This road to Senior Open less traveled

Alternate Van Hees tees off today after painful journey.

PEABODY, MASS. — A water polo player-turned-swimsuit model who didn’t pick up a golf club for decades, Kurt Van Hees told himself during a near-death experience, “If I get out of this alive, all I’m going to do is play golf.”

Today, he will tee off in the U.S. Senior Open.

The 51-year-old Californian was added to the field as an alternate Sunday and hopped on a red eye to Boston, fighting off the migraines and stiffness he still feels from a 2010 attack that left him unable to play more than four holes at a time.

“I just always felt like if I tried hard enough, I might be able to get to somewhere like this tournament,” Van Hees said Wednesday before his practice round at Donald Ross-designed Salem Country Club. “It’s amazing, the guys that I’m seeing that I’m playing with and stuff just blows my mind. So it’s been a pretty cool thing.”

After taking up golf when he was 6, playing only when the weather was warm enough in Oregon, Van Hees won a few junior tournaments and was approaching a scratch handicap by high school. But he was also a nationally ranked swimmer as a child, and by the time he was 20 he put down his clubs entirely.

Swimming never took him any further than his junior college water polo team, but the time he spent getting in shape paid off with a modeling gig for Speedo that landed him on the cover of Men’s Fitness magazine and on posters for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

After not playing golf at all for 15 years, he “got the bug again” when he was 35. But he didn’t really dedicate himself to the sport again until the steel-pipe attack that “egg-shelled” his face.

It took 6½ hours of reconstructive surgery, four steel plates and 12 screws to put his skull back together. His jaw was broken. His nose was reduced to splinters. His eye was knocked into his sinus cavity. And then his heart rate dropped to 19 beats per minute.

“When the thing went to 19, I just got this clear as day thought in my head that, if I get out of this alive, all I’m going to do is play golf. It was bizarre,” he said. “So that’s been a bit of a drag, but it was really what got me back into golf . ... I always kind of wanted to see if I could get good in the game.”