NATURAL BRIDGE -- Like the majority of the members of The Vista Links, Bobby Brads' official United States Golf Association handicap can be found in the clubhouse computer of the Buena Vista golf course.
"I have about a 24 handicap right now," Brads, a retired 65-year-old from Natural Bridge, confirmed Friday.
Then there is Brads' other handicap. This one isn't sanctioned by the USGA or anyone else.
It's right in front of your eyes. This golfer has only one arm.
As Bill "Sugarbear" Clark will tell you, that's what is called a real handicap.
"People who don't know Bobby, they'll stop and look and they'll kind of say, 'Look at that guy over there, he's got one arm and he's playing,'" said Clark, one of Brads' frequent playing partners.
"Then they'll watch him, and he very seldom disappoints them. He usually hits it pretty doggone decent. Bobby has got a little hot dog in him. He puts the pressure on himself a little bit when somebody starts watching. It makes him play a little bit better, looks like to me."
Clark will attest to that all the way to the 19th hole. Twenty-six days ago, he saw something he had never witnessed in all his years of playing golf. He watched somebody make a hole-in-one. And it took the only one-armed golfer he's ever seen -- not to mention heard of -- to make the ace.
After Clark and his other playing partner, fellow club member Mark Rogers, had barely missed the green with their tee shots from the longer white markers, Brads stepped to the senior tee and momentarily pondered his club selection for the 103-yard hole.
"I asked Bill, 'You think I can get a 9-iron over there?'" Brads said. "Well, he never said nothing. So I went over there and hit the 9-iron.
"The ball hit about two feet in the short cut around the front of the green, and I knew it was going to be close to the pin. And the ball just kept going and going, and it curved right to the hole. When it fell in the hole, all I remember is my 9-iron went flying up in the air!"
Clark said he and Rogers couldn't have been "more tickled" had one of their balls found the cup in a single blow.
"When Bobby made the ace, I jumped out of the cart and went over to him to give him a high-five," the gregarious Clark said. "Of course, Bobby had to take the club and sit it on the ground and lean it up against his leg in order to give me a high-five. I couldn't have picked a better fellow to see my first hole-in-one with.
"You know, I didn't have a real good day that day, but he and I shot the same score and I said, 'Bobby, I've got two arms and shot a 91. And here you've got one arm and shoot a 91, and had a hole-in-one doing it.'
"I'm telling you, it was some incredible stuff."
Who needs two?
Sure, Brads would love to be like the rest of the 99.99 percent -- and how many other 9s possibly needed to be strung to the right of the decimal point -- of the world's population that takes on life every day with two arms.
But he's got only one. He lost his left arm at age 24 in 1966, when it was cut off in a freakish accident at the Big Island paper mill. His arm was severed instantaneously when it got caught up in one of the ropes required to operate the mill's paper machine.
"The rope hung up and the slack came across another roller that was above my head and it got around my arm," said Brads, who almost 42 years later still vividly recalls the mishap. "When the slack went out of the rope, that's when it jerked me off the floor -- probably some two to three feet in the air -- and it just jerked the arm right out of the socket. Just that quick, it was gone!"
Brads said he would have likely bled to death that night if not for a first-aid member working at the mill, who was trained enough to know how to limit his blood loss.
"Death was close by," Brads said. "I'm only sitting here because the good Lord chose to answer my prayers that evening."
Susan Brads had married her Parry McCluer High sweetheart in 1962 and was at the couple's Glasgow home that night with their two young children, then 3-year-old David, and 1-year-old Tracy.
She thought he was going to die, she said.
"Bobby had lost so much blood," Susan Brads said. "But he made it somehow. But you know what, he accepted it, and I did, too. It just wasn't anything to do but go forward. We had kids. It was the only thing we could do."
A week later, Bobby Brads left the hospital. He was back on the job at the mill three weeks later, performing a less precarious job. He proceeded to toil for 38 more years at the mill before retiring Dec. 7, 2006.
A good-natured man who loves a good joke, Brads said he never let the loss of his arm beat him down.
"There's always somebody who is worse off than what you are," Brads said. "If you look around ... your eyes open up when things happen to you and you see other things that are worse off than what you are. I'm just glad I'm alive."
Getting hooked on golf
Funny thing, but Bobby Brads said he never once thought about ever holding a golf club when he had two arms and hands. However, two years after the accident, some of his buddies at the mill asked him to go with them to play golf. Never one to back off from a challenge, Brads took them up on the offer.
"They said, 'Let's go play golf,'" he recalled with a snicker. "They said you need to play left-handed, that you're going to have to hit the ball with your lead arm. Well, I had always swung things right-handed. So I borrowed some left-handed clubs and the ball went everywhere. I just couldn't hit it. It didn't work."
Soon thereafter, Brads purchased a set of old right-handed clubs and basically learned how to play from trial and error with a cast of friends at Botetourt Country Club in the late 1960s and early '70s. He developed a unique swing set-up in which he stands with his body basically facing the target and strikes the ball in what Clark described "much like a guy swinging a tennis racquet."
Off or on the course, Brads hasn't stopped swinging and having fun since. He routinely plays golf three times a week during the season with a pack of buddies. The best score he's ever carded was a 79 at Ivy Hill in Forest in the early 1990s. These days, he said he routinely shoots about 90, give or take a few shots.
"I've played golf all over the place," Brads said. "A bunch of us out of Buena Vista and Lexington, and people all the way to New York, go to Pinehurst [N.C.] every June for four days. I'm just one of the gang, just one of the redneck boys. I'm holding my own, though.
"I'm competitive on the course. I don't care who sees me play. I just say, 'Here I am, and if you don't like what you see, then you can leave.'"
Brads was in stitches as he recounted a story in which one of his old mill buddies brought a friend from Bedford to join him for a threesome one day.
"I didn't beat the guy from the mill because he was a pretty good golfer, but I beat the other guy," a guffawing Brads recalled. "The guy from the mill, Dennis, told me the next time I saw him that the other guy told him going up the road, 'Ain't this a hell of a note? I let a one-armed guy whip me!'"
Just think if everyone else at the club had to play with one arm. Clark said he wanted no part of that game.
"If we all had one arm, Bobby would beat the tar out of all of us," said Clark, his deep voice rising in tone. "Shoot, he would take all our money ... in a heartbeat."
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