Willis’ “worst injury”, it turned out, was a lacerated liver.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t realise they had me on the table and they had 40 pints of blood to keep me going,” he says.<\/p>\n
“They came to me afterwards and said they had given me a 10% chance [of living]. They said ‘obviously you wanted to live and that’s why you are still here’.”<\/p>\n
Willis, who was 42 at the time of his accident, spent five months in hospital.<\/p>\n
Yet barely a year after he was allowed home, he was back holding a golf club.<\/p>\n
Willis, from Ringland, Newport, had originally taken up the sport at the age of 35, having retired from a semi-professional football career which included a stint at Newport County AFC during their spell playing over the border in Moreton-in-Marsh.<\/p>\n
Willis’ golf handicap was 11 before his accident. Remarkably, he now plays off six.<\/p>\n
“I am really proud of that,” he says with a smile.<\/p>\n
“Golf has meant everything to me. I said if I ever got injured and I couldn’t play sport, I wouldn’t really want to be here.<\/p>\n
“Golf means I have been able to compete, playing sport with friends and keeping fit to a degree. It’s great for my wellbeing as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willis’ “worst injury”, it turned out, was a lacerated liver. “I didn’t realise they had me on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-584772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}