(upbeat music)
Welcome to Hadley Presents.
I'm your host, Ricky Enger,
inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, we discuss enjoying
the game of golf with little or no vision.
And joining us are Hadley's Director
of Community, Mark Arneson,
interviewing champion blind golfer, Chad NeSmith.
Welcome to the show, both of you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks Ricky.
So great to have you both.
Now, Marc, we'll start with you
because people already know you,
but for those who don't, just give a brief intro
and talk about who you are and what you do at Hadley.
So, as you mentioned,
my title is director of community,
but really what I get to do is just meet amazing
and fascinating people, hear their stories,
hear some of their challenges,
kind of bring that back to Hadley
and find out if there's ways that we can help.
And once we figure out something that
we think is helpful, part of my other job is
to go tell the whole world about it.
And Chad, how about you?
I'm so looking forward to hearing
more about your story.
And before we jump into that,
how about just a brief intro.
I introduced you as a blind champion golfer,
which is really, really cool.
So tell us a bit about yourself.
Well, my name again is,
Chad NeSmith, I'm 53 years old.
I was raised in a small rural part of Alabama,
Coleman, Alabama, graduated in 1986 from high school
and I earned two masters and a doctorate
by the time I was 26 from The University
of Alabama in psychology and counselor education.
And worked with my wife, who also has her doctorate.
We've been married 27 years.
So we ran a center for 20 years
for children with special needs.
After that, we moved to Nashville to work
with a healthcare company now.
And that's what we're doing.
Fantastic.
I'm looking forward to learning a bit more
about golf and I know that there are other
people who are wanting to get back
into the swing of things when it comes to golf.
And that's the last word play I'm gonna do.
So no worries that I'm gonna come up
with more puns and to keep that from happening,
I think I'm gonna just turn it over to Marc
who has a really great list of questions for Chad.
Chad, I have been so excited
just about this time that we get to spend together
and just hearing your story.
And I'd love to just hear, you know,
a little bit about your journey, you know,
your journey with vision loss
and what that's been like for you?
Looking back on it,
I was pretty much considered to be,
by the time I hit 11 or 12,
one of the star athletes in Alabama,
major sports, football, basketball, baseball,
everything seemed to be clicking for me athletically.
And saw myself doing is going, you know,
playing college football was what I was hoping
to do as quarterback because I wanted to be,
you know, in the NFL and play NFL football.
If not, I wanted to coach college or NFL football.
That was going great until about age 12 or 13.
I took a hit during a football game
that pretty much knocked me unconscious.
Everybody was like, "How did you not see him?
He was right in front of you.
I mean, you were running right at him full speed.
How did you not see him?"
And of course I thought, "Well, that's not true.
I got blindsided or something."
Well, back then, I don't know if, you know,
some of our listeners may remember the eight millimeter.
That's what we had back then to review stuff.
And you know, they showed it to me
and I couldn't believe it.
I mean, the guy was just sitting there squatting,
waiting to make a tackle.
And I mean, he made a legal hit,
but he was squatted down.
And what I didn't know at the time,
I was already lost a lot of my peripheral vision.
So when I'm looking straight ahead thinking,
I've got a touchdown, you know, 30 yards away,
he was just under the bottom of my peripheral vision
and just unloaded a great hit that
I was not prepared for.
And I mean, it just snapped
my head back and I was out.
At that time, nobody had a clue, you know,
just, okay, maybe he needs contacts,
and that was just starting contacts back then,
they didn't even have soft contacts,
they had the hard.
We didn't have any specialists where I was growing up.
So I was sent to Birmingham, Alabama.
They didn't know what was going on.
So I ended up going to Houston, Texas,
and that's where they had at that time,
in the 80s, retinitis retinal specialist.
And I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa
and they just flat out told me that, you know,
I was gonna be going blind
and it was gonna be a slow process.
I wouldn't wake up one morning and be blind,
but every year it would get worse and worse.
And it would always close in.
So I'd have central vision
and the outside would just keep coming in,
like, you know, you're looking down the tube
of a cardboard paper towel holder,
that tunnel would get more and more narrow
and eventually, it would just completely
close all together.
And of course, being 13, I was like,
"Well, if I don't talk about it,
if I don't acknowledge it, then it doesn't exist."
So they couldn't stop me from playing football
at the time 'cause my eyesight was still good enough.
But the fear internally that
I didn't acknowledge it then, like I said,
I'm 13, gonna live forever.
But looking back on it, I was in fear
every time I was on the football field
that I was gonna take another hit like that.
It became obvious that it was a part of me,
but I still wouldn't talk about it.
A year later, they wouldn't sign for me to play.
The docs wouldn't sign for me to medically
play football or baseball anymore.
It was looking back on it internally
again, for me it was a relief.
But I didn't act like that.
I mean, I was angry, I was depressed,
a lot of crying spells at night.
I'd come to church every Sunday with my family
and at this point I just told God,
"Why did you do this?"
But the thing I look back on though is that,
I had so many great friends that didn't party
because I was a prime candidate for drugs and alcohol.
If somebody would've got me at 14, 15
and said, "Hey, let's go to the lake,
you know, sipping the beers around the campfire."
I mean, I'm telling you, I would've tried anything
to feel better and just to get away from the pain.
But I had friends who, you know,
when we got together on Friday, Saturday nights,
it was board games, it was watching movies,
it was, you know, just hanging out
and you know, I owe them so much
and they're still great friends of mine today.
Sorry about that.
So I finally lost all my sight when I was
about 27, but that time from 14 to 18,
it was pretty devastating.
Thank you for sharing, Chad.
I appreciate just your openness and your vulnerability.
I can't imagine what a difficult time that was for you.
So when did you learn pick up golf,
and when did that start?
And how did you get involved in that?
The biggest thing was,
when I was 27, I met my wife and we were married
six months after we started dating.
And we've been now together almost 27 years.
She played tennis and was a great tennis player.
And I could still see to go hit balls
with her a little bit, I could like put her
at the net, I could get a basket of balls
and just, you know, hit some lobs for it and stuff.
If she hit it back, I couldn't keep up
with it enough to hit it back to her again.
So, you know, tried that.
But then it got to the time I reached 30, 32,
I mean, there just really wasn't, you know,
anything I could do athletically.
I was lifting weights, you know, I wasn't gonna
become a competitive bodybuilder or anything.
So it was like, you know, this is okay.
When I got to be about 37, 36, my wife came
in and she said, "Look, I love you,
but I got things I wanna do on the weekends
and I'm tired of being your entertainment
coordinator, so you gotta find something
to do and get outta the house."
I say, "Well, what do you want me to do?"
I say, "Look, a lot of my friends go hunting,
but they've already told me they're not gonna
let me sit in a blind with a gun and you know,
shoot at movement that I hear."
So you know, they're not gonna allow
that to happen at all.
So I don't wanna go fishing because I don't
wanna water moccasin to jump in a boat.
So she said, "You're gonna learn to play golf."
And I said, "I'm gonna learn to do what?"
My wife said, "You're gonna learn to play golf."
And I said, "Okay, I'll tell you what,
I'll give it one hour with somebody
at the public golf course there in Tuscaloosa.
And if they can teach me in one hour,
one of the instructors that I got a chance
to hit this ball, then I'll do it."
And about 30 minutes into it,
I hit a little pitching wave with a bump and run.
That's all he wanted me to do was
those chip shots and stuff.
And I hit it, I mean, I didn't even feel
the ball come off the club.
And I was like, "Oh, that's what it feels like."
He goes, "That's what it feels like."
And from then on, I was hooked.
You know, I played and hit balls.
My wife was the one that would take me
to the driving range and then she started playing.
About three or four years into it, we found out
that you could play blind golf tournaments.
So then I said, "Okay, the next two years,
I'm gonna work as hard as I can now."
I mean, I was working hard to play
on the weekends with friends that could see,
but now that I said, "I gotta way to compete
and I wanna see how good I can be."
That's when we started really getting after it
and really getting some great instruction,
getting better players to help me go practice.
Because my wife again, you know, she got to a point
where she goes, "Look, when they're talking about
how to hit a fade and set up to hit a draw."
And she said, "I don't know what all this is."
So, you know, at that time got volunteers
and people to work with me
and that became something I wanted to do.
I wanted to get to where, see how good I could be.
You've gotten very good.
How good you can be is very good apparently.
Chad, I wanna go back just a little bit.
So I think you mentioned your friends
that go hunting and they've invited you along
with and some of the buddies that
you're playing golf with now.
Are those some of the same friends that you had
in high school when you kind of learned
that you were no longer able to play football?
Yes, three of the four
had started playing golf in their 20s.
Had asked me, "You wanna go out
and you can put on the greens and stuff
or whatever and go out and just ride with us?"
And I was like, "No, I don't think so."
But then when I did the chipping thing
and I called and I said,
"Hey, I'm starting to play golf."
And they were like, "Oh man."
And you know, then when I played my first round
with 'em six months later where I felt like,
you know, I could hit a few shots,
pick up a ball after I'd hit five or six,
I wouldn't hold up the whole course.
And all of a sudden, it became a passion for me.
I found joy in doing it and I couldn't wait
to do it again, I wanted to learn about the game.
I wanted to learn about club selection and why
you wanted to learn about the physics of golf.
But yes, three of the four people
that were my best friends in high school,
we still play golf today.
You know, I've heard
from people in similar situations
who have said, it is really kind of tough
to talk to your friends, to talk to their friends,
you know, about their vision loss.
And even times when you felt like, you know,
you weren't able to continue to do
same things that you would do with your friends
'cause they became more challenging.
Was that ever something you experienced with those guys?
Yeah, that's a great question.
You know, my four friends and me, so five of us
and being, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old,
talking about feelings was really not
anything you wanted to talk about.
But like, we'd get together and we'd play,
you know, poker, we'd all put in $10
and play some kind of poker tournament.
But they saw as I started getting to where
I couldn't even read my cards that I had
in my hand and we showed up one night to play poker
and Scott, who's still one of my best friends
of all the group there, he had big print cards,
without even asking, we were playing that next night
with those large print cards where I could see it better.
Then as we continued to play, my wife,
we were having everybody over to play cards
when I was 27 or 28 and I had braille cards.
My wife had ordered them, they looked like regular cards
for everybody else, but the braille is in the corners.
And I was like, "Wow, okay, I can still play poker
and I don't need somebody sitting beside me
to tell you what my cards are."
So again, we didn't talk about it much,
my friends and I, 'cause again, we're teenage boys,
but they knew and they still, you know,
never said anything about coming to pick me up.
They never said, "Hey, you owe us gas money."
I had said, "Well, if y'all want me to go,"
it was never had to be discussed.
That's again why, you know, I had some great friends
and they were then and they still are now.
I know that you spend some
time helping people learn golf as well,
and I think that you and your wife
have an organization where
you're helping those with the visual impairment,
learn golf, is that right, Chad?
What happened was,
I was very fortunate when I started and I told
you I found out about there were blind golf
tournaments around the world.
I qualified for the 2016 nationals.
I had to shoot qualifying scores at other tournaments.
In 2016, my first blind golf tournament,
I won that one.
And then I repeated in 2017 and 2018
and also, won the Irish Open and I won,
the Guiding Eyes Classic in New York twice.
The way we got into helping others is after 2016
and winning that, you know, it was all about,
I did it, I did it, I did it, I did it.
I knew I could do it with hard work,
I did it, I did it, I did it.
The feeling lasted a long time, lasted for months.
You know, I just felt like I was on cloud nine,
you know, every time I went to the golf course,
people would say, "Way to go doc, way to go,
you know, you national champ," blah, blah.
And it was just, it was all about me.
I guess that was making up for what I thought
I got cheated in my opinion, you know,
from when I was a teenager, not being able
to reach that pinnacle in the sports I wanted to.
And after winning it in 2017 though,
that feeling lasted about a week.
And I told my wife, I said, "I can't believe
this is over, I don't feel happy anymore."
And you know, my wife's very spiritual,
always has been, as she said,
"It's because you didn't do it for the right reason."
And I said, "What are you talking about?"
Because when it comes to the two of us,
I'm not the brightest one of the two.
She's definitely smarter than I am.
She said, "Last year, you talked about winning it
and every time it was I."
She said, "You had a coach that was with you
all year helping you that went to it voluntarily.
You didn't say, "We want it," you said,
"I want it," without your coach setting you up
behind the ball, like all the other blind golfers."
I said, "You couldn't hit a shot
and you just kept saying, "I want it, I want it."
And she goes, "Also, you didn't do anything
with it afterwards, you didn't help anybody else.
You didn't improve anybody else's life."
And she goes, "Now, if you want it in 2017,
you don't have anything else to hang your hat on."
And she said, "We need to do something
to make a change."
And so she and I sat down along with my parents
and my mom and stepdad and we said,
"You know, what would that be?"
And they said, "Well, wouldn't you loved
to have had a golf club in your hand
at age 14 when you couldn't play the other sports?"
And I said, "Oh God, yes, I'd loved to have had one."
And they said, "Well, why don't we
do that for kids now?"
We sat down and set up a 501(c)(3),
it's called, AVID, A Vision in Darkness.
Every state has a blind school, state funded.
And I called here's one for Tennessee,
is in Nashville.
I called the Tennessee School for the Blind
and said, "I'd like to help with your golf team."
And they said, "We don't have a golf team."
And I said, "You gotta be kidding me."
You know, because to me it's like
the most obvious sport for visually impaired
and blind people to play because the ball
doesn't move, the target doesn't move,
you don't have to run or jump.
I mean, it just seems so obvious
that they would've had golf.
I mean, this is how naive I was,
even though I was blind.
We started the first golf team in the United States.
No other state school has golf
as a golf team and a golf practice.
So we started the first golf team,
blind golf team, and we got up to 14 kids,
right before AVID that were between
the ages of eight and 16.
These kids were hitting the ball.
It's not just a clinic we would do,
we got 'em clubs, we got golf shirts that matched.
We made it a practice on Monday,
Wednesday afternoons after school.
Our goal is to add one a year,
starting this year as we want to add
a different state blind school, a golf team,
and teach 'em how to get it started.
I'd like to see, in five years,
I'd like to see Tennessee, Georgia, Florida,
South Carolina, North Carolina,
all the kids get together in a central location
and play against each other in a golf tournament,
for the first one that's ever been done.
It's now not me winning it,
it's about me doing well to have a platform.
But it's like now then, you know,
if I don't win, it's okay
because these kids don't care.
But it gives me a purpose of,
I wanna keep trying to be better.
But it's more like life lessons now for the kids.
Golf is important, but the lessons
you learn from any sport, but especially golf,
you know, that's what we're trying to accomplish.
Give confidence.
You don't have to compete in tournaments.
That's not what it is, but it's about patience.
It's about respect, respecting the game.
It's a tough sport, but we're trying
to teach all the right aspects and life skills
that go along with golf to the kids as well.
So Chad, have you spent time with,
I mean, I know that there's, you know,
a lot of folks out there who
are new to vision loss and you know,
maybe similar to you when you were
in high school, felt like there, you know,
were things they could no longer do.
They kind of had to give up some different things.
And I imagine golf might be that for many people.
Have you spent any time with those
who later in life enjoyed golf,
but now, with their vision loss have had
a challenge being able to do that?
That's what we've actually
are changing this year, we're adding veterans
and any other adults to the list
who have lost their vision or losing their vision
and have not played golf.
They're invited and we're gonna get...
And again, when I say this, we do it at
no expense to them.
It's not because my wife and I are wealthy,
but we've had great donations from people locally.
And so we get 'em the clubs,
we get 'em everything that they need.
But yes, we're also trying to reach out
to the optometrists and ophthalmologists
and stuff in the area.
And what we wanna do is people that used
to play 10 years ago, but then they had
something cataract surgery that went bad
and they couldn't follow their own golf ball
anymore, so they quit.
You know, they can maybe still even see
the ball sitting on the ground
that as soon as they hit it, they can't follow it,
so they just quit.
And there's just no reason for that.
I mean, there are coaches out there,
people that want to do this.
There's even been times that, you know,
I've actually hired a college student
who plays on the college golf team here locally
and say, "Hey, you know, I'll pay 10 bucks an hour.
I wanna go out and hit balls for five hours."
And they're like, "You're gonna pay me to go hit ball?"
So, you know, I'll hit 10 balls, they'll hit 10,
you know, I'll hit 20, they hit 20
and they get paid 10 bucks an hour
when I wanna have a real heavy practice day.
So, you know, there's a way to do it depending
on what you want, is you wanna just get
practice and hit some balls.
You wanna compete in tournaments, do you just
wanna play on the Saturdays with your buddies?
There's ways to get people to coach you
and that's what we call 'em, are coaches,
not caddies, because caddies on television,
they just get the player, you know,
the yardage and stuff like that.
Keep the clubs clean, carry the bag.
Well, we call 'em, coaches, not because
they're all PGA teaching professionals,
but they gotta get us to the cart safely.
That's the number one, get us to the cart,
get us to the ball, get us up to the tee box,
get us around water hazards and bunkers
and don't let us step on rakes and sprinkler heads.
The number one thing in blind golf
is that if you finish the round and you've
not had any blood drawn, you've had a good day.
You know, and then the score is just,
that's just a second thing what your score was.
But the coaches have so much on them
that they have to do.
And that's why we call 'em, coaches
instead of caddies.
On the blind golf tour, it's all amateur,
we don't make any money for winning, it's trophies
and you know, the thrill of competition.
But some, it's their wives are coaches,
some, it's their sons, some, it's their fathers.
Some have PJ teaching professionals,
coaches can be anybody.
And so anybody that wants to play this game
or has played this game, there's no reason
why we can't help you get to where
you need to go to play the game.
So tell me about your golf game.
Like what's the best round you've ever shot?
My best tournament round is 81.
When I say tournament round,
the thing I like to tell folks, because when
they hear about blind golf, they're thinking,
"Okay, y'all play it differently
than the guys we watch on television."
And the answer is, there's only two rule
differences with two rules that are different.
Number one, we can ground the club in the bunker.
So in other words, the PGA guys and the college
players, when you get in the sand trap,
you can't put your club behind the ball
and touch the sand, you have to hover it.
Well, if we don't know where the ground is,
we don't stand a chance to returning the club
'cause that's what we learn.
We learn where the ball is in relation
to our feet and where the ground is.
And so we get to ground the club in the bunker,
no practice wings, but we get to at least,
set the club down behind the ball.
And the only other rule change that's different
from everybody else that plays it
by the rules of golf is that when our coaches
line the club up and hold the club behind
the ball, they take two steps back.
So they're staying in the straight line with me,
the line I wanna hit it on, and the target
we're trying to hit to.
In real golf, the coach can't be in that line.
They have to get out from behind you,
but they have to stay behind us 'cause like,
as they step back a couple of steps
and say, "All right, go ahead and swing
and hit it," the club could have moved a little bit
to the heel, club could have moved to the toe.
My feet could be aimed too far to the right
and that's where the ball's gonna go.
So they can see that, but if they can't
stay behind us, they won't be able to see
that and stop us and reset us.
So other than that, we play by the exact same rules.
No mulligans, we have to put everything in the hole.
There's no gimmes.
The pros play anywhere from
6,800 to about 7,200 yards.
Just to give you a reference,
we play about 6,100 to 6,200 yards.
I gotta ask, have you ever
hit a hole in one?
I have been so close,
but no, I've had so many chances where
we thought it was going in or we get up there
and it's six inches or a foot, but not yet.
But I sure am hoping, quick funny story.
Coach Moody was the women's basketball coach
at The University of Alabama back when I was
playing early, but I hadn't started playing
tournament golf yet.
I was still just trying to learn to play.
And we had a scramble for charity
for The University of Alabama and they had
some of the coaches out there on the tees
with us, you know, just saying, "Hi, coach Moody,
thanks for coming out," that kind of thing.
I was on a par three and they said,
"Okay doc, if you, you know,
make a hole in one here on this 155 yards,
you win this truck."
And they said, "That's gonna be funny
watching you drive this outta here."
And I said, "Yeah, that'd be hilarious."
You know, blind guy driving a big old Ford F-150.
So anyway, I hit the shot and everybody says,
"Dear Lord, that may be going in,"
the flag was over a ridge on the back level.
And so we couldn't see the bottom foot of the flag
and the ball never reappeared.
And they had a spotter up at the green
who was off to the side and he went
and motioned finger down like it went in.
So we started jumping around the tee box
and everything, coach Moody had
forgot that I couldn't see.
He came running in to gimme a high five
and I was giving it those tiger fist pump
and caught him right under the chin
and knocked him unconscious.
So I mean, I hit him perfect,
right on the jaw with an upper cut.
And so he was knocked out and then,
I found out the ball wasn't in the hole,
it was on the other side, so the spotter
couldn't see it, it didn't go in,
it was three inches.
So I didn't win the truck.
Coach Moody had to go to the ER, you know,
I was the one that knocked him unconscious.
So it was eventful.
Okay, Chad, so
amazing things that you and your wife
are doing in the world of golf.
If somebody wanted to, like, what advice would
you give to somebody who, again, maybe new
to vision loss is maybe thinking about the idea
of getting back into this,
never thought maybe it was possible.
What kind of advice would you give 'em?
I would tell you the first thing is,
that you just gotta believe that you wanna do it.
I mean, 'cause if you're not gonna do it
for the right reason, meaning that you wanna
have something that you can get outside,
something you can do and have camaraderie
with some folks, you don't even need to try.
I mean, and that's with anything, not just golf,
but golf is the most difficult sport I've ever played.
The room for error is so minute,
a couple of millimeters makes a difference
in a ball going straight or in the water.
And you have to have patience
and you gotta really have a passion
and enjoy what you're doing.
And so if you're ready for that
and you wanna try something difficult
and you understand it's gonna be difficult,
and that's for a sighted person,
it's gonna be difficult, and for a blind person,
it's gonna be just as difficult.
And there's some things that are harder
because you gotta have somebody with you.
You can't go out and just hit a bucket of balls
by yourself, but the thing I would tell people
to do is, check out the United States Blind Golf
Association website, that's usbga.org.
We have all kind of clinics listed across the country.
I'm the vice president of the USBGA.
We've got all kind of stuff there on the website,
clinics and videos and people you can
contact in your area.
The other option is AVID, go to avid.gov,
A-V-I-D.gov and that's the one that Pat
and I, that's our website for kids.
But like I said, we're expanding that now to adults.
We still can get you in contact with people,
we can get you golf clubs, if you can't afford those.
We can get you set up with a teacher
who can help you as a beginner.
If you were an advanced player, but you haven't
played in 10 years, then we'll get somebody
to check you out and see where you're at
in terms of your game and then, how much
instruction you need to get back to it.
We'll set you up with coaches
and you can interview the coaches,
see if you like 'em.
Just a lot of options we can give you.
So I would say, the usbga.org
is the national website.
And then our website, if you wanna check
it out is, avid.gov, and either one
of those websites will be a great starting point.
That's excellent.
Yeah, we'll have both of those things
in our show notes for those of you who
are listening and didn't manage to write
it down, no worries, it's all on the website,
along with this episode.
Any other final thoughts that you'd
like to leave our listeners with
before we wrap it up?
The thing that turned my life
around about golf and getting off the couch
and beat the depression, because there's a lot
of people that are losing their sight
or have lost their sight, and the number one
thing they're dealing with is depression.
Because again, if you're born blind,
you don't know anything else, but if you've been
able to see and been able to drive
and been able to snow ski and been able to go out
and on your own, go hunting or work your farm
and then you lose your eyesight
where you can't do those things,
I mean, it's devastating.
Make sure you keep searching for, you know,
a way to come to peace with what's happening.
It may be talking to somebody, it may be talking
to your spouse, it may be talking to a parent,
it may be talking to your pastor at church.
It may be going to something and somebody
says something and you hear something.
So don't stay on the couch.
You know, get out, do things,
you know, try different things.
Find what gives you joy,
and you can beat depression, you can beat this.
So would I take my eyesight back today?
The answer's, yes.
I mean, everybody says,
"Oh, you wouldn't take your sight back."
"Well, yeah, I would."
It's just not gonna keep me from living my life
anymore since, if I don't have it.
So I just thought I'd just tell
encourage everybody, you gotta keep trying.
You can't give up.
Giving up is, it's the easy thing to do.
Absolutely, I love that.
Thank you so much for sharing your story
and just sharing your journey with us.
Thank you very much for having me.
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Thanks for listening.
(gentle music)