By Matt Stout
Staff Writer

Jon Parker lost his right leg at the knee in a skiing accident on Jan. 22, 2005. But in the 20 months since, the Bow native has taken up golf and quickly become one of Bow’s top JV golfers, and he returned to the slopes to ski on one leg. Parker is eyeing a spot on the U.S. Disabled Ski Team. (Bow Times/Matt Stout)

Jon Parker admits when he’s on the golf course, he struggles with consistency.

The Bow High junior will nail a birdie, hit a double-bogey, come back with a par and then maybe three-putt the next hole. It’s understandable, considering he only started golfing seriously once he made the Bow team in late August.

Despite the sometimes erratic play, Parker is not an emotional player. He won’t slam his driver or throw his 7-iron. He won’t curse, even when his approach finds that lone cattail near the green on the third hole at Canterbury Woods Country Club. And it always does.

Parker learned, more than a year and half ago, that how you cope with setbacks will determine how you’ll move forward.

Then considered one of the country’s top young ski racers and ranked first in his age group, Parker’s life and career forever changed on Jan. 22, 2005, when a skiing accident robbed him of his right leg at the knee.

A member of an elite ski-racing school, Burke Mountain Academy, Parker spent the next nine days in surgery, the following month at a Dartmouth hospital and, after months of rehab, will spend the rest of his life with a prosthetic leg.

In the months that followed, he returned to the slopes racing on one leg and, throughout the winter, trained with former and current members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team. He’ll work toward making the team this winter.

No longer able or desiring to play soccer or baseball, he turned to golf, rising to become one of Bow’s top junior varsity golfers and a player coach Mike Seraikas said he expects to help carry the varsity team next fall.

His mother, Melynda, said the family’s “lucky all we lost was a leg, not a life” last January. Twenty months later, Parker’s letting little stop him from stepping forward.

The day’s final run

That January afternoon, Parker was supposed to be in Lake Placid competing in the junior ski racing Eastern finals, an event in which he earned top ranking in 2004. But dangerously freezing temperatures forced all those from Burke Mountain Academy who planned to compete to stay in New Hampshire.

The run that changed everything, however, wasn’t even a run at all. Cooling down and descending the mountain to the bus, Parker veered off course when a fellow racer collided with him as she cut back to retrieve her bag.

He hit the woods going nearly 40 mph, and without a doubt saved his own life when he utilized his previous training and jumped ­ right before slamming into an oak tree. His leg, not his head, absorbed the brunt of the impact.

Unable to feel anything in his legs and afraid he was paralyzed, Parker lay face down in the snow, a hole he dug the only thing keeping him from suffocating, as mountain patrol, coaches and emergency workers eventually retrieved him from the woods.

The next few days were agonizing. After doctors diagnosed him with a shattered leg, a dislocated and fractured hip, a broken femur, compound fractures in his tibia and fibula and a severed artery behind his knee, he underwent a 14-hour surgery before enduring six more surgeries in nine days.

Yet, he remained positive. When doctors gave him the choice of keeping his leg but walking with a terrible limp or amputating it and using a prosthetic, Parker said he made the decision in two minutes.

“My parents had like 10 psychologists and all these people waiting outside in case I started freaking out,” he said. “And I was like, ‘OK, take it off, whatever.’ They were like, ‘Are you serious? OK.’”

He also kept a sense of humor. When the nurse asked him if he had any questions prior to the surgery in which his leg would be amputated, he replied, “Can I keep my leg as a souvenir?”

“And the way she looked at him ...” Melynda Parker said with a laugh. “She thought he was so serious.”

The trail back

Come mid-April, during a campaign in which the Parker family raised nearly $3,000 for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center selling bracelets reading “I’m a winner ­ J.P.,” Parker had his prosthetic leg.

In the next year, he water-skied on two legs and practiced at least 15 times skiing on one, several of those sessions coming with Jason Lalla, a former U.S. Disabled Team gold-medalist and prosthetist with Next Step Orthotics & Prosthetics, Parker’s prosthetics provider.

Though Parker has the “toolbox,” Lalla said, to one day reach the highest level in disabled skiing, Parker has reservations. On one leg, he said he may never reach the level he reached when he had the use of both.

“But within a season or two he could be at the (U.S. Disabled Team) level,” Lalla said. “In my opinion, it’s up to him. If he decides he wants to pursue, I think he can make it and be pretty successful with it.”

For now, it’s been his golf game he’s tried to improve. In working with Laura Shanahan-Rowe, the LPGA teaching pro at Canterbury Woods, Parker has tried to overcome a weight-shift problem in his swing.

Unable to transfer naturally onto his prosthetic leg, Parker has compensated by generating more upper-body strength through his 5-foot-8-inch, 135-pound frame.

“Obviously, he’s a champion and he likes the challenge of the game, and he’s certainly rising to it,” Shanahan-Rowe said. “When you’re that competitive and that good at another sport, jumping into a new endeavor, you have the same determination, the same desire. I think he’ll use what he’s learned through skiing and apply it to golf, especially on the mental side.”

With everything he’s been through, it’s the mental side Parker should have little problem with, cattails be damned.