Camaraderie teed up at blind golf championship
Participants get the royal treatment at King’s Forest
You can tell they’ve used this one before.
“He likes to say that by the end of a tournament he’s done a thousand knee bends,” Joe Furbur of Winnipeg, who has been without functional sight for nearly a decade, laughs about his “coach” Gordon Melnyk.
“Every shot, I’m down,” Melnyk shoots back. “My knees are growing dandelions.”
The two were among 31 golfers and their coaches — friends, generally, who help the blind golfers line up swings and putts and track ball flight — at the Canadian Open Blind Championship, which concluded Wednesday at King’s Forest.
Furbur and Melnyk, who met when they were teenagers working at Safeway, are former teachers who like to tell stories of their four years as a team in blind golf. So do a lot of the other athletes who played tournament rounds Tuesday and
Wednesday, and on Thursday will play in a memorial tournament at Chedoke in honour of Hamilton legend Claude Pattemore, a blind golfer who’s in the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.
They’re in it not only for the competition, but the camaraderie.
“It’s great because you feel not only that you’re competing for something, but that you’re included,” says 48-year-old Rick Kush of Guelph, who had 20-20 vision when he was 16, but three months later had only 10 per cent of his eyesight because of a virus. He has since been diagnosed with rare Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy.
“It’s inclusivity, to be around people who are similar to you, in terms of your abilities and level of competition. And there are a lot of social aspects to it, which is nice.”
This was the 20th Canadian Open, but first in Hamilton, although the Ontario Visually Impaired Golfers Association, this year’s Canadian Open hosts, plan to stage a scramble at Chedoke every year in Pattemore’s memory.
There are three categories in blind tournament golf, rated according to severity: Furbur is a B-1 (for total blindness); Kush is a B-2 (for vision under five per cent) and Alberta’s Kiefer Jones, who had the lowest gross score by far at 82-76 for two rounds, is a B-3 (vision under 10 per cent).
Coaches will help tee up the ball, if needed, will position the club head behind the ball, and shift the angle of the head to match the shot required. Some coaches will place another club on the ground so the golfer can position his or her toes against it for proper direction.
Walking from the cart to the ball and back, and on the greens, the golfer plants his hands on the shoulder of the coach, who acts as a guide while the golfer uses a club like a cane, swishing it in front of him to detect any impediments.
On the greens, the coach and golfer pace out the distance to the hole and the golfer uses the walk to gauge the slope. Visual instructions are also often used.
“In my backyard, there’s a space I’ve walked many times that’s 22 feet,” Furbur says. “So if it’s a 22foot putt, I try to visualize that spot. Most of time, we walk 20 feet on the green and I’ll say, ‘What do you think putt at 10 or putt at 17?’ He reads it and I try to get the weight right.”
Furbur has a degenerative eye disease as do his brother Darcy, and uncle John Anderson, both of whom were in the tournament.
He shot in the low 80s when he was sighted, and Darcy had been a scratch golfer.
At King’s Forest, one of the toughest municipal courses in the country, Joe Furbur shot 145 in his opening round, but his net score was 93.
Glenn Babcock of Thornhill, who with his wife Lois run the OVIPA, says Hamilton has always been a good place for blind golfers, whose coaches play for free on municipal courses.
Many golfers said they’ve been “treated like royalty here.”
Kush and Melynk laugh about a couple of incidents during tournaments, including once when Melnyk parked the cart near a tree and didn’t look up, then heard Kush walk right into the tree.
“Another time, I veered away for a few feet at a tournament in Arizona and I heard, ‘Gord!’, and his hand was stuck to a cactus, with the needles coming right through it.”
And they’ve recounted that one before too.