[Chompy]

The outboard my boat came with is having some trouble shifting into Forward; specifically, I have to actually hold it in forward or else it snaps back to neutral within a few seconds. Reverse works fine. Is there some common issue that could cause something like this?

Right now the stern bracket is almost entirely gone, but I'm not sure how that would cause a problem like this. The outboard suffered a hard collision about 2 weeks ago, and I'm worried that it did some damage to the transmission along with the aforementioned stern brackets.

I'm afraid I know very little about outboards, in the past I never used one.. so any advice would be appreciated. I'm half-tempted to scrap the damn thing rather than spend $200 for new stern brackets and then find something else wrong with the thing. There are no Nissan marine dealers in the area, so I don't have a shop I can bring the thing to.