Fishing surpasses basketball as No. 1 for eye injuries
Tuskegee student Ralph Squire had paid five dollars for the fishing lure the same day that the crankbait became entangled in a bush while he fished later, it was only natural that he wanted it back. "I had just bought the lure at the Wal-Mart at Auburn and right off the bat I threw it up in a bush," the Texas native remembers of the incident. "I kept pulling on it with the fishing line, trying to pull it loose from the bush." The lure eventually came loose and struck Squire in the face. When several of his friends rushed to his side to see if he was OK, they made a gruesome discovery. A treble hook from the lure was buried deep in Squire's right eyeball. Squire became another of an ever-growing number of anglers who have suffered catastrophic eye injuries from fishing lures, according to Birmingham surgeons Dr. Robert Morris and Dr. Douglas Witherspoon of the Callahan Eye Foundation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The two surgeons can offer no reason for the increase in eye injuries from fishing, but they have hard data to back up their beliefs that such injuries are on the rise. Data from the Helen Keller Foundation show that nationwide, fishing injuries now make up about 9 percent of all sports eye injuries, Witherspoon said. A hook to the eye makes up about 38 percent of those injuries, while 44 percent come from a sinker or the body of a lure striking an eye. "People tend to think that a weight or sinker in the eye isn't as bad as a hook in the eye, but it can be just as bad," Morris said. "In a lot of cases the eyeball ruptures. In about half those cases the person is left permanently blind in that eye."
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