Elder Still Competing on Senior PGA Tour Despite Sight Problems

Lee Elder will turn 65 next month, an age when many of his Senior PGA Tour contemporaries essentially have become ceremonial golfers. They are spectator-friendly reminders of golf’s past glories and are delighted and rather amazed to be playing for more money than they ever did on the PGA Tour.

Elder would like to keep playing senior golf as long as he can. But at times over the past 3 1/2 months, he doubted he would ever play again.

On the morning of March 14, he got out of the shower in his hotel room in Newport Beach and suddenly had double vision in his left eye. At first, he thought it was perhaps a speck of dirt in the eye. He put in eye drops and played the final round of the Toshiba Senior Classic, shooting an uncharacteristic 84. The double vision would not go away.

Elder, a diabetic, went to a local hospital for a battery of tests. A stroke was quickly ruled out and he was advised to return home to south Florida for further evaluation if the double vision did not disappear.

It didn’t.

After trying to play the next two weeks, he went to Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Clinic. He was told by doctors that a nerve in his left eye had essentially frozen, perhaps as a result of a recent bout with flu, and his vision problem was a common occurrence among diabetics. They said there was a 75 percent chance normal vision could return over the next 10 to 12 weeks.

The bad news was obvious: There was a 25 percent chance it would not.

“I was just thinking, ‘Oh my God, what do I do now?’ ” Elder recalled this week at Hobbit’s Glen Golf Club in Columbia, Md., where he will play in the State Farm Senior Classic. “I sat around the house for a few weeks, not playing or even practicing. I couldn’t drive. But I finally said the heck with it--as long as I’m exempt, I might as well just go out there and play.”

Elder’s doctor told him he couldn’t make his vision any worse, so he played, wearing a patch over his left eye. Elder’s scores often soared into the eighties. It was hardly fit for a man who had won four times on the PGA Tour and eight times as a senior, and was the first man of color to play in The Masters, in 1975.

Elder was fine off the tee and the fairway, but the patch clearly affected on his short game. He had a serious problem with depth perception, making it difficult to gauge how far to hit his ball or to discern breaks in the greens. Often, his caddie had to line him up to putt.

Elder became a role model to African Americans because of the significance of his participation in The Masters. But golf fans of all races rallied behind him, constantly telling him to “hang in there.”

Some of his peers, thought, grumbled that Elder might have been wiser to stay home.

“Some people admired me for playing, other guys said I shouldn’t be out here because I was taking a spot away from someone more qualified,” he said. “Heck, it was my spot. I earned that spot whether I was playing with one or two eyes.”

Over the past two weeks, Elder’s vision has improved considerably. He says he’s now at about 90 percent, that his only problem occurs when he tries to look toward his left shoulder and has virtually no peripheral vision. He can drive a car, though he often defers to his wife, Sharon, who he says “was always encouraging me, trying to keep my spirits up. She wouldn’t let me get down.”

Says Sharon: “He’s still not 100 percent, and maybe this is as far as he’ll get. But the fans still love to see him and talk to Lee. To me, he’s one of the most under-appreciated people out here. All he does is give back to the game, and he never quit trying to come back.”

Elder does not know how much longer he’ll keep traveling the tour, but he was encouraged by three straight scores in the seventies two weeks ago in San Antonio.

“I think I can still play,” he said. “Because of the eye, I have not been able to work at the game. I’ve got to start working harder on it, and I will. There’s still a lot of things I’d like to do. I always had faith I’d get better, and now it looks like I have.”