The 19th Hole is a biweekly column geared toward golf's weekend warriors.

We all knew Tiger Woods was hurting when he won the U.S. Open last month, but it became an epochal victory after we learned he did it on one leg and probably a nosebag full of Advil.

His coach, Hank Haney, related what Tiger's doctor told him two weeks before the Open: that he needed to go on crutches first for three weeks, and follow that with full rest for three weeks. "That's not going to happen," Tiger said as he pogo-sticked out of the doctor's office. "I'm going to play in the U.S. Open and I'm going to win it."

Because every single aspect of the golf world revolves around Tiger, we can now expect the golf injury (ideally one requiring surgery) to become this summer's hottest accessory, especially for anyone serious about the game. The golf injury has become a kind of status symbol, a testament to your commitment to the game. You've got your special interchangeable-lens sunglasses, your 60-degree nickel alloy wedge, your J Lindberg belt; but if you don't have a torn ACL or a couple of ruptured vertebrae, you probably aren't a serious contender.

Your preround routine is a good place to begin training for an injury. Many people warm up, but the only reason you would want to do that is to stay healthy. I recommend my routine as a better injury-development tool.

It involves a tire-screeching tour of the parking lot looking for the closest available spot, exiting the car before it has come to a halt, pulling my clubs out of the trunk while spilling balls all over the tarmac and frantically retrieving them, putting on my shoes without taking time to tie them up, sprinting to the clubhouse to pay a green fee and then breathlessly making it to the first tee just as my friends are about to hit. My first practice swing of the day normally doubles as my first stroke of the round.

Once the round is under way, numerous options for a more dramatic injury exist. The surest path to physical self-harm is to swing too hard early in the round, particularly if you wisely failed to warm up. Curtis Strange once remarked that his teacher told him, "I've shortened thousands of golf swings, but I've never lengthened one." This is wise advice if one's goal is merely to play better, but you're probably better off taking a scything, jungle-clearing lash every time you see the ball, any ball, in front of you.

Visualization has long been an important part of a good player's preshot routine, so imagine you're trying to kill a warthog that has come at you straight out of the Tanzanian bush, and the only tool available to clobber it to death is your 460cc titanium stiff shaft driver. That kind of violence and aggression may get some results. Just make sure you repair your divots.

Hitting it in the bush can help, too, since it is in the trees that you'll give yourself the chance to make contact with something harder than dirt.

Warm-down strategies are also important to any athlete seeking a status-conferring injury. If you feel something amiss with your body during your round, it's best to ignore it until you are drinking afterward in the lounge, at which point you must remind yourself not to stretch or ice or medicate or seek attention for the injury in any way until you are physically unable to get out of bed.

The sole medication you can allow yourself is beer and/or highballs (this aspect of the game will be the subject of a future column).

It's also worth highlighting that in the absence of witnesses, an injury acquired in any other way - such as a gardening accident, closing the car door on your hand, tripping over your daughter's skateboard on the driveway in the dark - must be transferred to a golf-related cause when explaining it to your friends on the first tee.

They won't show it, but your pals will be intimidated knowing that the ligament damage to your wrist requiring that bandage wasn't caused by taking out the trash, but rather from practising your three-wood stinger for two hours on the range.

Of course, there are always going to be people out there who play the game for fun and simple exercise, who don't care whether anyone else thinks they're good, who want to play golf but not at the expense of their overall health. Perverse as it is, if you are of this bent, there are a few simple things you can do to not get injured.

The first is to warm up properly; do five minutes of light swinging without hitting a ball, follow that with some gentle stretching and then hit enough balls prior to your round to get warm. Make sure you walk instead of taking a cart, so that you stay loose. And as you're putting your clubs in the trunk, do another light lower-back and hamstring stretch.

By far the best thing you can do to avoid injury is to follow the only piece of playing advice that's ever really worked for me. Jack, my dear 90-year-old friend in Scotland, told me a decade ago, after I'd raked yet another violent tee shot into the gorse: "Half swings, my boy, half swings."

I haven't been injured since, but now Tiger has given me permission to get unhealthy again. I have therefore changed my swing thought from half-swing with tempo to a rather more startling, but hopefully productive, image: warthog.

Curtis Gillespie is the author of Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links along the Scottish Coast. His most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.