Golf star Robert Allenby “kidnapped, beaten and robbed in Hawaii”

Melbourne-born Allenby, 43, claims his horrific ordeal only ended when he was dumped from a car boot into a park several miles away before a retired military veteran paid for a taxi to take him back to his hotel.

Allenby had gone to the Amuse Wine Bar, in Honolulu, after failing to make the cut for the Sony Open tournament – but the evening ended with him nursing cuts of a very different and unwanted variety.

The exact circumstances surrounding the bizarre incident remain unclear, with local police confirming only that they are treating the case as second-degree robbery. But the golfer was left feeling several strokes under-par as he nursed wounds to his nose and forehead, and bruising around the eye.

Allenby claims he left a friend in the bar in order to go to the bathroom. When he returned a group of people told him his friend was waiting outside – but on leaving he was bashed around the head and kidnapped.

“I walked around the corner and then – bang. Then the next minute I was thrown out of the boot of a car,” Allenby told Sunrise breakfast show. The golfer – who also suggested he may have been drugged before leaving the bar – told Nine News he was “still trying to pinpoint whether it was a baseball bat or someone’s fist” that hit him, and told the AAP news agency: “I didn’t think I was going to survive this one.”

Allenby said a homeless woman spotted him being dumped from the car after he had been robbed of his phone and wallet.

However, Nine News claimed that the homeless woman had given them a conflicting account, saying that she found Allenby “bloodied and confused” as he argued with two men only about a block away from the Amuse bar. She alleged that Allenby asked her to use his credit card to withdraw $500 cash to pay his attackers so he could get his wallet back. The woman told Nine that the men became “quite aggressive” – at which point the former soldier intervened to help Allenby.

Nine also reports that the Honolulu Police Department has CCTV footage of a suspect using Allenby’s credit card to buy two bottles of alcohol.