Golfers not responsible for all bad shots

An errant shot that left a man blind in one eye has produced a message for golfers: you are not responsible for all of your bad shots.

The errant shot came while three friends were playing at Dix Hills Golf Course on Long Island in 2002. The man who lost part of his vision, Azad Anand, was no longer able to work as a neuroradiologist. He sued Annop Kapoor, the golfer whose shot hit him, claiming that Kapoor should have warned him by yelling fore.

But on Tuesday, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that Kapoor was not responsible for yelling fore because Anand was not in the intended path of the ball, so Kapoor was not responsible for paying damages.

The court, which sided with several lower courts, ruled that Anand assumed the risk that he could be hit by an errant ball when he decided to play golf. And Kapoor was responsible for yelling fore only to golfers in the ball’s intended path.

“What this now means,” said Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, “is that when you play golf in New York, you are only liable for hitting someone” if that person is in front of you.

Anand said he never heard anyone yell fore. On the first hole, Kapoor’s second shot landed in the rough about 20 yards from Anand’s ball, which was sitting in the fairway. Kapoor did not wait for Anand to find his ball and hit his third shot, which struck Anand, who was not in the intended direction of the ball, according to the court ruling.

The decision was the latest in a series of similar rulings about who is liable when a golfer is struck on a course. In 2007, the California State Court of Appeals made a similar ruling, saying golfers were not responsible for many injuries sustained by fellow golfers on the course.

New York and California are two of the leading states in tort law, and both states ruling the same way “will almost certainly have larger implications for the rest of the country,” Tobias said.

Fore has been used by golfers since the 18th century to warn others of an errant shot. Although historians are divided on its origins, many believe it originated in the 1700s, when, before artillery was fired, it was customary to shout, “Beware before.”

Dalton B. Floyd, a lawyer in Surfside Beach, S.C., who specializes in golf-related litigation, said courts had traditionally found that golfers are not liable for hitting those golfers not in their intended path.

“There is an inherent risk in golf that not everybody is going to hit a straight shot,” he said. “It’s different, however, if you are driving the ball and you normally hit 200 yards and there is a person 150 yards out and you hit them and don’t yell fore. In that case you have to warn them and if you don’t you are liable.”

Most issues arise, Floyd said, when a golfer hits someone on a green when the golfer thought the green was farther away than it actually was.

“Where we have the most controversy is with the suing of the clubs,” he said. “A guy hits a 3- iron and thought he was 210 yards out but the marker on the course was wrong and someone on the green is hit.”