A 12-Handicapper Is a Sight for Joy, Thanks to His Work

There were Hall of Fame baseball players, Pro Bowl football players, movie stars, talk-show hosts, sportscasters and 128 of the finest golfers in the world abroad on the fairways of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic tournament.

So I went out in search of a player who was not even-money to break 90, will never play for the Green Bay Packers, make a playoff at Augusta. In fact, you might have to give him strokes at your home course and hope he’d press you on the back nine.

But when I saw the name, Charlie Kelman, on a pairing sheet, his golf game was the most irrelevant thing I could think of. I went up to one of his playing partners, whom I knew.

“What do you know of this fellow Kelman in your foursome?” I wanted to know.

My friend tried to be helpful.

“He’s got a bad grip, but he can play some. He’ll help a shot or two.”

“No, no!” I protested. “What I want to know is, is he a doctor? More specifically, is he an eye doctor?”

The fellow looked puzzled. “I think he owns drug stores,” he said. “Or maybe it’s dress shops.”

There are 384 amateur players in the Hope tournament, ranging from scratch players to 18s. To a man, they think they’re 3 to 5 shots better than they are. Golf is not a game, it’s a delusion.

But no one ever pays much attention to these hackers. No one wants their autographs on anything but a check. The pros tolerate them. The charities need them. They pay up to $8,600 to tee it up in here.

Corporate America is well represented here. Guys who could shake up Wall Street with a phone call apologize abjectly to a club pro for a missed putt. They might terrorize a board room but here, they’re the ones eager to please.

The celebrity in Team No. A-36 was the great catcher, Johnny Bench, just elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame on his first try. The pro was the meticulous Calvin Peete, who hasn’t been off a fairway or behind a tree with a shot this decade. The team was 7 under par, if you care for trivia.

If your vision is 20/20, if you have two eyes, if you never flunked an eye chart in your life, your interest in Team A-36 would begin and end with the greatest 1-man Bench in baseball history or one of the straightest pros on the tour.

But if you’d ever looked out at a Miami street sign and it looked as if it were written in Mandarin Chinese, you might want the autograph of the 12-handicap in the group. If you’d ever lain in a hospital bed with bandages over both eyes the morning after an operation, you’d know who Charlie Kelman was.

It was some years ago, after several months of virtual sightlessness, vision gone in one eye and a dense cataract in the middle of another and a suspect retina behind it, that I stood in the office of Dr. Otto Jungschaffer.

“There is controversy over the best way to remove a cataract, and I do not take part in it,” he explained to me.

“There is the traditional method and there is the method invented by a Dr. Kelman, in which the cataract is extruded by an ultrasonic technique. While I do not involve myself, I would say in your case, the Kelman phaco-emulsification procedure is indicated.

“There are four doctors who are the world’s best at this operation--Dr. Kelman in New York, Dr. Liddle in Oklahoma City, a doctor in Houston and Dr. Richard Kratz here in Van Nuys.”

A few nights afterward, I was able to look up and see one of the most wonderful sights in the world, a television screen that didn’t look like a pot of 5-color paint being stirred, a picture on which it was possible to read a quarterback’s number. Doctors Kratz, Jungschaffer--and Kelman--had given me back the most precious gift a man can have: his sight.

So, to me, the celebrity on the course at Eldorado one day this week was not necessarily next year’s Cy Young Award winner or future Masters champion, but a determined, 50ish New Yorker with just a hint of a loop in his backswing, a forward press right out of a Tommy Armour golf book and a golf cap that looked as if it came with a tractor.

I am afraid I interfered with golfer Kelman’s concentration. The spectators thought the guy with the press badge on his sweater had gotten a businessman player mixed up with the pro in the group.

I had made no mistake. If there were a Cooperstown for eye doctors, this man would make it. Eyes are more important than birdies. I didn’t want to know how his round was going, I was interested in his life.

Charlie Kelman was not going to win any glassware with this round, but he broke a course record years ago when he perfected the method of removing a cataract with the use of a needle prick and an ultrasound machine. It is almost as casual as removing a sliver.

Traditionalists decried it, but today it is a universal tactic for cataract surgery, practiced all over the world.

“How did I happen to perfect it?” Dr. Kelman echoed as he stood over a trap shot. “Well, my cataract patients used to have to stay in the hospital for 10 days and then spend 6 weeks in recovery period at home. One day, I was in the dentist’s office, and he had this ultra-sonic probe and drill. I began to wonder why this couldn’t be modified for cataract extraction.”

It could. And he did it. His first patient was a woman whose eye was so ravaged by diabetes, she had little to lose. The technique was successful.

Next was a ticker-tape parade? Eye surgeon of the month?

Wrong. Next was a 7-year fight with the medical profession.

“I worked with cats in the basement of my house. My wife almost threw me and them out. My practice suffered. I went broke. But I was stubborn. I couldn’t see why cataract patients had to go through having their eye slit open, having to have 12 stitches and a long recuperative period, versus maybe one suture, if any at all, and being able to see right away.”

He got a reputation for being cantankerous, abrasive. The fact that he was right got lost in the noise.

“There was also the fact I used to play the saxophone,” he said. “On television and on stage with Lionel Hampton. They said, ‘How can he be any kind of an eye surgeon when he plays the saxophone in Jersey?’ They said it was too dangerous.

“By now, I was operating on famous people, congressmen, senators. Great doctors began to see its advantage. Dick Kratz was one of the first to join with me, one of the first to believe in it. Now, everybody does it.”

He is working on a modification of his technique to remove brain tumors. “My father was an inventor,” he said. “I like to find better ways to do important things.”

The golfer Charlie Kelman would like to find better ways to make 3s. He became hooked on golf about 10 years ago and has, typically, become good enough to play in advanced tournaments like the Hope. This is his second.

His swing is precise, as was to be expected. He is a bold player, as was also to be expected. Surgeons do not deal in negatives.

On the 11th hole at Eldorado Wednesday, the golfer Kelman bladed one out of a trap. It squirted off at right angles to the green just off the fringe into the deep grass.

It is standard for the amateur partner when he has lost all chance to make par, to pick up his ball and head for the next tee. I thought Dr. Kelman, lying 3 in the deep rough, might honor this custom. I hauled out the notebook.

“I’ll just make notes while you pick up,” I explained.

He looked at me as if I had just stepped on his ball.

“Pick up?” he said. “I might chip this in!”

Just for the record, Billy Casper would have had trouble chipping it in. But also for the record, Charlie Kelman damned near did. He looked surprised when he didn’t.