The most catastrophic Masters Sunday meltdown never aired on TV

Haotong Li's 13th hole at the Masters will live in infamy among those who witnessed it. Getty Images AUGUSTA, Ga. — When someone witnesses a catastrophe, several interesting things happen in the brain in an instant.

The autonomic nervous system floods the body with adrenaline and cortisol, speeding up sensory processing in the amygdala and supercharging memory encoding — basically turning the brain into a vector for documentation. Occasionally, this physiological response causes a phenomenon called “ tonic immobility ,” where the witness of a traumatic event does not flee or fight, but freezes . In this situation, the witness is helpless — trapped in a moment of unforgivable horror, incapable of doing anything to alter the situation, and undergoing a moment of physiological stress in which their brain is uniquely attenuated to remember every gory detail.

This is the unfortunate situation that befell a few hundred patrons on the side of the 13th hole on Sunday afternoon at the Masters, when Haotong Li endured the worst 30 minutes of his golfing life, then recorded a score that both torpedoed his tournament and defied belief: A quintuple-bogey 10. The trauma began fairly innocuously. On his second shot from the fairway, Li overcooked his 3-wood approach into the winding section of Rae’s Creek that frames the hole.

Under normal circumstances, the situation facing him would be fairly simple: Recover the ball from the creek, take a drop on dry land no nearer to the hole, and play the wedge approach shot into the green. Except, as fate would have it, Li’s approach did not arrive under normal circumstances. Rather than settling inside the tributary, his ball ricocheted off a large rock and took an ugly bounce left, nestling deep into the bushes further up the hill on the far side of the creek.