Golfer unexpectedly swallowed by 18-foot sinkhole ‘can’t wait’ to get healthy and get back to golfing

On Friday, Mark Mihal found himself in a terrifying situation on the Annbriar Golf Course in Waterloo, Illinois when a sinkhole in opened up right under him. Mihal, co-founder of golfmanna.com was playing the fairway on the 14th hole when he was swallowed by an 18-foot sinkhole. His friends raced to help and managed to yank him out after about 20 minutes. This morning, he joins “Starting Point” to discuss his terrifying experience.

Mihal says he was attempting to find some yardage for his friend when he “noticed and anomaly of a little bathtub-shaped depression in the fairway.” After noticing the depression, he went to observe further and says, “I just took one step and then I was gone.”

As he was falling down the sinkhole Mihal says he thought about the Florida man who fell into a sinkhole that opened suddenly beneath his Tampa home earlier in March. Mihal says he was quickly engulfed in darkness and was “just hoping to land on something sometime soon and something hopefully not hard.”

“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pull myself out of there by myself,” says Mihal after he realized he had dislocated his left shoulder during the fall.

Mihal says he has suffered “couple of panic attacks” since the “traumatic” fall “but I can’t wait to get healthy and get back on the course.”