How golf helped war reporter Benjamin Hall recover from a deadly attack in Ukraine | Golf news and tour information

The Center for The Intrepid, part of the U.S. Army’s premier medical facility, Brooke Army Medical Center, is a rehabilitation facility for amputees and burn victims in San Antonio. It’s not a place you’d expect to find a reporter – especially one like Benjamin Hall, who lives 5,000 miles away in London – but when Hall got there, he found something else unexpected: golf clubs.

“It was part of my therapy. They asked me right at the beginning, ‘What do you like to do most?’ I said, ‘Golf.’ They said, ‘Great. You’re going to play golf again,'” says Hall, who was in a hospital bed at the time and was lucky to be alive. “You give people things to strive for, and that was one of them for me.”

Hall was covering the war in Ukraine for Fox News on March 14, 2022, when Russian missiles struck the car he and two colleagues, Pierre Zakrzewski and Sasha Kuvshynova, were in. Hall was the only one of the three to survive, which is why he has been grateful every day since, despite the devastating injuries he suffered, including the loss of his right leg, left thumb, part of his left foot, and the vision in his left eye. He has undergone more than 30 surgeries in the past two years (and counting), and in 2022 he spent an agonizing six months in San Antonio, not seeing his family.

Just getting from a street in Kiev to San Antonio was a miracle. Hall was spotted by a Ukrainian soldier who only found him when he made a wrong turn. Getting Hall out of Ukraine and into a U.S.-run medical center in Germany sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. You need permission to board a train carrying the Polish prime minister, a military helicopter, special permission from the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and a former special forces agent known only by the code name “Seaspray.”

Hall’s biggest motivation during recovery was, of course, getting back to his family. He and his wife Alicia decided not to tell their three young daughters about the extent of his injuries until he was well again. In Brooke, the game that Hall had fallen in love with as a child helped him through the difficult times. At one point, with a handicap index of 13.0, Hall went from swinging a pitching wedge in his hospital room to making trips to a nearby driving range. Since he was confined to bed most of the time, he had plenty of time to think and write down thoughts for what became a New York Times bestseller: Saved: A war reporter’s mission to get home.

“It’s something that’s kept me busy and I enjoy doing it and I think it’s been therapeutic,” Hall says. “If you’re going through a difficult time, talk about it, tell someone about it, write it down. Don’t hide from it. Face it. Tell someone about a problem you’re having and you’ll feel lighter and better.”

Hall, 41, was introduced to golf as a child by his late father Roderick, who helped develop several courses including Ryder Cup venue Valderrama in southern Spain, but Hall believes the game – and the connections it creates – are needed now more than ever.

“We live in a world where we’re constantly staring at screens. We’re not spending time with other people,” says Hall, whose father died two months before his near-death experience in Ukraine. “That’s why golf is so great. You leave that behind. My friends and I always turn our phones off, at least before when I played with my dad. That connectivity is what we’re missing in the world and we need to get it back.”

Hall didn’t always know he was destined to be a journalist, but he always wanted to travel. He’s traveled the world as a correspondent for Fox News, but other activities have taken him there too, including a 30th birthday “car rally” in which he drove from London to Mongolia with a friend. Hall fondly remembers packing his clubs into an old black Suzuki Jimny and playing on the 10,000-mile journey, including recreating his own golf holes in the Gobi Desert.

“The stories I do require you to constantly think about geopolitics and military and what’s going on,” Hall says. “The beauty of golf is that you can leave all that behind.”