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For the blind, a
helping hand
By SCOTT A.
MILLER
EDGEMONT, Pa. – During his 25 years as a
Spalding sales representative, Bruce Hooper played a lot of
“had-to” golf.
“I had to go (play golf) with a
customer, I had to go to a sales meeting,” Hooper
says.
Now that he no longer works, Hooper is able to
play because he wants to.
He still gets his ball
around the golf course pretty well.
“I sometimes like
to think that now I’m almost as good as I was – although we do
it totally differently,” he says.
These days Hooper
plays blind, the result of macular degeneration that first
surfaced in 1998 and forced him to go on disability in 2002.
He can see only about 6 feet. But that didn’t stop Hooper from
shooting 83-84 to handily win his division of the U.S. Blind
Golf Association National Championship at Edgmont Country
Club. (The names of the golf course and town have slightly
different spellings.)
Competitors are placed in one of
three categories, ranging from B1 (totally blind) to B3 for
people with visual acuity of 20/600 to 20/200. Hooper is a B2,
and his wife of 38 years, Judy, serves as his coach, lining
him up for each shot, painting a verbal picture of the course
and tracking each shot.
“You have to have a good sense
of humor. We have had a lot of funny things happen because of
people (having) low vision or (being) blind,” Judy says.
“Fortunately, this organization has so many resilient people
that have overcome so much. Those type of people have a good
sense of humor and they make you feel good.”
Few are as
resilient as Sheila Drummond, who started playing golf 15
years ago – 12 years after she lost her sight. Last year she
made her first hole-in-one.
“You move on. You’re blind,
you can’t see, so you do what you gotta do,” she says
matter-of-factly.
Drummond can be downright irreverent
on the subject, such as when she recalls the day a woman from
her church visited while she was baking cookies.
“She
asked me ‘Sheila, how do you bake cookies?’ I told her, ‘The
same way you do, cookie dough, a cookie sheet and an oven,’ ”
Drummond deadpans. “I mean, how else do you bake
cookies?”
The formula isn’t a whole lot different in
golf: club, ball, aim, swing. Hooper does that as well as
anyone on the blind golf circuit, having won the 2006
International Blind Golf Association World Championship.
The USBGA’s origins can be traced to Minnesotan Clint
Russell, who lost his sight in 1924, then took up golf a year
later. At the tail end of World War II, Russell is said to
have contacted the Veterans Administration about using golf as
therapy for the blind. In 1946, the first group of blind
golfers held a national championship in Inglewood,
Calif.
But the Philadelphia area soon became the
epicenter for the blind golf community. The USBGA’s motto:
“You don’t have to see it to tee it” – was coined there in
1953 by Robert Allman, a lawyer and blind golfer, who had
founded the Mid Atlantic Blind Golf Association (MABGA) five
years earlier.
In 1967, Bob Hope came to Edgmont to
host the Hope for the Blind Golf Tournament. Edgmont also
plays host to the MABGA’s annual tournament.
“This has
been a tremendous experience,” says Pam Mariani, Edgmont’s
general manager and
daughter of the man who helped build
the club in 1963. “To be able to continue on that path, and be
part of that history as we were in 1967, is a tremendous
opportunity.”
Posted:
11/19/2007
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