David Quinn always said he would walk again. The significant injuries to his back and right leg left the 21-year-old paralysed for some time; he would take eight months of rehabilitation before he could leave the wheelchair and walk out of the hospital on crutches, but he made it. His reward now is he can smell the cut grass on a beautiful golf course every day.
In November 2001, their car had skidded on a patch of oil and hit a bridge, tumbling down a bank and landing on the car’s roof. David Quinn couldn’t move his legs. Lying upended against the car’s ceiling, petrol was leaking down into the front seats and sparks were flying in front of them. His father realised the key in the ignition was keeping the engine running. It was now or never, and David lunged towards the key.
“It was just a lonely part of the Wicklow mountains,” David recalls. “We knew it well, just a freak accident. You just never know what is around the corner really. Just a simple thing can be so devastating.”
David had been a highly talented motorcycle rider and a national motocross champion (off-road track racing). After hurtling around muddy race tracks for nearly a decade showing barely a scratch, winning three junior Irish Championships in succession from aged 12, David and his father James had nearly died on a routine journey on a peaceful mountain road.
“That was my ambition to become a professional motocross rider. I had been number one in Ireland when I was a schoolboy. Then I went to Northern Ireland to race where the level was even better. The father took me across to England, I was doing a lot of internationals, I was doing pretty well.”
He had started riding at the age of eight, a bundle of energy. He loved the speed, the noise, the thrill of the race against his mates, but on other days he would follow his Dad to Arklow Golf Club, a fine links course south of Dublin, and play some golf with the man whose calm and thoughtful presence showed him the way back then, as it does to this day.
County Wicklow is a beautiful area on the east coast of Ireland blessed with superb golf courses and his Dad James, a fine golfer in his day, had played with the top Irish professional players and even Seve Ballesteros when the great man was fine-tuning his game on the region’s links courses in 1976 in readiness for The Open over at Royal Birkdale on England’s North West coast. David loved hitting his own good drives down the fairways at Arklow but although he enjoyed the company of the older golfers it couldn’t quite match riding the bike for thrills and spills.
“Golf was in my blood all along as well as the motocross because Walter Sullivan from the Grange Golf Club, the professional who taught Padraig Harrington in his schoolboy days, encouraged me to play and said he’d have me as Irish champion by the time I was 16, but I decided to take the fast lane and do the racing.”
The youngster from Wicklow was mesmerised when he watched the professional riders such as David Thorpe on television and dreamed of making his living by riding. David’s Dad proved a wise counsel and mixed encouragement with realism to guide his son.
“I was doing all the international motocross races down near Brands Hatch [in Kent]; we were over there nearly every second weekend. Then it was really taking off, but unfortunately we were stopped from motorbike racing with the ‘Foot-and-Mouth’ at that time.”
The highly infectious bovine disease erupted in areas of England, disrupting events and travel. Instead of swooping over the humps and hollows of English race tracks father and son were driving in the Wicklow mountains on a late Autumn morning, looking to buy some engine parts at a sale.
David recalls: “If not for that issue, I’d probably have been in England racing and it wouldn’t have happened, but we can’t turn back the clock.”
The car accident was 23 years ago but David remembers it all so clearly.
“It was the 14th of November, 2001. We were going across the Wicklow Gap heading for [nearby] Hollywood one Sunday morning at six o’clock. The father was driving and we had a skid on the oil and we hit a granite bridge. We turned over down into the field beside the river. I fell down on the roof beside my Dad and didn’t know what was wrong or what had happened. There were lots of sparks hopping out of the ignition and there was petrol dripping down beside us on the roof. And he just said, we have to turn off that ignition. I couldn’t feel my legs. I was paralysed from the waist down and I had a vision and just dived for the steering and turned off the ignition and all the sparks stopped.”
David would later learn that he had broken his right ankle; his L3 vertebra had shattered and damaged the nerve in the spinal cord causing the paralysis; he had a laceration to his head and a broken left hand. His father, 63 years-old at the time, was also badly injured with a dislocated hip and broken pelvis. It was too soon to know whether David would walk again; it was looking bleak. “Both of us had a fair smacking up,” is how David accurately sums it up.
Dark moments are recalled by David today as he remembers lying in his hospital bed. He is recounting his story as a 44-year-old, who has a warm smile and open personality, though a little shy at first. Through his momentarily pained expression you see the resilience there. It was obviously needed. He greatly missed his father who was in the Tallaght University Hospital in the west of Dublin while he was in the Mater Hospital in the city but his mother Patricia visited him every day. Knowing his motocross dream lay shattered, it wasn’t going to be easy.
“It was a bad feeling. I’d lost my whole life in motorbike racing from the time I was eight years old.
“The family was very supportive. The mother was in every single day to the hospital. She was splitting us up time-wise. I didn’t see the father for six weeks. He didn’t know how bad I was and he thought the mother wasn’t telling him the truth. After about six weeks, the nurses let him out in a wheelchair to come across to see me, and we had seen each other then, and we knew then.”
With considerable determination the 21-year-old was learning to walk again as his spine and legs slowly recovered. Eight months of rehabilitation from the wheelchair to walking on crutches, and like the motocross rider flying for the first bend David didn’t doubt himself once during this test.
“From the time I was paralysed, I always believed that I was going to walk again. I had that ambition in my head that was 100 per cent positive. I was going to walk, I was going to get back on my motorbike and race it again and the whole lot.
“One day I started moving my right ankle and from then on it just started getting better. I said, bingo, we’re going to walk again. I never looked back. As soon as I was on the crutches, we went to the local par three, with the crutches sitting at my back and I’d swing the golf club and golf took over again.”
For a long time he just enjoyed playing again with his Dad and a few friends, relishing the peace and quiet, the nature, the smell of the grass. Two wonderful things would come out of the young man’s change in lifestyle: one being his growing love for golf and another involves what he jokes is a four-letter word beginning with ‘F’ (being Ford cars). The twin passions would again be shared with his Dad, creating a formidable double-act in the mechanic’s shed and on the fairways, and certainly golf would replace the motorbike to foster David’s competitive streak.
It took David a good while to get used to his new swing. The metal plate in his back along with a weakened right leg led to a loss of power and some mobility, so David adapted his method of swinging the club to be “more in the shoulders”. After some years of gradually getting better, playing in plenty of local competitions, in 2021 David heard of EDGA and the golf tournaments for players who have a disability. In 2022, he learned that the first G4D Irish Open would be staged at Roganstown, Dublin.
“I said, I’m going to try and look for a pass and try and get into this. Then it just took over from the Irish Open. I just loved it so much and I got on well. I never thought I’d have the ability to play at a level like this with EDGA. I was getting a few seconds and then obviously the win came along in Madrid [October, 2023] and there were a few tears shed that day.”
He was able to celebrate with his wife Susan and his young son David (daughter Saoirse was in school) in Madrid. His father James couldn’t make it as he had just had eye surgery but James would be David’s caddy for a memorable few days this April (2024) at County Sligo Golf Club, where David would win the Net prize in Golf Ireland’s ISPS Handa G4D at the West. David said his Dad, who is now 86, caddied the whole way round and his usual great advice and support helped him to play his best golf.
Alongside the golf, father and son put their knowledge of engines from the motorbike days to good use when they started restoring classic cars just a couple of years after David’s accident. This has turned into a grand project and they now have 26 cars, nearly all Ford models. A number had been highly neglected and decrepit shells of old cars which the pair have lovingly rebuilt: they sourced new parts, and painted and polished them to look as good as new (David bought one scrap-heap of a 1990s Mini for 80 Euros which he totally rebuilt and put in a 1.3 engine: this dream machine is now worth more than a few Euros). None of the 26 cars have been sold as David is saving them as an investment for his family. He says that working on the cars has given him and James so much joy. “Dad still wants to get oil and grease on his hands and work an engine to this day,” smiles David.
He had worked in different areas over the years, including construction and farming, but it would be his mechanical knowledge that would lead to what has become a dream job, when the greenkeeping staff at nearby Powerscourt Golf Club gave David the chance to join the team two years ago. The course is owned by the Slazenger family and David will be eternally grateful towards them and the course superintendent Paul Farren, who put his faith in him, given his lack of greens experience, offering him the chance to join the 10-strong greenkeeping team that works on the West and East Courses there. David has never looked back, and one of his biggest smiles of the interview comes when he talks of his fellow colleagues and the sheer joy of working well on a fine golf course.
“We are well looked after by the Slazenger family. There’s a great atmosphere in the canteen with the lads. We always have a laugh at lunchtime and you couldn’t ask for a better bunch of lads.”
Impressed with his knowledge of machinery, Paul Farren has David teamed up with the “Master Mechanic Guru” for Powerscourt, Conor O’Brien, to widen his knowledge.
Each working day David leaves his house at 5.15am and is cutting his grass in the rough, on fairways or greens by 6am, before tending the bunkers and other tasks on the West Course. Typically finishing at 2.45pm, there is usually time to practise and on the longer summer days play either at Powerscourt or the club he first played as a boy, the seaside links of Arklow Golf Club, where he has been a member for the last five years.
He adds: “I must thank Paul Farren tremendously. They also let us practise in the evening time there and the Slazenger family have been absolutely excellent to all the staff there.”
David is relishing the good form he has shown in EDGA tournaments and wants to keep going and take his golfing journey as far as he can, both in his job – he says he hopes to work at Powerscourt until he retires – and as a G4D player.
“I would love to play a lot more G4D events, get down to single figures [golf handicap] if possible with all my practise. I’d love to get inside maybe the top 10 before the end of 2024 in the Net division of the World Rankings. That’s my goal so far.”
Dad James and Mum Patricia, Susan and son David and daughter Saoirse make a happy and supportive group and are well-known by other EDGA golfers, with family members usually with David for a tournament. David the younger, aged four, is just starting to swing a club properly, while his sister Saoirse, aged eight, is already wanting to emulate her father on the links.
James Quinn is still doing very well and is always the voice of reason on the course. David, who admits to being a little hot-headed at times, usually goes with Dad’s advice, and he is continually looking to improve with James on the bag.
The motocross racing seems a long time ago now for David but he looks back fondly on his younger self as he raced hell-for-leather to get ahead of his friends. He did get back on the bike after the accident, as he said he would, but it was of course different then. David is just as competitive today but golf has encouraged his more philosophical side. He can appreciate the good shots and the bad ones that life throws at him, and that he is also still in one piece. Importantly, he is able to enjoy the smell of the cut grass at his now spiritual home, the golf course.
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