PINEHURST, N.C. — For more than four decades, Dennis Walters has dazzled hundreds of thousands of golf fans with his trick-shot show, from Augusta National to St. Andrew’s and just about everywhere between, all while strapped to the seat of his golf cart.
He has become one of the most famous faces in golf, known around the world, and the message woven through the theatrics has never changed. If you have a dream and it doesn’t work out, that’s okay, because the solution is simple: Get a new dream.
That was Walters’ mantra from the moment he was paralyzed from the waist down in a golf-cart accident 48 years ago, putting an abrupt end to one aspiring professional golf career and launching another. And then, Sunday, as Walters tried to hold back tears, he relayed how that message had changed when he entered the inaugural U.S. Adaptive Open, the USGA’s first-ever national championship for golfers with disabilities.
“All the shows I’ve been doing since this was announced, I tell people in addition to doing my shows, I’m trying to re-learn and learn how to play golf,” Walters said. “And so guess who has a new dream?”
This is the power of the Adaptive Open, held at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club’s No. 6 course — the fourth of Pinehurst’s nine courses to host an USGA event — this week for golfers with disabilities in eight different categories, from the visually and intellectually impaired to amputees and seated players like Walters. The Adaptive Open brings together just about every variety of adaptive golf into one unified tournament to determine one male and one female national champion.
From the signage to the venue, it has the same feel as any other USGA championship, the pomp and circumstance, the logo and the trophies that were unveiled last month at the U.S. Women’s Open down the road at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club. A veteran pro like Ken Green, who lost his lower right leg in an RV accident 13 years ago, would be quick to notice if it were not.
Green, who has never been shy to speak his mind or ruffle feathers — his battles with the green-jacketed Augusta hierarchy are the stuff of legend, from enjoying a beer mid-round (he was playing with Arnold Palmer and wanted to be able to say he had a drink with Arnie) to smuggling in friends in the trunk of his car — would not hesitate to speak out if there were any difference. But that’s not the difference he notices.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to play in U.S. Amateurs and U.S. Opens, and obviously it’s an honor. But that was golf. You were just kind of a stud at golf,” Green said. “Whereas this one, everyone here has been dealt a bad hand, some numerous hands. They use golf to help them get out of the hole, so to speak.
“To me this is far more important, this event, because the USGA is the USGA. They have power, let’s face it. All the other amputee golf tournaments are great. But when an organization this big comes to the plate and has a national open like this, it’s just a perfect way to showcase how people can come back from whatever disasters have befallen them, and then the other is how golf is a great way of recovering.”
There are a few players who have qualified for other USGA championships. Fifteen of the 96 are scratch players or better. One, Green, played in the Masters before the accident. But only one has his own logo and is in the World Golf Hall of Fame and has won the USGA’s Bob Jones Award for service to the game.
Walters, the second-oldest player in the field, has hit more golf shots than any of them, almost all of them in front of crowds on a practice tee, hundreds of thousands of people over the years. He has arrived, at age 72, at a moment he never thought he would live to see, 51 years after he finished 11th at the 1971 U.S. Amateur.
Once he established that his service dog Gus, short for Augusta, could ride along with him on the course — among other duties, Gus can retrieve the ball from the hole — Walters set about relearning the game he has spent his life playing. Those millions of shots, hit off 3 foot tees or out of midair or any of his other showmanly ways, weren’t going to help him sink a 10-foot putt.
“The shots you hit on the range mean absolutely nothing,” Walters said. “I’m the only person that gets paid to look good on the range, okay, but this is not the range. Playing golf and doing what I’ve done for the last 45 years over 3,000 performances is a very small portion of what I do. Everybody said, ‘Oh, this will be easy, it’s a piece of cake, you hit the ball great.’ No, it’s way different.
“When you’re strapped into a cart and you’ve got a hanging lie and got to hit a 5-wood to an uphill green, that’s a challenge. It’s one I’ve embraced, and I’ve gotten a lot better. I’m not near as good enough as I’d like to be, but that’s golf. So here we are.”
Over the spring, for the first time in decades, he started playing some of the courses that invited him to perform, the bucket-list courses like Oakmont and Chicago Golf and Shoreacres and Inverness. Finally, he took a month off his grueling tour schedule to prepare. He’ll need two full days of practice to re-hone his routine before he heads back on the road for two shows at the end of July and 12 in August, but it’s a small price willingly paid to be a part of this.
All those performances before all those fans, all those years trying to inspire others, and now Walters finds himself inspired instead.
“They’re proving what I’ve been trying to say for 45 years, and I’ve been trying to show — I try to show people with every swing I make that golf can be a game for all, every single person, and this proves it,” Walters said. “I’ve also been trying to show people what’s possible, not only in golf but in life itself.”
Walters can still remember the last shot he hit before the accident, out of a bunker for a tap-in putt. And he remembers lying in his hospital bed, wondering if he’d ever get out of it, let alone become a golf superstar. That was his new dream, and he has lived it to the fullest.
And then a new one came along.
