HUNTINGTON BEACH — You’d call it a long shot, the prospect of a blind guy competing in a long-drive golf event.
You’d chalk it up as far-fetched, the idea that he could hold his own against some of the biggest hitters in the world, step up and, like those guys and gals, smack a golf ball so far you lose sight of it.
Or you would – if you didn’t remember Jake Olson taking the field for the USC football team in 2017.
Because if you were paying the slightest attention to sports that fall, you would have been privy to the season’s most inspiring story: The Trojans’ blind long-snapper coming on for a fourth-quarter extra point in a victory over Western Michigan.
I doubt you’ve forgotten it six years later; it was such a remarkable feat.
Olson, a kid who’d been born with retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer, and who lost his sight totally at 12, learned to snap under the patient tutelage of an Orange Lutheran football coach named Dean Vieselmeyer, who died last year. “He kind of was a visionary,” Olson said Sunday. “I don’t know what in him made him want to do that with me … but there’s always that one person that’s crazy enough to chase your dream with you. All you gotta do is find that one, and he was that one for me.”
Vieselmeyer helped Olson get an opportunity at USC, his dream school. And then the kid took it from there. Bulked up, trained hard and earned the opportunity to get on the field at the Coliseum.
Proving, as he is prone to, that where there’s a will, there really is a way.
“He’s always looking for that next challenge,” said Devin Whipple, his pal since they began playing golf together at Orange Lutheran, and a member of Olson’s party Sunday, along with his service dog, Quebec. “It’s always onto the next thing.”
Such as, say, shooting to become the first completely blind golfer to defeat golfers with less severe cases of visual impairment in a tournament setting.
The U.S. Blind Golf…
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