Wounded ex-Warrior changes weapons
Craig Kieswetter takes on pro golf challenge after horrific cricket injury
CRAIG Kieswetter has just hit his golf ball further than some of us go on holiday. With a glorious, elegant swing, he has dispatched it from the first tee at Wisley Golf Club somewhere towards Guildford. After a lengthy hike up the fairway, however, the ball is not where he expected.
“That’s my problem,” he said. “As soon as I hit the ball, I’m not quite sure where it has gone.
“Mind you, they tell me Jack Nicklaus had an issue with depth perception. So, I don’t think it’s that big a drawback.”
Watching Kieswetter – or to give him the full title by which he is invariably called these days “Former England Cricketer Turned Golfer Craig Kieswetter” – it would be a foolish punter who bet against him fulfilling his ambition of gaining a place on the European Tour within a year.
The way the South Africa-born former Warriors keeper drives, chips and putts, he looks a golfer of natural accomplishment.
The only issue is the one of not knowing precisely where his golf ball has landed.
Although, given what he has experienced in the past couple of years, that seems a minor inconvenience.
Two summers ago, batting for Somerset, the then wicketkeeper-batsman misjudged a bouncer.
The ball hammered thought the grille on his helmet, laying waste to his face; his nose was broken, his right eye socket smashed to pieces.
“I looked like a train wreck,” he recalls. “But I was still quite young, brash, bullish. My first thought was: ‘I’m going to get back’.”
On the outside, there was no suggestion he could not. His face was rebuilt with metal implants, and the only visible remnant of his accident is a slight red mark across his cheekbone.
He had declared himself fit to return to cricket just a few weeks after it happened.
It was while playing in a Twenty20 game in South Africa that he realised all was not well.
“I played a day-night game and when we fielded in daylight, everything was fine.
“Then we batted under the lights and I just could not pick up the white ball in the glare.
“I was out there batting and had absolutely no perception of where it was. I was missing it by, like, a foot. That wasn’t right.”
The truth was, the sight in his right eye had been irrevocably damaged.
And while he tried to barrel on for a few months, he quickly came to accept his time in the game he loved was limited.
“I’d always been a cavalier sort of player, lived and died by the sword,” he says.
“What I probably hadn’t realised was that I was inevitably going to get tested with the short ball.
“The truth was, I was struggling to pick up a ball bowled at my head at 90mph [140km/h].
“That alters the way you play. It changes your belief. I realised I couldn’t be the player I wanted to be.” And what a player he had been. He had come to England to attend sixth form at Millfield School.
While there, he had been offered the chance to turn professional by Somerset.
Within three years, thanks to his mother hailing from Scotland, he was playing for England.
In the World Twenty20 final in 2010, he was named man of the match.
His future seemed secure. Then came that bouncer.
“I’d always said I only wanted to play at the top level. I quickly came to the realisation there was no chance of that.”
So, at the age of just 27, in June last year he announced his retirement.
“Everyone said to me: ‘Ah you were so close to getting back into the England team, then you got that injury’. But I’ve still got 85% vision, can still function day to day, still look OK. It wasn’t as terrible as it might have been.”
And then he pauses for a moment, remembering the player who was hit by a bouncer just a few months after he was. “Phil Hughes died.”
With retirement, however, came the small matter of what he might do next. Fortunately, he was not in any immediate financial difficulty.
He comes from a comfortable background – among his entrepreneur father’s business interests is a distillery in Scotland – but he needed fulfilment.
As he had always enjoyed wielding a club, his dad suggested he take a golf break. While in Florida he arranged for lessons from David Leadbetter, Nick Faldo’s old coach.
“It was actually Leadbetter who said: ‘Are you looking to progress with this?’ ” he recalls.
He entered a couple of amateur tournaments, did well and soon his ambition settled on becoming a pro.
Only 29, Kieswetter is convinced he has the ability and, crucially, time.
He admits he has a lot to learn. Not so much in how to address a ball, but in the different rhythms of the game.
“There’s not 10 other guys there to interact with. It’s you on your own,” he says.
This is not a man who can be slowed by such things; there is no time to waste.
Today, he starts a Sunshine Tour event in Equatorial Guinea and he intends to turn pro next spring.
Then he has set himself the target of being a regular on the European Tour by the time he is 30.
Before that, all he has to do is find his ball.