'I feel like a golfer': Blind golf events bring Indian Wells resident back to game she loves

The hardest part about participating in blind golf tournaments for Linda Port was, well, admitting that she was a blind golfer.

“I didn’t want to join it because, then I have to really be disabled,” said Port, a part-time Indian Wells resident, about her decision to start playing blind golf tournaments in 2014. “I have to announce to the world that I really am disabled. I don’t want to do that. That took two years for me to get through that acceptance process.”

Now Port regrets quitting the game for 10 years after her eyesight began to slip away and the time it took her to embrace her disability and begin playing the sport she loves again.

“We did nothing during COVID, but typically it is four to six tournaments a year,” said Port, who will turn 75 this week. “I’ve traveled to a lot of them, Tokyo and Italy and Ireland. It’s been wonderful.”

With her husband and alignment coach Fred with her, Port also has been a member of four Vision Cups, a Ryder Cup-style event showcasing countries with sight-impaired golfers from around the world. In 2022, Port was a member of the combined United States-Canada team that won the Vision Cup for the first time over six days at the TPC at Sawgrass, the home of the PGA Tour’s Players Championship.

At her side the entire time was husband Fred, who has been part of Linda's success story.

“To be honest, in the very beginning, I think I had many of the apprehensions Linda had, which is the words blind golf,” Fred Port said. “Almost by definition, you go ‘What?’”

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Port’s sight issues come from cone dystrophy, one of the conditions that fall under the category of macular degeneration. As the condition progressed, Port slowly began losing her eyesight, but still had enough vision where she wouldn’t have qualified for blind golf events. Today, Port has no central vision, but does have some peripheral sight.

“If you have a sliver of (vision), you can see the ball. Now I can’t see the ball. That’s what we all have in common. None of us can see the ball,” she said.

Port, who started playing golf in the 1980s when she was in her early 40s and when she had first been diagnosed with macular degeneration, returned to playing a few rounds of golf with friends about 10 years ago, both in San Diego and at The Vintage Club in Indian Wells. She warned her playing partners that they likely would have to find her ball for her.

As Port returned to the course, she wondered if there might be few opportunities for her as a golfer before discovering the United States Blind Golf Association.

“I Googled it. I didn’t know anything about it,” Port said. “But I had this problem at that point of adjusting to truly being disabled, not being able to pass as a full vision person. So now I have this problem that I am dealing with. What can I do that will save my life instead of just being isolated? How do you invent yourself?”

Ready for competition

Port discovered there were competitions she could play in, and with her husband’s help, she started playing in one of three divisions of those events. Port is in a division where a player’s vision can be no better than 20/200 even with corrective lenses. Another division is for golfers with vision no better than 20/600, and a third division is for totally blind golfers. Each category has men’s and women’s divisions.

The process for blind golf involves a sighted person, or coach, who aligns the blind golfer, who then swings and hits the ball. How much information is shared between the golfer and the coach varies from player to player. Fred Port doesn’t tell his wife about hazards like lakes or bunkers, focusing instead on the distance to the flag or to the next landing spot.

“We don’t talk about the bad shots. You are out there, this is an intense competition, the idea that you would dwell on a bad shot like you do with any amateur is crazy,” he said. “What you really want to do is to come up with a brand new strategy on every single shot based on what you just did.”

“What everything keeps coming back to is what kind of confidence does the player have,” Linda said. “That’s everything. Whatever (Fred) does, he’s trying to make sure I have whatever confidence I can have going at the time.”

Fred Port remembers the first tournament Linda played in 2014 at Exeter Country Club in Rhode Island, not really knowing what the level of competition would be.

“I thought this ought to be interesting. What do I know,” Fred said. “The guy gets up and the coach sets him up and lines up the ball and he says go. The guy swings and you can hear it, obviously. Linda said what happened. I said he hit it 250 yards down the fairway with a draw. Totally blind. And then I announced to Linda, we are in a golf tournament.”

Port said she can often tell whether a shot is good or not by the feeling in her hands, whether the shot was solid or off the heel or toe, thin or fat. But she mostly just hits the ball and joins Fred in moving to the next shot.

Port earned her spot as one of two women on a 14-player U.S.-Canada team based on her handicap, which she admits is now a 23 after being as low as a 16 pre-COVID. Fred Port said his wife’s best blind round was an 82 in the 2016 U.S. National in Tucson.

For Linda Port, the Vision Cup victory was a highlight of her time in blind golf events, and she hopes her success in simply returning to the game will show others they can keep playing despite physical limitations.

“It was first class all the way. It was wonderful. It was as close to being a pro as you can get,” Port said. “And for me, as a woman to be six days in a row at TPC Sawgrass, that’s pretty cool. I don’t think they even have an LPGA event there. So that is sort of unusual. Who would have guessed that you could get there playing blind golf.”

As for being a blind golfer, Port no longer thinks of herself as just a disabled player.

“I feel like a golfer. I definitely feel that it is all about golf when I am out there,” she said. “When I am off the course, I do like to see how many people know about (blind golf), which is nobody. Nobody knows about it. I’ve never, ever met anybody who does.”