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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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