Opinion ID: 2518817
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Court of Appeal's Inappropriate Limitation of Dilger

Text: The Court of Appeal here concluded that golf is an active sport in which participants run the risk of being hit by an errant ball. Nevertheless, it declined to apply the primary assumption of risk doctrine. It distinguished Dilger, supra, 54 Cal.App.4th 1452, 63 Cal.Rptr.2d 591, on the ground that the plaintiff there was struck by a ball hit from another hole, whereas Shin was struck by a ball hit by a member of his own threesome. In support of its conclusion, the Court of Appeal reached back to 1974 and outside California authority to the Louisiana case of Allen v. Pinewood Country Club, Inc. (La.Ct.App.1974) 292 So.2d 786 ( Allen v. Pinewood ). In Allen v. Pinewood, supra, 292 So.2d 786, the plaintiff and the defendant were golfers in the same foursome. After all of the players hit their tee shots, they walked to their respective balls. The defendant had topped his tee shot, landing far behind the plaintiff. The defendant shouted fore and hit his second shot. The plaintiff, hearing the shout, turned around and was struck in the face by the ball. (Id. at p. 788.) The Louisiana court described the pivotal issue as whether plaintiff was guilty of negligence barring his recovery by proceeding ahead of a member of plaintiffs own party whom plaintiff knew, or had reason to know, would [hit his shot] next. ( Allen v. Pinewood, supra, 292 So.2d at p. 789.) The court held the defendant was liable under a proximate cause analysis. If the plaintiff was negligent in proceeding ahead of the defendant, his negligence was only a remote cause of his injury, whereas the defendant's negligence, in making his shot without ensuring the plaintiff had heard his warning, was the proximate cause. (Id. at pp. 789-790.) Allen v. Pinewood, supra, 292 So.2d 786, was a slender reed upon which to lean. The intermediate appellate court in Louisiana decided the case almost two decades before this court issued its opinion in Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th 296, 11 Cal. Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696. Thus, it applied a conventional negligence analysis. It did not consider the primary assumption of risk doctrine or whether that doctrine should apply to golf. Certainly it did not address whether, in applying the doctrine to golf, a distinction should be drawn among defendants based on whether they are members of the plaintiffs playing group. We are not persuaded that a case should turn on whether a defendant is playing with the plaintiff, or in another group. The question of duty involves the relationship of the parties to the sport. ( Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th at p. 309, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696.) Coparticipants have the same relationship to the sport whether they are in the same playing group or not. This analysis is consistent with our conclusion in Cheong, supra, 16 Cal.4th 1063, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 859, 946 P.2d 817. There the parties were not competing against each other. They were coparticipants, however, because they were both engaged in the same sport, at the same time, using a common venue. The golfers both here and in Dilger, supra, 54 Cal.App.4th 1452, 63 Cal.Rptr.2d 591, were sharing the same course, just as the skiers in Cheong were using the same ski run.