Guy Survives the Most Embarrassing Death of All Time as He Almost Dies From Turning His Head Too Fast in a Game of Pickleball

Source - A “super-fit” dad is lucky to be alive after tearing a neck artery and suffering three strokes all because he turned his head “too quickly.”

“I was in complete shock and disbelief,” Joel Hentrich, 35, told SWNS of the freak accident. “You don’t think that these things will actually happen to you.”

The fiasco occurred Nov. 23, 2022 while the native of Festus, Missouri, and his pals were playing pickleball, a racket sport that’s similar to tennis but with smaller paddles. ...

Things turned disastrous, however, when Hentrich turned his head “quickly to the left to try and track a ball. I felt a pop in the back of my neck,” the alarmed pickleballer described. “I wasn’t sure if anyone else could hear it — but internally I could.” ...

He added, “The ground went out from underneath me, and I ended up with extreme nausea and I was projectile vomiting. There was tingling on the left side of my face, hand and part of my leg.” ...

Fearing the worst, the sportsman was transported to the hospital.  ... That’s when medics informed him of the horrific news: Hentrich had dissected his artery, which triggered three strokes in his lower cerebellum, the portion of the brain responsible for coordination and movement.

First things first: Yikes. 

Second, I'll die myself before I'll say anything that should be construed as me mocking Joe Hentrich, who comes across as a good guy, with a gorgeous family and who hasn't done a thing that deserves ridicule. He's probably way more fit and athletic than I am. And not long ago I tore an ACL miscounting stairs in the dark, and then aggravated it when a flip flop came off my foot on another staircase. So I'm in no position to put this young father down. We are all ecstatic he avoided a terrible, freakish death and wish him a speedy and complete recovery. God bless.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I have to ask if this is part of some larger societal problem. Just another symptom in the rapid decline of American manhood. When our fellow men are having near death experiences playing a game that's basically bigger ping pong, something is not right. When a 35-year-old man almost shuffles off this mortal coil in a sport that's played on half a tennis court, I'm afraid we've watered down our definition of "super-fit." 

I mean, what is becoming of us? We used to make steel in this country. We once carved the Chrysler 440-cubic inch engine out of a solid block of steel, melted down the scraps, and built skyscrapers with them. Without safety harnesses. 

We're not even 80 years removed from thousands of guys barely out of puberty storming Omaha Beach. We've heard a lot about what bullets and shells from the German coastal defenses did to them. But there's not one recorded instance of one of them losing his life to turning his head too fast. 

At the end of the 50s, the Mercury Space Program put out a call for men with a very specific set of requirements. They had to be test pilots with over 1,500 flight hours. Have a college degree. Be under the age of 40 and in good health. Just over 500 men in the entire country qualified for this highly dangerous, very experimental job with a high probability of death. Over 80% of them signed up. 

Imagine trying to explain to those workers, soldiers and pilots that by the 2020s, we'd have grown men who'd rather play video games than try to seduce women, workplaces with yoga rooms, and a good father would almost die turning his head while playing a game designed for middle aged wine moms, they'd wonder what they were doing all that work for. 

I say again, I'm happy and relieved for Hentrich. While at the same time, I weep for my country. Remember this if you hear about me doing something humiliating like dropping dead on the elliptical machine at Planet Fitness. In the words of that truly great American Male Lt. Frank Drebin, "A parachute not opening... that's a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine. Having your nuts bit off by a Laplander. That's the way I wanna go."