Bernhard Langer is back.
The 66-year-old Energizer Bunny of PGA Tour Champions, who tore his left Achilles tendon while playing pickleball on Feb. 1, defied the odds and returns to action just 3 months later at the Insperity Invitational this week.
“I was talking to my surgeon and my PT – you know how long will this recovery be and they were well, 4-6 months, and I was like I got this tournament that I’d love to play, it’s in 3 months,” Langer recalled Wednesday during a pre-tournament press conference. “And they were going, well, we don’t know about that. I love this Tournament, Insperity. I have won it four times, it was my first victory on this Tour. The other thing I was arguing with my PT and my surgeon is that Houston is very flat. It is like south Florida, easy to walk and get around. It is not hilly. They finally agreed after I played about a week ago and showed them I am capable of doing this. There are no restrictions, I am not in pain, and they all said alright you have our blessing – go and be careful.”
Overcoming obstacles is nothing new for Langer, who has been doing it all his life. In the new book “Life on the Green: Lessons and Wisdom from Legends of Golf,” sports broadcaster Ann Liguori chronicles some of the obstacles that Langer has faced in his life starting from his birth. Langer’s mother was told that she ran a high risk of losing her child and her own life.
“She went to the doctor and the doctor said, ‘Well, Mrs. Langer, you need to abort the child because if you don’t, you’re going to kill yourself and the baby, and then you leave a husband behind with two little kids.’ And my mother said, ‘No, I’m not going to abort,’ ” Langer recalls.
They both made it through with Bernhard being born on Aug. 27, 1957, in the village of Anhausen, near Augsburg, Germany, the youngest of three children of Erwin and Walburga (Wally) Langer.
Langer had another near-death experience as a baby when his temperature spiked so high that the doctor said, “There’s nothing we can do anymore. We don’t have any medication that can bring the fever down. We have no remedies and he’s probably going to die.”
Perhaps the ability to cheat death is an inherited trait. Langer’s father was a prisoner of war during World War II and was on his way to a Siberian prison camp when he jumped off a train and escaped at night while being shot at. Erwin Langer, who became a bricklayer, hid in the woods and traveled west…
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