Camera catches blind golfer’s hole-in-one

Press, 30 September 1986, Page 17

Camera catches blind golfer’s hole-in-one

ALAN ROAD

meets

the golfers to whom disability is just another challenge

Terry Wallace’s golf handicap is 20. His other handicap is that he is blind. Wallace is one of more than 70 blind or partiallysighted players throughout England who refuse to be quarantined by their disabilities from the game they love. In addition to being blind, the 42-year-old former lorry driver suffers from diabetes, is on kidney dialysis, and is out of a job. As Tony Middlebrook, his guide, caddy, and good friend, says: “When they were giving out the good luck, Terry was in the air raid shelter.” Well, not quite. On the fourth at Picketts Lock golf course in North London, Terry Wallace sank a hole in one. In the presence of Middlebrook, his two partners and their guides, a P.G.A. coach, his guide-dog Zeus, and your reporter, this irrepressible optimist from Birmingham struck a ball he could not see with an eight iron a distance of 127 yards and achieved a dream that eludes multitudes of sighted players for a lifetime. An astonished witness, teeing off on the fifth, spoke with feeling for all those professionals and amateurs who pursue the holy grail of a hole in

one. “Perhaps I had better play with a blindfold in future,” he muttered a trifle irrevrently. “I’ve been trying to do that for 20 years.” Best of all for the jubilant Wallace was the fact that the entire operation had been recorded for posterity by the London “Observer” photographer, Michael Steele. The player’s unconfined joy as he knelt on the green, feeling for the hole and scooping out his bail, was more moving than the posturing of any professional punching the sky with ritual salutes. After kissing the

dimpled golf ball he placed it carefully in his pocket, never again to be driven or putted. For the uninitiated, the very idea of playing a game like golf in total darkness is reminiscent of those fiendish multiple tasks set by kings in fairy tales to sort out the upwardly mobile shepherd lads with designs on the Royal daughter. For fiery dragons and an enchanted pool at Lee Valley Park read electricity pylons and a sneaky canal. And that’s not to mention the customary trees and bunkers, and a man-trap known

locally as the Enfield Ditch. On the tee, Wallace extends his left hand shoulder-high and points in the general direction of the hole. “This then is 12 o’clock,” he explains. “If the hole is a little to the left, my guide will tell me to turn to 11 o’clock, or if it is to the right, he will direct me to one o’clock.”

After a quick briefing from his guide on the length of the hole and the general topography of the course, Wallace bends to place his golf ball on the tee and, still squatting,

places the head of his club behind it. A vertical ridge on the club’s rubber grip indicates its angle but fine tuning is done again with the help of the guide who tells the player to open or close the angle of the head.

According to Patrick Tailack, a professional who runs a free coaching clinic for blind players at Chessington Golf Centre, they “see” the course through the eyes of their guides. “Whereas golf is normally an individual game, golf for the blind is a team game.”

Once on the green, Terry Wallace likes to be taken to the hole and walked by his guide back to the ball so that he can pace the distance. “I then place the putter head behind the ball and my guide goes back to the flag and taps it.” As if to underline his point, the former 12 handicap player sank a difficult putt for one over par at the first hole.

Before he began to go blind, Wallace played three or four times a week, but had sold his clubs in disgust by the time someone at a Birmingham blind

school encouraged him to take a shot in the dark — literally — and return to the game. “The first time I tried, I went round in 50 shots for nine holes,” he recalls.

An English Association of Visually Handicapped Golfers was set up in 1982. The association will contact a convenient golf club on behalf of a new member and request facilities. “So far we have had 100 per cent co-operation,” says Ron Tomlinson, who is chairman of the association. Gerald Kelly has set up a similar body in Scotland and has organised matters to such good effect that to date the English have failed to win once in their annual international clashes.

Sport for the visually handicapped is not new. Athletics, bowls, cricket, cycling, football, pool, riding, rowing, ski-ing — on snow and water — and weightlifting are all now popular with them. 1

Integration is the present aim of the handicapped golfers, who do not want merely to be tolerated as a quaint curiosity off the main fairway of the game. Already clubs are organising foursomes in which the sighted and visually handicapped team up.

As Patrick Tailack says: “It’s a sobering thought that if a blind golfer played Greg Norman at midnight, he’d beat him.”

Copyright — London Observer Service.