he was upside down at the tee, to my left, and as I was about to hit, he decided to lift his feet up and spread his legs, so he dropped his right leg a little bit to the side, right in my line of fire, and I hit a TaylorMade golf ball with little patterns on it, on the inside of his right ankle, and it cracked the ball,” he said.
“True. It was destroyed,” Beisner-Buck said. “But it was a freak accident.”
“If you were to compete, you would never, ever be able to do this. It was like God or the universe directing the ball right to my ankle bone. And now I have to wear this,” Beisner-Buck continued, pointing to her boot on the dashboard.
She revealed that she had spent six weeks in a hard cast and two weeks in a boot so far. It turned out that her injury was worse than they had initially thought; not only did she suffer a comminuted and impact fracture, but she also suffered severe nerve damage to her tibial nerve below her ankle. Still, she didn't blame her husband. “It wasn't his fault. It was a freak accident,” she noted.
“You can't work on nerve damage if you can't move your foot,” he said. “So once we got out of the hard cast… we started working on it. We did nonsurgical things like nerve blocks and lidocaine infusions. None of them worked.”
“Here we are, in the surgery center, ready to go in. I'm going to have surgery right now or in about 20 minutes to decompress my tibial nerve,” he concluded. “We're hoping that this will open up some space so I can get some blood flow to my ankle so my nerves can start working and regenerating and I can start getting back to normal.”
“I can get back to things I love, like headstand.”