Enterprising golf fan reinvents his favourite sport

Being told to give up a favourite sport might seem like the end of the road for most people, but not so for one enterprising retiree. Seventy-three year-old Rex Hebley has been a keen golfer most of his life but multiple back surgeries meant he had to give up the game he loved.

‘‘People like myself are not meant to be playing games of golf.’’

But Hebley came up with a way around that and has recreated golf through his game Putt It.

When he first moved to Metlifecare Ka¯ piti Village in Paraparaumu, he said there was a huge number of activities.

‘‘We said ‘this is amazing, what can be missing?’.’’

But eventually it dawned on Hebley – the village needed a putting green. While he could no longer golf, putting golf balls was still allowed and the bowling green in the village had been drawing his eye.

‘‘I kept seeing this lovely piece of green here and thought ‘why couldn’t we putt on it?’,’’ he said.

His first challenge though was that regular bowlers and management probably wouldn’t be too pleased with him if he dug holes on the bowling green.

So the idea for Putt It was born. Hebley started by creating small wooden blocks with numbers on top to represent the different holes. Players can scatter them across the bowling green however they please.

When Hebley debuted the game late last year, more than a dozen village residents stopped by to give it a go but the golfers came up against the next problem.

In one of the first games four or five white golf balls were clustered around a single block and no one could quite distinguish which one was their’s.

So Hebley added coloured balls, each handpainted with different designs from buzzy bees to flowers.

The ones with daisy designs were easy favourites among the players.

Next up on the list was painting the putting clubs, designing small scorecards people could use and making a handy little basket to keep everything in.

A few residents play regularly, every Wednesday, but it’s not just the seniors getting on board with Putt It.

The game was proving popular with visiting grandkids, he said.

‘‘The thing we really want to have is people just coming any other time rather than a fixed time. People are coming out here when their grandkids come to stay. So anybody can play it.’’

‘‘I kept seeing this lovely piece of green here and thought ‘why couldn’t we putt on it?’ ’’ Rex Hebley

ROSS GIBLIN/STUFF Rex Hebley has created his own version of golf, called Putt It, after multiple back surgeries prevented him playing.