Senior Jimmy White, the co-captain of the men’s golf team, has been nursing a broken wrist since early March. White suffered the injury during a strength and conditioning workout of pickup football.
That’s where things got a little murky.
According to White, the team was playing tackle football on the turf field inside the Moshofsky Sports Center when White and a fellow teammate collided in a freak accident.
“During workouts, we play a little football for conditioning, and I was undercut going for the interception,” White said. “Instead of landing on my head, I braced myself and landed on my wrist.”
A milder version of the story comes from Oregon men’s head coach Steve Nosler.
“It sounds a little dramatic and involves some poor judgment to say that they were playing football,” Nosler said. “What they were doing is after their workouts, the kids go out and play touch football, and (White) just tripped over somebody and landed on his arm. It wasn’t like he was going head-on with the Oregon football team.”
Kim Terrell, the trainer who attended to White, said the participants were throwing a football around when White tripped on accident.
When asked about the viability of using football as a conditioning workout, Nosler said the coaches do allow football as conditioning, and that trainers were present at the time.
“You can’t keep them in a test tube,” Nosler said. “If he would have been downhill ski racing or he would of fallen off a fence at the frat house at 4:30 in the morning, that’s a little different story. There was no poor judgment at all. Nobody did anything wrong. It was just a very unfortunate accident.”
White’s absence could have a profound affect on the rest of the men’s season. The Ducks have played a single tournament since White’s injury, earning a second-place finish at the Duck Invitational three weeks ago. They still have two more tournaments before the Pacific-10 Conference Championships at the end of April.
“(White’s injury) means that you have a seasoned player that probably would be playing somewhere up fairly high, in the top five, that won’t be playing now,” Nosler said. “So potentially, you could be replacing a one- or two-man with a six or seven.”
White’s return is not completely out of the question, but he and the doctors agree that it isn’t probable.
“I have a week left in the cast,” White said. “You can’t really set a schedule on it. It’s whatever the doctors say.”