MICHAEL BREED
I'm real excited about the opportunity to work with Suleiman. I once taught somebody who had mild vision loss, but I've never worked with anybody who's totally blind. I think I'll learn as much from Suleiman as he'll learn from me. I'm going to have to be so much more thorough in my explanations because I can't assume anything. I have to describe every little thing, including what a club looks and feels like, because what Suleiman senses might not be the way things really are.
I'm also excited about the spiritual aspect of the experience. I have the opportunity to totally change somebody's life, to open him up not just to golf, but to everything the game has to offer: nature, life lessons, new friends, even the tasty grilled hot dogs at our club's halfway house.
For first lessons, I normally start raw beginners on the putting green. I want people to first learn the look and feel of the energy it takes to move the ball, beginning with the smallest shot. I then move to chipping and finally to the range for full swings. But I didn't do that with Suleiman because he can't see the ball roll and wouldn't totally understand the relationship between the energy of a swing and how far the ball goes.
So I took him to the range for his first lesson. My first "Oh gosh" moment came almost as soon as we met. I noticed him walking with his cane, holding it with his left hand to touch the ground in front of him as he walked. It dawned on me that the black rubber grip on his collapsible walking cane was the same as the grip on a putter. Also, I noticed that he held the cane with a good golf grip, although it was just with his left hand. So in a weird way, Suleiman has been practicing his golf grip for decades because he's been walking around with that cane everywhere he goes.
The similarity between the putter and walking cane grips was thrilling because I knew I could use the cane as a teaching aid. All I had to do was have Suleiman add his right hand to his grip on the cane, and then I had him practice swinging the cane.
We spent much of the hour-long first lesson learning what the club felt like. I had Suleiman use a pitching wedge for the lesson. He rubbed it and twirled it in his hands so he could learn how to recognize the direction the clubhead was facing. This was a challenge, but Suleiman was able to use his other senses to learn what a sighted person would learn through seeing. Suleiman may even have some advantages over sighted people. For example, I think he will be much more in tune with the feel of the clubhead than players who can see.
The biggest surprise of our first lesson? Suleiman learned the basics of holding the club and the address position, and he started swinging and hitting some balls. Granted, he hit only pitches, but I didn't expect him to hit balls until at least the second lesson. I expected a blind man to be much more cautious.
But Suleiman is a quick learner who has no fear. He has a childlike quality of great expectation and innocence. Oh, those first shots: most of them were dribblers, but a couple of them were airborne and flew about 10 yards.
This is going to be really fun.
