Struck Down, Clark's 'Response' Has Been Uplifting

This week at Augusta National Golf Club marks the 20th anniversary of Jack Nicklaus's historic 1986 Masters triumph, a victory that has been celebrated as one of the most emotional in golf history. The highlights of Nicklaus's final-round charge have become staples of Masters television promotions and serve as the last major milestone on the PGA Tour for the game's greatest player.

But for one person who was strolling the grounds of the famed course yesterday, Loritz "Scooter" Clark, Nicklaus's victory stirs much more personal memories, and Clark's story is true definition of a "miracle comeback."

As a gifted young golfer at Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville, Clark watched Nicklaus's famous Sunday back-nine charge as he worked as a cart attendant at the University of Maryland Golf Course. On a clubhouse TV, he saw Nicklaus make putt after stunning putt using a "Response" brand putter to erase a four-shot deficit.

Clark, who had idolized Nicklaus, decided he needed to have the same putter and convinced his father to buy one for him. That was the putter Clark was holding the following month when he was struck by a bolt of lightning on the practice green in College Park.

"The last thing I remember is putting," Clark, 37 and a golf course operations manager for Walt Disney Co. in the Orlando area, said in a telephone interview last week. "They tell me I made the putt, but the next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and asking everyone what I was doing there and what had happened."

Several members of the University of Maryland golf team had just finished their front nine when the storm hit. As they came up toward the clubhouse, they saw Clark stretched out on the green, and Mark Long said at first he thought Clark was simply fooling around.

"Then we saw the marks on the green, and when we got to Scooter, he wasn't breathing," recalled Long, now the caddie for PGA Tour player Fred Funk. "George Wood, an older guy who used to work there, gave him a real hard hit on the chest, and Scooter started coughing, and then we carried him into the clubhouse."

Stephen Fahey, a Maryland team physician who had just dashed in from the storm himself, was able to continue CPR and inserted a tube that allowed Clark to breathe, which probably saved his life.

"I was one of the wise people coming in out of the rain," Fahey recalled. "When I first walked in the shop, it was a little strange because there was nobody around. Then I asked where everyone was, and they said someone got hit by lightning and he was lying inside on a table. CPR had already been started and I just continued to resuscitate him."

Funk, then the Maryland golf coach, had been inside the golf shop when Clark was hit. He immediately called 911 when his players told him what had happened. An ambulance took Clark to Washington Hospital Center.

"I've also been told my heart stopped three different times and that I probably went eight or nine minutes without oxygen," Clark said. "I was in a coma for 36 hours and they told my parents that even if I came out of it, I'd probably have brain damage, maybe even be brain dead. But when I woke up, I was okay. None of my vital organs had been damaged."

The only lingering effect from the lightning strike Clark has ever been able to discern involved his ability to do simple arithmetic. Before he was hit, he said he was always an A or B math student. Ever since, he's struggled with numbers, forcing himself to double- and triple-check even the most basic addition and subtraction. While Clark was in the hospital, the Kemper Open was being played at Congressional, and Funk asked PGA Tour players to sign a card for him. Lee Trevino, who also had survived a lightning strike on a golf course, wrote a note on the card that has since become one of his standard punch lines: "Neither one of us could hit a 1-iron, because only God can hit a 1-iron."

Once his own burns healed, Clark resumed working at the Maryland course, and playing as much as he could. The next fall, using his Response putter that had been singed by the strike, he went on to win the Maryland state high school golf championship and was named to The Post's All-Met team as a junior and senior and went on to play two years on Maryland's golf team.

By the time Clark finished college, he wanted to work in the golf business. Funk, by then a PGA Tour regular, convinced him to take a job as an assistant pro at TPC at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. He's had several jobs in the industry since, and six months ago, he and his wife, Amber, relocated to Orlando, where Clark is operations manager for the Disney-owned Palm and Magnolia golf courses.

He still has that Nicklaus Response putter, storing it at his late father's home in South Carolina.

"After I was hit, I sat down with my parents and we talked about what it meant to have this second lease on life," Clark said. "We talked about trying to make the most of it. Of all the opportunities I've had, the most fulfilling things I do are centered around giving back."

Part of that mission includes spreading the word about the dangers of lightning on a golf course.

"It makes me crazy, the ignorance people have to the danger of those storms," he said. "It's kind of ironic, in a lot of the jobs I've had, I'm usually the last one in off the course when a storm hits because I'm out there trying to get people to come in themselves. Every golf course ought to have one of those early detection systems. Yeah, you could say I'm pretty passionate about that."