By Joe Juliano

Bill McCafferty, who once believed there was no place in the game for a blind golfer, has proved himself wrong.

Bill McCafferty is all business on the practice range. He is set up in the proper address position, and as he takes the club back he remembers the swing keys his teacher has given him. He concentrates on staying down and keeping the downswing smooth as he follows through, trying to feel his club make impact with the ball.

Only there's no golf ball. His teacher, Bob Crowther, did not place another ball in position for McCafferty to hit.

McCafferty is blind. As his club scrapes the ground, he grimaces.

"You took away the ball, didn't you?" McCafferty asks before breaking into a hearty laugh that infects Crowther and Justin Buchwald, his coach, and even perks the ears of Alfie, McCafferty's loyal guide dog.

The funny interlude over, McCafferty and Crowther go back to work while Buchwald listens attentively and keeps a record in his notebook of directives and advice given from teacher to pupil. Since McCafferty can't see the ball, everything is done on feel alone. "How did that feel? What did you do?" Crowther asks after every shot. Not only can McCafferty tell the good shots from the bad, he usually knows where the bad ones went.

"I know nothing about what it's like to be blind," says Crowther, head professional at Cripple Creek Golf and Country Club in Bethany Beach, Del., "but I've found from the first lesson that he's very attentive to what I say."

McCafferty, 47, a professional drummer from Seaford, Del., practices persistence and dedication in his life, not only with his occupation and his work for the disabled in the state, but also on the range and on the course. As with the thousands of other blind golfers in the United States, he is self-sufficient and only seeks what is necessary to play and improve in a game that has shown him how unwise it is to place limitations on himself.

"Golf plays a major role in my life," McCafferty says. "I really lost a friend when I stopped. The people I've come across in playing golf are good people. Golf seems to attract those kinds of people. I like being around good people. And golf has ethics. That's what I like about it. You're honest. You play the game right."

McCafferty has been sightless for nine years. He lost vision in his right eye in 1968, when he was studying to be a nurse, to glaucoma and retinal detachment. In time, deteriorating vision in his left eye prompted him to give up a nursing job at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington, Del. Doctors at Johns Hopkins University told him a blood vessel was about to burst because of pressure in the eye, and vision there would soon cease.

"I remember going home that night, taking out my clubs, and hitting balls," he recalls.

McCafferty started playing golf while performing his nursing studies. He played once or twice a week for close to 20 years. But once he entered the sightless world in December 1989, he just gave up the game. There was no place in the game for a blind person, or so he thought, and for three years he never touched a club.

"Everyone who loses his sight goes through stages," says Paul Truka, the founder, president and CEO of the Tobin Foundation, a Wilmington-based organization that works with the blind. "The first stage is, 'Why me?' Then it gets to the next stage, to a point where you're really mad at the world. To get them out of it, they need a challenge. I challenged Bill to play golf. He said he didn't think he could do it any more. I said, 'Sure you can.' So he accepted my challenge."

That was in 1992, when McCafferty wasn't quite sure he wanted to play. He didn't want to embarrass himself by missing the ball or taking a divot that could carpet a small room. However, with the encouragement of a friend, David Gaynor, he went to a driving range to try to rediscover his swing.

"David told me, 'Just rely on your memory and on what you used to do when you played,' " he said. "So I did. I went back with the club and swung through. The ball went out and all of a sudden I hear, 'I don't believe this.' He told me the ball went 200 yards straight out. I thought he was lying. But then the guy who ran the driving range came over and said, 'Yeah, 200 yards.'

"That gave me the spark. I got hungry."

McCafferty went on to score 118 in the Tobin Open, a fund-raising event for the foundation, and he has been playing since. He plays pretty well these days, as his ranking of No. 14 in the U.S. Blind Golfers Association standings attests. He succeeds at the game by using his other senses, especially hearing. McCafferty, as other blind golfers, can tell how well the ball has been hit by hearing the sound it makes on the clubface.

"It really comes down to a very simple statement: that I'm doing things with my ears and my hands and my head," McCafferty says. "You can do these things, but they're being done in a different way. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. I've trained my ears. The acuity of my ears has come up greatly. The sense of feel has come up tremendously. I rely on those senses."

He also has to rely on a coach for additional direction. However, finding someone who has the time, devotion and patience, can be difficult. According to Truka, about half of all blind players are coached by their spouses or a retired relative. For McCafferty, whose companion, Shirley Bowden, does not play, it hasn't been easy finding someone who can help.

That search ended last summer when McCafferty located Buchwald, a 26-year-old employee of a Seaford construction company and a self-professed "golf nut" who lives about 10 minutes away in Laurel, Del. Buchwald had heard about McCafferty from a co-worker at a former job.

"He was politically involved with stuff involving the disabled in Delaware, and I thought that was wonderful," Buchwald says. "He wasn't a guy sitting at home crying in his beer. We went to a driving range in Seaford and he taught me how to set him up. Then he started hitting golf balls. By the third shot, all I could say was, 'Wow, this guy hits them straighter than I do.' "

Buchwald's job takes on added responsibility around the greens. He has to tell McCafferty how hard to hit a chip shot and where to position his feet so he can get a certain degree of loft on the stroke. On the greens, after making sure of the alignment and allowing for the break, he will tell McCafferty to hit a "Delaware 20" (for a 20-foot putt) or a "Florida 20" depending on the speed of the greens, on the theory that Delaware's greens are faster than those with bermudagrass in Florida.

"His putting amazes me," Crowther said. "The target area for a putt is so small. To be a good putter you have to have good hand-eye coordination, and people have trouble doing that. He's just working off the mechanics, using the shoulders and the hands, back and forth, straight through."

Crowther has been teaching McCafferty since May, offering an hour or two of free lessons per week. McCafferty started with Rick McCall, head pro at Maple Dale C.C. in Dover, Del., in 1993, and credits him with restoring his game after the long hiatus. Before McCall agreed to be the tutor, McCafferty had been unable to find anyone who would work with him.

"It was something I enjoyed doing," says McCall, who still works with McCafferty about once a month. "It was a new experience for both of us. We were both starting from scratch. It worked out well. The lucky thing is that he had played golf before. As his golf awareness increased, he hit more good shots. I watched him improve as his skills were being honed, much like with juniors."

McCafferty was disappointed in his performance in the individual competition of the Ken Venturi Guiding Eyes Golf Classic, played in June, but he was smiling after the next day's better-ball contest, in which he shot a 123 on his own ball. He also performed well at the Tobin Open near Philadelphia, where he carded a 140 total. He is exempt for a return trip to the USBGA nationals in November.

McCafferty's preparations appeared to be peaking in July. He shot two rounds of 81 — his career best — over a par-48 course near his home in Seaford. Later that month, he sank a 20-foot putt for his first career birdie, which followed, by a few holes, the first par of his sightless life.

If there is one thing McCafferty has learned, it's that golf is a game for the sightless as well as the sighted, something that, like many other life experiences, both worlds can enjoy.

"Hey, we experience everything you guys experience on a day-to-day basis, except for the fact that we're blind," he says. "We still raise kids. We still go to work. We still get married and have relationships. Then you can involve sports in that.

"Justin is coming from the sighted world. Bob is coming from the sighted world. I'm not. I'm living in the sighted world. So therefore, I have to make as many adjustments as they do and understand where they're coming from. They have to understand where I'm coming from as well. When that happens, the magic takes off. It's like, there it is.... It's amazing."

Joe Juliano writes about golf for The Philadelphia Inquirer.