VERO BEACH — Nearly 27 years have passed since an ill-fated golf shot cost Scott Keefer the vision in one eye.
“I was playing back home in Rhode Island, at Kirkbrae Country Club in Lincoln, three days before my 60th birthday,” Keefer said while at his longtime winter residence at Ocean Club III. “I had driven the ball into the woods and there was a small opening to the green, so I tried to thread the needle through the trees with a 3-wood.
“Before I hit it, I remember turning to my playing partner and telling him to be careful, in case the ball comes off the tree on the right.”
Keefer’s shot hit a tree on the left.
The ball ricocheted back at him and struck him in the left eye with such force that, as he describes it now, “It felt like my eye exploded.”
Doctors told him the ball hit him flush in the eye, entirely missing his cheek, nose and brow.
The cornea was destroyed. The retina was detached.
“I forgot to tell myself to duck,” he quipped.
And for the next five years, he underwent several surgeries, including two corneal transplants. But they didn’t take.
“I finally gave up,” he said, “and just accepted that I was blind in one eye.”
Keefer didn’t give up golf, however.
In fact, playing three Mondays ago at the Sebastian Municipal Golf Course, the retired attorney celebrated his fifth hole-in-one – his fourth since losing the vision in his left eye.
He used a 7-wood on the par-3, 136-yard 17th hole.
“My luck has exceeded my skill,” Keefer said with a laugh. “Funny thing is, every hole-in-one I’ve had was a good shot, not a miss-hit or a skull or a bank, and I’m not that skillful a golfer.”
He was being modest: In his younger years, Keefer, who said he began playing golf in the 1950s, carried a single-digit handicap.
Now, he plays to a 25-handicap, which isn’t terrible for an 86-year-old golfer who wears an eye patch on the course and relies on GPS to overcome a lack of depth perception, which hinders his ability to determine distance to the hole.
“I can’t see out of the eye at all,” said Keefer, who returned to golf only three months after what he calls “my accident” and has continued to play ever since.
“The eye looks normal – the doctors did a good job of putting it back together – and I don’t usually wear the patch. But if I don’t wear it on the course, the sunlight bothers me.”
It was sunlight, not his diminished vision, that prevented Keefer from seeing his latest ace roll into the cup.
“I hit it well and the guys said it was headed for the green, but it was late in the day and I was looking into a setting sun, so I was robbed of the joy of watching it go in the hole,” he said. “I didn’t know it was a hole-in-one until we got to the green and somebody looking into the cup and said, ‘Here it is!’”
In keeping with golf tradition, Keefer sprang for a round of adult beverages at the 19th hole, as those who make holes-in-one are expected to do – the first time he needed to do so in Florida.
His first hole-in-one came at a course in East Providence, RI, in the 1960s.
“I can’t remember the year,” he said, “but it was the only one I made when I had vision in both eyes.”
Keefer holed his second ace roughly 25 years ago while on vacation in Myrtle Beach, S.C. His third and fourth holes-in-one came in the same year at courses in Rhode Island.
“I got one in April and another in August, but I’m not sure of the year,” he said. “It was probably around 2005.”
Now he’s got another one.
Keefer, who has been wintering on the barrier island since 1987, said he doesn’t belong to a club in Vero Beach.
Instead, he plays mostly on public or semi-private courses at Sandridge Golf Club, The Club at Pointe West and Sebastian, either with friends or with whomever he gets paired with at the course.
“I usually play two or three times a week,” he said. “I’m living proof that you don’t have to be able to see to play this stupid game.”// Keefer laughed again.
He still loves to play golf, so much so that he’s able to make light of what happened on the ill-fated shot that cost him the vision in his left eye.
“Sometimes,” he said, “your luck runs out.”
Maybe so, but you can’t blame Keefer for thinking he might have one more ace in the hole.
“Every time you get one, you wonder if it’s your last, but I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said. “I’ll call you when I get my next one.”