Tony Finau hit a woman in the head with his golf ball, so he turned up at her house with flowers

Blood is thicker than water, but not chocolate

Elisa Buster was having a lovely day at the Dean & Deluca Invitational at Colonial Country Club in Texas.

300 yards away, Tony Finau stood on the tee of the par-5 11th hole.

“Someone shouted ‘watch out!’ and the next thing I knew a golf ball hit me on the head,” says Buster. Big-hitting Finau had sailed his shot into the crowd, where Buster’s head had deflected it back into play. 

“The next thing I knew, Tony was right in front of me, just saying ‘hi’ and checking to see if I was okay. The first thing he said was, ‘wow that’s a lot of blood’.”

Finau apologised profusely before Buster was rushed to hospital for treatment. But that wasn’t the end of the encounter. 

Several hours later, after Buster had returned from hospital and Finau had finished his round, the 26-year-old PGA Tour star turned up at Buster’s house with flowers and chocolates to apologise properly. 

“He gave me some flowers and some chocolates, and he gave me a get well soon card, and on the bottom it said ‘from your new favourite golfer’,” says Buster. “He said that he had actually been hit in the head with a golf ball as well a few years back and he was hospitalized for like three days.”

The incident didn’t help Finau’s golf.

“It was kind of hard to erase the image from my mind, because there was a lot of blood,” he says. “It was hard for me to regroup mentally. ‘I hope I didn’t kill somebody,’ you know? I just wanted to make sure she was OK for my own piece of mind. I went to her house with some chocolate and flowers – it was the least I could do.”

Finau, whose closing rounds of 73 and 71 saw him drop to T-34, may not have had the best weekend on the course, but at least he made a new fan off it.