Imagine playing some great golf aged 87, having given up the game once aged 75 because you had gone blind.
Danny Daniels has done just that, after finding that the answer of ‘who could act as his eyes’ and guide him around the golf course again was sitting beside him all along.
Making his comeback aged 80, the equation is simply: player + guide = a great team. Danny and his wife of nearly 60 years, Diana, are winners together, a heartening solution to a problem more common than readers might at first think.
There are many older golfers who will find themselves encountering sight loss, one common type of this is known as ‘age-related macular degeneration’ (AMD). Some of these players will gradually lose confidence in searching for that golf ball in the sky and in the rough. Concerned perhaps of holding-up their playing partners, they may take a break from playing (thinking it as just a rest perhaps) but then later they may suddenly find themselves to be a former golfer, sitting at home, and more than a little lost.
Supporting Danny in his golfing quest has been hugely satisfying for his guide, Diana, who he relies on completely, while her sense of purpose in really helping someone pursue their passion has become her passion too.
Former RAF engineer Danny had seen a lot in life. He had answered the Queen’s call to do National Service as a young man of 18, in 1952, then joining the Royal Air Force and enjoying a first posting to see Hong Kong (he would be later based in Germany for three years), while in England specialising as an engine fitter and also a gliding instructor on airbases including RAF Bicester and RAF Halton; at Halton he met Diana, also known as ‘Di’, who was in the RAF herself working as a dental hygienist. They married in 1965 and today live in Norfolk.
After 22 years of service Danny enjoyed other jobs while leisure time included a spell as a Scoutmaster, when their son Paul was in the Scouts, and a number of years seawater diving, before later turning to – when aged 65 – a more traditional pastime for his age group: the game of golf.
He tells us that starting at that age he knew he wasn’t going to be the next Nick Faldo or Jack Nicklaus.
“That was obviously not going to happen. But I had an ambition to play off a handicap of 18. That was the magic figure it seemed to me, one shot per hole, and I was getting there. I’d got down to 23 and all of a sudden away went the eyes. I was driving home from Scotland, towing a caravan on the A1 [a major English road]. Something happened to my right eye, I don’t know, and I blinked it, shut it for a second. It was evening and the red lights that were in front of me suddenly went very dim.”
Danny adds: “A young doctor referred me to the specialist, and after a few weeks I went back and he said, I’m sorry but there is nothing I can do for your right eye.”
He would lose the sight in his right eye except a peripheral blur of 5% inside two years and there was concern for his left eye. Regular injections didn’t help as hoped, and a detached retina in his left eye would lead to almost total blindness. From that blink of the eye on the A1 to blindness in under three years.
“It really is serious. Once you can’t drive anywhere, your independence begins to diminish extremely quickly,” says Danny. “So that happened, I was declared severely impaired in 2011, and that was just two years from that day driving in the car, it was really very quick.”
As his sight was failing, Danny carried on playing golf until one day, a playing partner made his excuses and told Danny he didn’t want to play with him any more.
“I was gutted and I was ready to give up golf, I pretty much did, started to sit in the armchair at home. Di was a bit upset about this and did some research on the internet and came up with England and Wales Blind Golf. Well, I thought, I’m not going to play with blind people. There was no way I was going to play with blind people.”
But Danny had fallen for golf over the course of a decade, he loved the game, and his club Barnham Broom was like a second home. He wasn’t going to spite himself and throw it all away. So at the age of 80, Danny had the guts to change his mind. He and Diana finally contacted England and Wales Blind Golf (EWBG) and he has never looked back.
After being warmly welcomed into the fold he was soon selected for England & Wales to play against Scotland and he won his three matches – all with Diana guiding his every shot and learning about the game herself. He then qualified for the World Blind Golf Championships, held in South Africa, where he came 24th.
Every win and every loss is inevitably felt by both player and guide, as Diana explains: “The guide and the player are a team. Danny just couldn’t do it without me. When he one-putted a green, yes, he had hit the ball well, but he would immediately say, ‘Thank you Di’, because I’d lined the ball up properly. It taught me too, I play golf as well now, not very well, but I’m getting quite good at reading the greens. Like everybody, you don’t always get it right, but there are lots of times when you do.
“But it’s that team, the team building, and I think it’s so good, especially if a husband and wife can do it together. We only fell out once on the golf course and I told him quite plainly that he couldn’t do that with me. He blamed me for something that wasn’t my fault and I very quickly said, ‘That’s not on. All I can do is put you in the right place. I’m not the one hitting the ball’.
“Some people think I’m harsh because I’ll say that the shot wasn’t very good, but actually he wants me to say that. He wants to know if it’s a superb shot, but I’ll also tell him if it’s rubbish. If he could see it, he would say that himself, wouldn’t he?”
Diana clearly sticks up for herself with Danny, but is also quick to defend Danny on the occasional instances when other players on a course can be a little intolerant. Danny and Diana both know that they set a decent pace tee to green, the only area which needs a little more attention is when player and guide pace out the length of the putt on the green, which is essential for knowing at what speed to strike the putt. Certainly, the members at Barnham Broom have been very good, and playing here and in all the events organised by EWBG, this has created many great experiences for them both.
“I thoroughly enjoy going out with Danny and his ups are my ups, and his downs are my downs,” says Diana.
For Danny, he loves that golf is still serving to keep him active at 87, relishing the exercise, the fresh air and the sociability around the game.
“It’s the practise, the continuity of playing golf, that to me is an important thing and the continuity of just walking up to a ball. I use a buggy a lot now, but walking up to a ball, making the decision which club you are using: I get behind the ball, set up, fire at it, back in the buggy and off again to the ball. And I suppose I’m a bit impetuous about things, I want to carry on and want to move fairly fast.”
Talk to Danny and Diana and you learn they clearly enjoy a good laugh together, but as a golfer with something to say about golf for the disabled, Danny doesn’t like people to feel sorry for him and other visually impaired people, or any golfers with a disability. Rather he wants people to recognise their actual ability, what they can bring to life.
“What I really want to get people outside of the game to understand is that we have ability. It isn’t about disability, it’s about the amount of ability that we have. It’s nice when people say to me, well I hope I can do what you are doing when I get to your age.”
Danny also draws on his memory of being in the Royal Air Force with valued colleagues, in such cases such trust between air personnel could be a matter of life and death. He equates this feeling of a tight community to the world of golfers with visual impairment and with other disabilities, respecting the philosophy of supporting one another through empathy and shared experience.
“In the services you are there to defend the rights of your country and you learn to rely on them for what they do, what they say, what they tell you. It can be similar in golf for instance, when you have gone blind. England and Wales Blind Golf is like this because people will talk to you about the difficulties you are having as a blind person and say to you, well yes, I know precisely what you’re saying because that happens to me and I cope with it by doing this, for example. This can be very important in such situations.”
Danny adds: “In the community of people with a disability, those little ideas that can help are shared, and I think that is what makes this sort of community unique in a way. It’s about trust, companionship, friendship. You need to have trust in people. You need to be able to rely on them.”
At this point, Danny tells a story about his grandfather who worked in the leather tanning industry. Working all hours with a passion for his craft, the grandfather discovered a tanning secret that found much demand, a secret he would tell no one, not even the company who employed him, only passing it on to his son. For Danny himself, who grew up as a man in the armed forces and serving his country, the commercial secrets of the business world did not sit easily with him. Where was the trust in people?
Certainly, his most trusted partnership is not slowing up. As we spoke, Danny and Diana were preparing to attend – as guests of the DP World Tour and EDGA – the Betfred British Masters (August 29-31), where in the Spectator Village they would be supporting the teams of England and Wales Blind Golf and EDGA as they promoted the game together to event visitors and their friends and family, to anyone who may know of someone who is visually impaired and may be interested in sampling golf or volunteering as a guide. EWBG was also able to share a space with the charity Guide Dogs, both looking to help the visually impaired in different but complementary ways.
Meanwhile, only days earlier in August 2024, Danny, aged 87 remember, with Diana as his guide, won the British Blind Masters held at Meon Valley Hotel & Golf Club in Hampshire, beating more than 30 golfers of all ages who were visually impaired from around the UK and Southern Ireland over three days. It was a remarkable win, and a triumph of Danny’s consistency and skill and Diana’s expertise as a guide.
At the prize presentation for key EWBG events, not only the player lifts a winner’s trophy, so too does the guide. Two trophies are presented. One player, plus a good guide, makes a team that is impossible to beat.
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