Lance Lucas’ high-flying golf life temporarily grounded

BY MARC HARDIN | LINK nky CONTRIBUTOR

Spring has sprung a surprise on local amateur golfer Lance Lucas for the second year in a row. As a result, the attorney’s exceptional golf game has been at a virtual standstill. But he’s trying to resurrect it.

“Last April, I fell while doing some yard work and suffered a compound fracture of my left wrist. It killed off almost all of my golf last year,” Lucas said. “This past March, I was diagnosed with severe arthritis in my right hip. I’ll eventually need hip replacement surgery. I’m just trying to tough it out.”

Pain notwithstanding, what makes it so tough for Lucas, 61, is that injuries and maladies are prying him away from the sport he loves, a game he has dedicated himself to during 45 years of successful, championship-winning golf.

Unlike his heyday when he was winning three Northern Kentucky Amateur Championships, Lucas is now playing with a titanium plate and 10 titanium screws in his left hand. Not exactly ideal for a premier ball striker.

“They’re holding my radius bone and my left wrist together after I fell,” said the right-handed Lucas. “It’s getting a lot better, but it did affect my swing for a while.”

The right hip? That’s another story. There are good days and bad days, but it’s not getting better. In fact, Lucas expects it to get worse until he replaces it. That most likely means less golf until the new hip goes in.

One of the reasons Lucas has been able to outlast Father Time for so long and hang with younger players is his long game. Longer and more accurate off the tee than most, Lucas can’t play to his strength with a degenerative hip.

“I can’t get a full turn in my hip when I swing,” Lucas said. “The hip is painful, and it’s really affecting my game off the tee. My mind says 'yes', but the body says 'no'.”

These are gory details for a man who has enjoyed relatively good health, enough to be out on the golf course so much that he’s recognized as one of the best amateur golfers in Northern Kentucky over the last quarter-century.

Lucas, a 1980 Boone County graduate who golfed for the Rebels and the University of Kentucky, won his first Northern Kentucky Amateur Championship in 1999. He added back-to-back crowns in 2003-04. He has appeared in the final six times. Lucas plays out of Triple Crown Country Club, where he has won five club championships.

But he hasn’t won anything since 2018 when he captured the Kentucky Senior Amateur Championship. In 2019, Lucas had an OK year. COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic March 11, 2020. He wasn’t thrilled with his play in 2021. Then came the spill that broke his wrist in spring of 2022 and this year’s hip prognosis. It’s starting to feel like he hasn’t had a normal golf season in five years.

“I tried playing this past March, but I wound up withdrawing from a tournament in South Carolina,” Lucas said. “I would say (until this year’s Northern Kentucky Amateur), the last tournament I completed was 2021.”

Which seems like an eternity to Lucas, who has no plans to encase himself in bubble wrap ahead of next spring to make sure he reaches summer safely. Showing up for University of Kentucky Board of Trustees meetings in bubble wrap would raise some eyebrows.

“There have been some positives,” Lucas said. “I was appointed to the Board of Trustees by the governor last July. I’m a grandpa now. One grandchild is 2 years old. And we recently had a newborn grandson.”

His law firm, Lucas and Dietz, is doing well. Lucas has been practicing law for 32 years, devoting his career to representing employers and insurance carriers in workers’ compensation claims. He was selected for inclusion in Best Lawyers in America in 2002.

It’s part of a personal story that has reached amazing heights. After earning his degree from the University of Kentucky College of Law in 1987, Lucas was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Air Force and assigned to undergraduate pilot training. He attended survival school and combat crew training in the KC-135R Stratotanker. He was assigned as a pilot to the 340th Air Refueling Wing. A veteran of both Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, Lucas refueled jets 30,000 feet in the air.

No wonder he’s known for having nerves of steel on the links.

“The pressure of golf is nothing like flying in combat,” Lucas said. “I flew 42 different sorties.”

And he came back alive every time. Now, if he can just get through next spring safely.