Rickie Fowler won the 2019 Waste Management Phoenix Open and a north Phoenix woman is taking some credit for it.
Fowler’s tee shot off 15 on Saturday struck Amy Strouse in the head, giving her a concussion and splitting her head open. She had to get seven staples.
“I heard the tee shot come and I heard everybody yell 'fore,' so I ducked behind the tall guy, thinking I was protected and luckily I didn’t look up I looked down and then it just popped me,” Strouse said.
Strouse said it felt like "banging your funny bone."
“So I put my hand on my head and then took my hand down and there was the blood, so I freaked out a little bit and then the crowd freaked out when they saw the blood, which kind of amped everything up," she said. "Everything was so chaotic with trying to get a towel on my head and everything.”
The next thing that crossed her mind?
“I’m sitting on the ground and I look at the crowd and I’m like at least tell me it was Rickie that hit me,” Strouse said.
Turns out, it was!
“He came over, he was super sweet, made sure I was OK,” she said.
Fowler signed a golf glove for Amy and wrote “my bad” on it.
She says it took about a half hour for the medical team on site to staple her head.
“So I have a nice seven staples in my head, concussion. It’s very pretty,” she said. "They were super good, they didn’t have to shave my head or anything. No numbing, no local, nothing, so that was, that was the fun part.”
Then first responders made sure she got out OK, and now she can officially say she got hit in the head by the Waste Management Phoenix Open champ, Rickie Fowler.
“Big fan, I had all my Puma gear on and now it’s covered in blood,” she said. “He’s cuter in person.”
Amy has a message for her husband, Chief Paul Strouse, who’s deployed in the Middle East.
“I’m OK, I’m alive... too bad you didn’t get to meet Rickie,” she said.
Strouse jokingly said she's taking credit for Fowler's win.
“His shot would’ve gone out of bounds, but I saved it with a nice bounce off my head, so I got him back in the fairway," she said.
Doctors told Amy the golf ball was going 100 mph when it hit her.
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” she said.
And believe it or not, this isn’t the first time she’s been hit in the head at a sporting event.
Back in high school, when Amy was on a date at an Adirondack Red Wings game, she took a hockey puck right over the glass and left with a broken nose. That was before the netting was up.
Amy said she’d take the golf ball over the hockey puck any day.