LEFTOVERS: Imperfect lie: Golfer falls into sinkhole

Talk about a bad lie.

Mark Mihal was walking on a fairway at a golf course in Waterloo, Ill., on Friday when an 18-foot-deep sinkhole swallowed him.

Mihal was checking the distance for his friend, Mike Peters, when he disappeared into the earth.

“I felt the ground start to collapse, and it happened so fast that I couldn’t do anything,” said Mihal, a 43-year-old mortgage broker. “I reached for the ground as I was going down, and it gave way, too. It seemed like I was falling for a long time. The real scary part was I didn’t know when I would hit bottom and what I would land on.”

Mihal landed in mud at the bottom of the sinkhole, which was approximately 10 feet wide, and dislocated his shoulder during the fall.

Afraid of being buried alive after watching the recent news clip of a Florida man who fell into a sinkhole while in his bedroom, Mihal spent a terrifying 20 minutes underground before he was rescued by playing partner Ed Magaletta, who tied a rope around Mihal and hoisted him up a ladder.

Magaletta surely will receive an endless supply of free mulligans from Mihal, whose wife, Lori, said the ordeal reminded her of a scene from the movie “Space Jam,” when Michael Jordan was playing golf and disappeared into the ground.

It reminds us of the scene in “Caddyshack” when Bill Murray talked about caddying for the Dalai Lama himself — “the flowing robes, the grace, bald ... striking” — on a course in the Himalayas.

“He hauls off and whacks one — big hitter, the Lama, long — into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier,” he said. “Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga.

“So we finish the 18th, and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, how about a little something, you know, for the effort?’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’

“So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

Mihal will have to settle for the blessing of being alive now and the fact he’ll never worry again about getting out of a sand trap after escaping from a giant sinkhole.

■ RECLINE IN PEACE — A woman is suing a Catholic church in Indiana for refusing to install a $9,000 black granite headstone she had made for her husband that is shaped like a couch and features images of a deer, a dog and color logos of NASCAR and the Indianapolis Colts.

“We did not think a granite couch was an appropriate monument in our historic cemetery,” said Jonathan Meyer, a priest at the church.

We can understand the church’s position, had the headstone been shaped like a toilet bowl bearing an image of the sports page.

But how better to rest in peace than on a couch or recliner watching your favorite sports teams?

Exceptions reportedly will be made at the century-old graveyard for headstones bearing the logos of the Angels, Saints or University of Notre Dame.

COMPILED BY TODD DEWEY
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL