Golfing with Vision Loss

Hadley

Golfing with Vision Loss

Presented by Ricky Enger

Ricky Enger: With determination and creative thinking, we can find ways to do the things we love, even those that seem inherently visual. In this episode, Hadley members, Judy Messina and Jan Ober join us to discuss golfing with vision loss. I'm Ricky Enger and this is Hadley Presents. Welcome to the show, Jan, Judy. So glad to have you.

Judy Messina: Well, thank you for having us.

Jan Ober: Yeah, it's very exciting to be here with you.

Ricky Enger: I am delighted to have you both. And Judy and I have spoken a couple of times and Jan and I are just getting to know each other. But interestingly enough, Judy and Jan connected with each other when we invited them to do this podcast. So, they've had a chance to chat about golf even before this podcast, which I think is awesome. So, before we get into talking about your stories and some of just the logistics of golfing with vision loss, I want to get some quick introductions, just letting people know who you are, a bit about you. So, I think we will start with Jan.

Jan Ober: Okay. My name is Jan Ober. I live in Salem, Oregon. However, I was born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota. I went to college at Iowa State and got a home economics degree. My husband and I moved to Oregon as an adventure and 52 years later we're still here. We had no job, no place to live, just our dog and our U-Haul trailer and away we went. We downsized five years ago when we moved to a golf community, a 55 and older community, which was the best decision of our life to move here. We've raised three daughters who are now all married, live in three different states, and we have eight grandchildren.

Ricky Enger: And Jan, as much as you're comfortable, tell us about your vision loss.

Jan Ober: Okay. So about nine years ago, we bought a puppy and the puppy was black with white face and white feet. And I would take the little dog out at night to do his business. And all of a sudden I couldn't see where he was. I thought I was looking right at him. And when I turned my head to the side, I could see his white feet and his white face out of the corner of my eye. And I thought, "That is weird." And I looked right at him and he disappeared. So, I went to the eye doctor and was diagnosed with macular degeneration. And so that was nine years ago. And I had started golfing maybe five or six years before that without a hint that I would have vision loss. And it's just progressed slowly over the first few years, but in the last six to eight months, it's degenerated quite a bit to where now I have geographic atrophy, and I don't have very much central vision.

I gave up the car keys. I gave up sewing, which was harder for me as a home ec person. I like to do all the quilting and make quilts for my grandkids. And that was the most difficult, but I was determined that I wasn't going to give up everything. Golf was one of those things I said I'm not going to give up on it.

Ricky Enger: I love that. And especially living in a golfing community, it was clearly important to you. Judy, tell us a bit about you.

Judy Messina: Yep. I'm Judy Messina. I live in Wiper Lake, Minnesota. I am a wife and a mother of one son and a grandma of two grandchildren. And I had gone to college and gotten a degree in social work years ago. And as far as my vision loss, I was diagnosed in elementary school with Stargardt's disease, and it took a while to figure that out. And I had much more vision in elementary school, but it has continued to decline, and I've lost quite a bit in my older years at this point. And so pretty much what I have is kind of hand motion if you're doing it by the eye chart.

Ricky Enger: So, Jan, you did not expect at all, I think, to have any vision problems when you started playing golf. That wasn't even on your radar, right?

Jan Ober: That's right. And it should have been. It should have been. My sister, who is 10 years older than me, passed away three years ago, but she had macular degeneration and I believe there is a genetic component to this. And so, it should have been on my radar, but either I was in denial or just optimistic.

Ricky Enger: And Judy, I think your experience is a little different because we know that Stargardt is progressive, but when you started playing golf, did you kind of have the assumption that your vision would stay at the level it was when you started or how did you approach that?

Judy Messina: I didn't really consider it at the time, to be honest, but yes, I was hopeful that it wouldn't be too much different. But when I first was golfing, I was with my family, and I wanted to be able to be out and be part of the social piece of it. And I still always had to have somebody line me up and help me out. As time progressed, I have found that each time it declines a little bit more, there still seems to be some adjustments you have to make when you're dealing with limited vision. It could be a lighting concern. So, I've had to look at some of that kind of thing. I use a visor with a dark underside because the white underside gives me trouble, but it's a lot of lighting issues. And like I say, every time you lose a little vision, you definitely are finding yourself struggling a little bit to readapt your game a little bit.

Ricky Enger: Yeah. And I think that's true for a lot of things as you go through that progressive vision loss, something that you thought you'd learned and figured out a way around, now suddenly you're having to figure that out yet again. So, for both of you, you started to lose vision and then things progressed a little more rapidly for each of you. And that can be a real challenge to adjust. And I think for both of you, golfing became a thing that you really appreciated doing. So was there any point where you thought, "I'm going to have to give this up. This isn't something I'm going to be able to do. " Or did you approach it differently and think, "I got to figure this out? " Jan, we'll start with you.

Jan Ober: Well, yes. I came home one day last summer in tears, and I just told my husband, I said, "I am not going to lose this. I am not going to give up and there has to be something I can do. " We had just gone on a Mediterranean cruise because I wanted to see sights before I wouldn't be able to see them. And so, we're on this cruise ship and I'm listening to a Hadley podcast while I'm by the pool on this cruise ship and I am in tears because I realized when I got home, I'm going to have to give up my sewing. I'm going to have to give up my car. I can't hardly read. All these things are just going away, and it was really difficult. But the golfing, because we live here in this community with all these amazing women around me, golf was something very important to not give it up, to find a way to adapt.

Everybody is so helpful to help me. When I golf with somebody, I say, "You have one job. Your job is to help me find my ball." And everybody helps. They say, "Well, your ball is right after the third shadow at about two o'clock." And that gives me some perspective to know where to walk and find my ball. So, I guess I just, it's a social thing. It's being outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Yeah, it's just something that I didn't want to stop doing.

Ricky Enger: And Judy, what about you?

Judy Messina: I did not want to give it up either. I definitely wanted to be part of the social piece of it. I kind of look at it as what are your goals? My goal was to be able to go out and golf with other people and have a good time, not having the expectation of being a great golfer, but to enjoy the game of golf. And so, as that progressed, then I had heard about the United States Blind Golf Association and I thought, okay, I contacted them and I realized there's a whole lot of people who are golfing, who are blind. And I did call a couple people to get some ideas a little bit on some of the questions I had. And I joined the organization, but I did not sign up for a tournament yet because I felt I still needed more practice before I jumped into that.

So, I ended up finding locally an adaptive golf team. There were some places around here that have adaptive golf and I thought, there you can build your confidence and that way you're not having people push you from behind because we're all in the same league and we all have something that slows us down. And from there I've kind of tried different things like doing best ball kinds of things so that I can be out on the course and two of us are hitting a ball and we take the better ball on the next hit and everything and we just keep moving along faster. I've done times to make it easier that I didn't keep score at first until I got to the level that I'm at now. But it's like, how can you make it fun and not be stressful and then just enjoy the game?

Ricky Enger: I think that's so well said because often no matter what it is that we are figuring out, we think, "Well, I have to be really good at this in order for it to be a worthwhile pursuit." And we just don't stop to think that isn't true. If you're going out and you are doing something that you enjoy, I feel like you've already won. And if you happen to become good at it, then so much the better, but that doesn't always have to be the focus and it's easy to forget that.

Jan Ober: That's exactly right. It's not about being proficient at it. It's about having fun and maybe next week you have a better score on hole number seven than this week. And so, you just look at any little progress that you can make.

Ricky Enger: Love that. So, what we have talked about so far, I think we've touched on a couple of things. Like Judy, you touched on some lighting things and Jan, you've touched on some things practically in terms of how you play golf, but I know that there are people listening who have been golfers or are struggling with this right now, or maybe they've never picked up a set of clubs and it's something that intrigues them. So, let's get into that logistics piece of it then and talk about some things that you do in order to make this work for you. So, Jan, we'll start with you.

Jan Ober: Well, number one is I can't golf by myself because I couldn't find the ball. Number two is to find a ball that is the color that you can see the best. For me, it's either white or a neon yellow, sometimes a neon orange, but like red balls, blue balls, they just disappear in the grass. I can't see them at all. Number three, my husband has taken my clubs, and he has used duct tape in little strips, and he's put them on the edge of the blade of the iron so that I can see which direction that iron is supposed to be shooting for. He's put a big white dot on the center on the top of my driver, so I know where the middle of my ball should hit. My putter has a big white line going across it so that I can have a better vision of the line that my putter is going to hit and putting a black line on your golf ball so that when you're ready to putt, you can line that up with where the hole is.

The other thing is recently I've had to have people tell me where the hole is on the green from a distance. I don't know if it's towards the back on the left or where it is. And so, I'll have people tell me it's on the left towards the front and it will give me a better idea of what I'm doing. Also, lighting is so important. Sometimes in the bright sunlight, you're making a shadow right on your ball. And so I have to step away and kind of line it up and then step back into my stance to hit the ball once I can see it again, because in the shadow, it's gone. So those are some things that I've done. It's been very helpful to have all these slit marks on my clubs, and I thought it was pretty ingenious for my husband to figure all that out.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, no kidding. And that was something that the two of you figured out just in the process of doing this. So, you didn't really have a resource that you looked to for figuring some of this out. It was just a bit of trial and error and some creative thinking, right?

Jan Ober: Right. Because he'd say, "Well, can't you see how you're aiming your club right now?" And I go, "No, I can't see the bottom of the club. It's in the grass. I can't see it." So that's why he put white duct tape along the edge so that I can see where it is.

Ricky Enger: And for you, Judy, we were talking before we started the recording and we kind of talked about how everyone's approach is going to be different. Everyone's going to have different ways that they do things and things that work for them, things that don't. Are Jan's ideas things that have worked for you, or do you have a totally different method of doing this?

Judy Messina: I have a totally different method because I have less vision, and so there's nothing visual that will help me if we mark something on my club to see lines or anything like that. I can't see my ball on the tee. So first of all, on the golf grips, I try and find grips that at least tactilely help me to know how to hold it so that the club face goes the way it's supposed to. I haven't marked mine with braille, but I'm going to mark my clubs with braille, so I know which club I'm picking up. At this point, obviously I golf with a coach all the time. Most people in the United States playing golf have to have a coach because most of us need a coach. And so that person is lining you up in the direction of where you need to have your ball go.

And my husband happens to be my coach. I've got a couple friends who have coached a little bit as well. My son has coached a bit. So, no matter when you're out there golfing or at a tournament, that person is just as much a part of your team as you are. You win it as a team when you're coaching. And so I spend a tremendous amount of time practicing at the driving range or putting and all that kind of stuff and getting a sense of, okay, if I putt, am I going to be putting or even when I do a chip shot, am I going to go from my ankle and then in, or am I going to go further up to my knee or that kind of stuff just to get a sense of how far back I have to come with my club and also the tempo of that. And then we'll practice.

When I first started putting, we'd start at three feet out and then we'd keep moving out and out and out on the putting range to do all that. Like I say, you can't expect to get it all figured out. Luckily, I always say I can have fun. I can't get upset because I'm not good enough to get upset at my team, but I am good enough to have a good time. Even if I have a bad day of golf, I can at least enjoy the people I'm with. I've got a friend here who is totally blind and on the board for the United States Blind Golf Association in Minnesota. And we will meet, about 90 miles, we'll each go each way, meet halfway with our coaches and we'll golf from time to time just to get the practice in.

But it's been so much fun to meet so many people. I love just being with people and being out on those beautiful courses.

Ricky Enger: And it sounds like for both of you, there haven’t been the people who are going to be unkind to me, or people are going to be impatient with me. Maybe that has come up, but just listening to your stories, it seems that by and large people have been really kind and helpful and invested in you having a good time as well, right?

Jan Ober: That is exactly right. People are willing to help. They're happy to help. It seems this place where we live, we play cornhole and my husband and I won the cornhole tournament last week because I can see the black hole on the whiteboard. So a lot of it is, you've done it a while, you kind of know how to swing, but if you were a brand new person, I would just find somebody to help you learn, either a pro or a friend who golfs and get some easy lessons going and then find a place where they're not intimidating. I wouldn't want to be in a club where they were really proficient, and everybody was out to beat everybody else. We don't care here. That's one of the things we say. We don't care what your score is. We're out here to have fun and be together and get some vitamin D. So yeah.

Judy Messina: I would say the first hole is always concerning for everybody. It's uncomfortable if you're sighted or not. Nobody likes starting on the first hole. But if a blind golfer hasn't had enough experience ahead of time practicing, it can slow up the golf course. And sometimes people will say something about that. So, I would say you want to make sure you've had a chance before your first time out on the course. You don't want to be out there first learning it on the course. And otherwise, like I say, if you did a best ball or if you think you're slowing things up, then skip a hole in the beginning stages. But otherwise, no, people in general, if they know, they're usually very kind about it. And I will also check and see when is the slower time of the day to get on a course?

Ricky Enger: That's a great idea. Yeah. If you are in a situation where you don't know who else is on the course. So, if you're not in a golfing community like Jan, where the vibe there is, "Hey, we're all in it to have fun." If you are uncertain about that, then doing those little things like, "Hey, when's it slow?" Or making sure you're practicing ahead of time makes a lot of sense.

Jan Ober: Oh, we have a time at two o'clock in the summer that if you are a beginning golfer or we call it a casual golfer, maybe you're just learning or you know that you're going to slow people up, then you go out at two o'clock with people like you and nobody else is going to play for a while. So, nobody's pushing you from behind.

Judy Messina: That's ideal. Yeah. The other thing too is having a routine. I mean, knowing what your routine is when you get up to that tee and so forth. I use a tee that is the same size that goes into the ground, the same height every time. But I always, before I'll even put a ball on that tee, I hit the tee with my club so I can get a sense of where that club is going to hit when I bring it down. I do the same thing and do a practice shot on the ground each time too, because I want to know, am I going to come through clean or not?

Ricky Enger: Wow. This is all really incredible information. And I know it's going to be helpful for people who have golfed before and can put some of these ideas into practice. And I also think it's very encouraging for people who haven't golfed before and are thinking about it. I always looked forward to learning golf when I retired or this was something I was going to spend time doing with my kids or whatever it is. And the fact that it is possible to do that is, again, so encouraging and just hearing how much the two of you enjoy it is great. Are there any final things that we didn't mention whether it is a resource or an approach or anything about adjustment and doing things a little differently, anything that you want people listening to know? Jan, we'll start with you.

Jan Ober: Well, I was thinking about when I first started to play, I was not a golfer. My husband was the golfer in our family, but someone approached me at church one day and said, "Hey, would you like to start playing golf with us?" We play every Thursday and then afterwards we go out to lunch. I think she had me at lunch right there. And it was always, for me, it was like, "I don't want to spend the money." I thought golf was kind of expensive and I'd rather buy a new pair of shoes or something with that. But she said, "Oh no, we have coupons. We have coupons and it's a short course. It's only $9. And then we go to lunch." I'm like, "Okay, I'll do it." And it was like every Thursday we would have this time, and my husband gave me some lessons, got some clubs. It's important to have clubs that fit you right and they're not too short or too long, so got some inexpensive clubs.

And I think if somebody isn't a golfer or they're looking at it in the future, be that initiator, like the woman that came up to me, I wasn't a golfer, but she just initiated it. And maybe you could be the initiator for someone else. We have women here at our course that are well into their 80s that are playing all the time. The man across the street is 95. He plays every day. So, it's something you can continue to do well into your 70s and 80s or even 90s.

Ricky Enger: Excellent. And Judy, how about you?

Judy Messina: Well, I would say first of all, with the social media and stuff that we have out there, there are a number of YouTube on blind golf. And so, if anybody's wondering, you can pull up a number of things that give suggestions on how people do it or how coaches coach. I think that would be an excellent resource. United States Blind Golf Association's a great resource. I knew I had my goal. My one dream is one day to do a tournament. I never thought I'd do it. And it was thanks to my friend here, Kurt, who called me one Sunday. He says, "You've been signed up for United States Bland Golf, but you haven't done a tournament." Well, for some reason he caught me in a weak moment or something. And so, I did a tournament that he was hosting, and it was so much fun.

I did another one that he had. I ended up being guiding eyes for a couple of their tournaments. And then last year I ended up helping, we had the nationals here in Minnesota. So, if it's a dream, go after it and whatever it is, if it's golf or whatever, just pursue it and do what it takes to have a good time. United States Blind Golf has one comment. They always say, you don't have to see it to tee it.

Ricky Enger: Well, there you go. Well, this has been amazing. I've learned about golf and I've loved hearing both your stories and again, your enthusiasm for doing this, just getting out there and having a good time. I appreciate both of you for stopping by, sharing all of your tips and tricks, and it's been so much fun. Thank you again.

Jan Ober: Thank you, Ricky. It's been fun to do this with you.

Judy Messina: Yeah, what a privilege. Thank you so much.

Ricky Enger: Got something to say? Share your thoughts about this episode of Hadley Presents or make suggestions for future episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at [email protected]. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T at HadleyHelps.org or leave us a message at 847-784-2870. Thanks for listening.