Tomas Gomez, 18, was enjoying a fun night out with friends at the San Antonio-based driving range when Mother Nature decided to crash the party. As the skies above opened up, Gomez decided to drive one last shot. That’s when the scene turned to mayhem.
An enormous flash of light blinded Gomez and his friends, and an earth-shattering clap of thunder shook the ground simultaneously. Beads of electricity traced a channel through midair, fading a second or two after the strike. After the initial shock — no pun intended — of what happened, Gomez and his friends can be heard shouting and clamoring before vacating the premises. That’s right around the time they realized they had captured the remarkable scene on camera.
(Caution: Background music contains strong language.)
Social media quickly lit up with commentary, some joking that Gomez belonged in a scene from “Caddyshack,” while others admonished Topgolf. The company did work to make it clear that it evacuated patrons immediately after the strike, but experts think that measure came too late.
Whether the golf ball actually got struck is debatable. Some experts, such as John Jensenius, a retired lightning safety specialist with the National Weather Service, think it wasn’t the golf ball that got struck, but rather a tall pole in the background, obscured by the heavy rain.
He noted that the lightning’s contact point seems lower in the video than the curved path traced by the ball.
“Everything I see would indicate that lightning is striking something tall, [a] fixed object in the background,” Jensenius wrote. “Pictures from Topgolf show tall poles surrounding the facility, which very likely is what was struck.”
Jensenius explained that, if lightning had struck the ball, the electric channel wouldn’t terminate in midair at the golf ball; instead, it would continue to the ground. That’s typically the case with airplanes, and would certainly be the case with a golf ball. Lightning exists to balance or redistribute charge. Ordinarily, the greatest imbalance exists between the cloud and a ground-based object.
Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala, which operates a global lightning network, tweeted that it was probably the back fence pole that was struck rather than the ball.
Maribeth Stolzenburg, a research professor of physics at the University of Mississippi, thinks the ball was struck. She argues that, as a “stepped leader,” or the start of a lightning bolt, propagated down from the cloud, a “return stroke” began leaping up from the ground to meet it. The golf ball may have been a natural connection point for the return stroke, which subsequently means it would have become part of the path that the fully connected lightning channel took.
“The ball does not need to have any charge to be struck,” she wrote in an email.
Regardless, Gomez and his friends were lucky to not have been directly affected by the strike. Even if not hit directly, they could have been injured, had the charge traveled through the ground or nearby structures. Heading indoors and remaining away from metal objects or electrical appliances is always the safest bet during a thunderstorm.
“The golfer and friends in the video are EXTREMELY fortunate to have not been struck themselves AND to not have been harmed by the very nearby stroke,” Stolzenburg wrote. “Obviously, they were not in a safe location. Lightning is deadly, and a thunderstorm that close should have driven them inside to safety many minutes before that ‘last shot’!!! I am glad they live to tell the tale.”
At least two people have been killed in the United States so far this year by lightning, including a man golfing in New Jersey during the second week of June. Days later, a 15-year-old girl suffered a fatal strike while swimming off the coast of Georgia during a thunderstorm.
On the Topgolf website, the company writes: “Unless it’s an extreme weather event, nothing can stop a good time.”
Topgolf later posted an update on TikTok, within which a patron claimed to find a blackened, charred golf ball left after the electrifying experience. It’s unclear whether this was the golf ball affected by lightning.
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