Blind golf is a very popular sport, yet at first it seems almost impossible for a blind person to play the game. Yet despite their obvious disability, there are many outstanding blind golfers playing the game across the globe, the question is, how are they able to play golf, if they can’t see the ball they are hitting, or where they are hitting it to?
Categories
Of course, the first issue to note here is that there are different levels of blindness. Competitions are organised into three categories that are ranked from the most to least severe:
- B1 – No light perception in either eye, or slight light perception but unable to recognise the shape of a hand at any distance, or in any direction.
- B2 – Can recognise the shape of a hand but has visual acuity of 2/60 and a visual field of less than 5 degrees.
- B3 – Visual acuity between 2/60 and 6/60 and/or visual field of between 5 degrees and 20 degrees
While blind golfers of all categories can play with each other, blind golf tournaments often have ‘category winners’ as well as, or in place of, an overall winner.
Now that we understand how tournaments are organised, let’s discover how blind people actually play the game on a typical round of golf.
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