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Brock Hoover had played golf with his Augusta University teammate and roommate Dawson Booth roughly 10 times before realizing that Booth was blind in one eye. Hoover had gone in for a routine fist-bump and had to call out “Dawson!” to get his attention.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Booth explained. “I’m blind in my right eye.”
Handshakes can get awkward for Booth, too, as the lack of depth perception means he sometimes misses the other person’s hand entirely.
Diagnosed with uveitis, an inflammation that impacts the middle layer of the eye, at age 3, Booth had cataract surgery two years later and was diagnosed with glaucoma at age 12. Juvenile idiopathic arthritis is the underlying condition that ultimately led to a lifetime of vision impairments that culminated with six surgeries during his junior year of high school.
During one particularly harrowing complication, Booth’s right eye had to be patched back together with a synthetic graft made in a lab.
“I call it the bionic eye,” he said good-naturedly.
A young Dawson Booth (Courtesy photo)
By the time it was time to pick a college, Booth, a former baseball pitcher, had given up on the dream of playing college golf and was set to follow the family tradition of majoring in mechanical engineering at Georgia. While in Athens, he played one round of golf with a friend who played on a women’s club team but had mostly moved on from the game competitively.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Booth moved back home to Augusta, Georgia, where his parents live at Champions Retreat. He started practicing again with a friend who played collegiately at USC-Aiken, and one day was invited to play a round of golf with PGA Tour pros Luke List and Henrik Norlander and PGA Tour Champions player Scott Parel.
“I birdied four of the first five holes,” said Booth, “and they were like who is this kid?”
All three pros individually called Augusta head coach Jack O’Keefe about Booth, imploring him to give the kid a look.
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Source : yahoo
