It is not easy to hit a golf ball consistently long and straight, even if the very best among us make it look that way.
Imagine, then, trying to do so with no legs.
“There’s a lot of things I have to do, because I have to do little adjustments,” said Los Angeles resident Rose Veldman, who had both legs amputated when she was 10 but at 25, she attacks the sport with a passion, playing every day and doing so with two prosthetic legs.
She played in the U.S. Adaptive Open in Rockville, Md., earlier this month, a tournament bringing together the nation’s best physically challenged players. She has played in the tournament the last two years, and this year she finished 12th overall in the women’s competition, and was the better of the two multiple amputee entrants, with a three-day total of 263.
And for those of us who have trouble breaking 100, this is worth noting: She has no such trouble. She had scores of 88, 94 and 81 in the three rounds at this year’s Adaptive Open. In last year’s tournament she shot 85-85-81=251 and finished 10th overall among women as the only multiple amputee entered.
How does this work, anyway?
“A normal person would just get up to the ball, bend their knees, stay away from the ball a little bit, have a V-shaped arm or whatever, and just line (up) at an angle,” she told me in a recent video interview. “I’m (a) bilateral amputee, so I have one knee on one side and then not a knee on the other. I have a robotic knee on the other. So I have to put all my weight mostly on my right side, when most people would put their weight on their left side. So it’s hard because I can’t do the movements with my knees to like switch my weight over.
“And I also have to have a closed stance because I tend to bring my swing around my body. That’s how I generate my power. I don’t get my power from my hips and then my lower body, I get my part from my upper body, because I have no lower body.”
And yes, she said, the strength of her game is her driver, and her ability to hit it long – 210-220 yards “on a good day,” she said – and straight.
“I usually (don’t) get myself in trouble with my driver,” she said.
Veldman lost her legs in the chaos of a 7.0 earthquake near Port Au Prince, Haiti, on January 12, 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and more than 300,000 were injured. She was a 10-year-old, living in an orphanage, when the temblor began, and while rescuing a 3-year-old girl on the fourth floor, the building collapsed and crushed her legs.
The 3-year-old survived, and has stayed in touch with Rose all these years later. Meanwhile, Thomas and Anita Veldman of South Bend, Ind., who previously had been on a mission to Haiti and met Rose on a visit to that orphanage, heard about the accident and “moved heaven and earth” to adopt her, bring her to the U.S. and get her the needed treatment, Carly Veldman Parks told the Equine Chronicle in 2024.
“There are a lot of really strict rules for adopting from Haiti, including age restrictions, but they were able to adopt her despite all the criteria they didn’t meet,” Parks told the publication. “Rose had a rough life before she came here, and they’ve done a lot to give her every opportunity.”
From her adoptive dad, Rose picked up her interest in – and, ultimately, passion for – golf, but only after she’d realized that basketball wasn’t going to be her forte.
“In grade school, I wanted to fit in, because all my friends were playing sports,” she said in our conversation.
“I tried for the basketball team. I was the slowest one on the team. I did practice a lot to become the best shooter, because I figured if I was going to be the slowest at least I’d be the best shooter or I’d be sitting on the bench,” she added with a laugh.
But that didn’t work out, probably because her teammates got tired of, as she described it, running down the court only to “wait till I get down there and then pass it to me and I would shoot it.”
Tennis was next, but “I can’t move side to side very easily,” she said. “So I was like, okay, this is not going to work. I ended up quitting tennis the first day.”
But then there was the day that Rose was at the driving range with her dad, and one particular moment.
“My dad was like, looking at me and looking at the ball for some reason, you know, the golf ball,” she said. “He was like, ‘Why don’t you try hitting one? And I hit it so far, he was like, ‘That’s your sport.’”
Of such moments are passions born.
“Golf has done so much for me,” she said. “It has opened so (many) more doors because I remembered being a kid watching my friends go play sports and being good at it and I was just like sitting there and being like, ‘I want to do that but I know I’m not going to be good at it.’
“But since I’ve discovered golf I found something – not only does it help you build community and friendship but it also helps you with your mental state because if you’re not good up here (tapping her forehead), you’re not going to play well, you know? Because golf is a mental sport.”
She had to learn a lot of patience, she said. Golfers understand.
I asked her if she thought of herself as maybe inspiring others by what she accomplishes.
“To some extent, I think so, because this is my daily life,” she said. “… For them to look at me and be like, ‘Wow, if she can do it, then I can do that,’ that’s amazing.
“I love being able to inspire them to go out and try. And it really warms my heart because I inspire other disabled people to go out and do things that they didn’t think they could do.”
And then there is this:
“I box a lot,” she said. “I do wheelchair boxing and also stand-up boxing with my legs on.”
In other words, she’s tough in more ways than one.
jalexander@scng.com