Casey Martin, Golfer Who Didn't Have to Walk, Moves On
May 10, 2006 — -- Mark Twain famously called golf "a good walk spoiled." Casey Martin, who Tuesday was named the new men's golf coach at the University of Oregon, has played a lot of golf very well and never had a good walk doing it.
Martin's legacy in professional golf is that he is likely to be known forever as the golfer who didn't have to walk. His most famous victory wasn't on the course -- it was the case he won that allowed him to use a golf cart when he competed on the PGA Tour. That case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Martin has lived with a circulatory disorder in his right leg since birth that is painful and debilitating, and has turned his leg into a mass of varicose veins that makes it extremely painful to walk the approximately 5 miles of an 18-hole golf course. Just making the walk from his cart to his ball sometimes challenged him. There is no cure for this rare condition known as Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome and there is a chance that Martin's leg may some day have to be amputated.
When I met him for the first time eight years ago, Martin had just gotten a temporary court injunction to ride in a cart in a tournament. ABC News was the only national media there that wasn't from the golfing world. I'm a golfer. Not a particularly good one, but a golfer. That's how I knew about Casey Martin and what he was trying to do.
Martin wasn't looking for pity or publicity. He didn't even have an agent at that point. He was a young golfer just out of college with a powerful swing and a bum leg who wanted the chance just to play.
His fellow professionals were split. Some were supportive, like Chi Chi Rodriquez, who told an interviewer, "If Franklin Roosevelt could run the country sitting in a wheelchair, Casey Martin can play tournament golf using a cart."
Others -- like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus -- were less generous and even testified against Martin as his case made its way through the judicial system.
For our piece we interviewed Tiger Woods, a Stanford teammate of Martin, and like a lot of other pros Tiger was conflicted about whether or not Martin would have an advantage by using a cart. But Tiger expressed his personal feelings too and said that he knew Casey needed the cart play and hoped he would be given that right.
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