Jose-Maria Olazabal once feared that he would end his life in a wheelchair but a stroke of luck and a brilliant doctor have brought him back to golf
GOLF: David Davies
JOSE-MARIA OLAZABAL is to play in the Dubai Desert Classic this week. After 18 months out of the game, it is dipping his toe — a toe that has until recently been in agony — in the water, to see if he is once again capable of playing tournament golf.
The 1994 US Masters champion has not played competitive golf since September 1995, when he took part in the Lanc(tm)me Trophy in Paris. After that he withdrew from the Ryder Cup team and went instead to the Mayo Clinic in the US, where rheumatoid arthritis in his right foot was diagnosed.
Incredibly, Olazabal and his manager Sergio Gomez now believe that was a mistaken diagnosis, although it was made by three different doctors — two in Spain and the one in America.
Olazabal, despite being, at a conservative estimate, 2-million out of pocket, and having suffered terrible pain in the interim, does not intend to sue. “I just want to get on with my life,” he said this week in his first interview anywhere in the world since he departed golf, almost unable to walk.
Nine months after the Lanc(tm)me, Olazabal was convinced that he would never play golf again. “In those days, when I woke up in the morning,” he said, “I knew my first move would be to the bathroom. It was only nine feet from my bedroom, but I could not get there on my feet. I had to crawl. At that point I thought that I would end my life in a wheelchair. I did not think that I could ever play golf again.”
But one extraordinary coincidence, and one extraordinary doctor have allowed him to return to the PGA European Tour this week. “Okay,” says Olazabal, “I start now — but it is only a test. This is not Jose- Maria Olazabal charging back, it is me testing my feet in competition so that I can begin to know my situation for the future. I will not be happy until I know, maybe in six months, maybe more, that I can play two or three tournaments week after week without real pain.”
At least his appearance in Dubai will put to rest some of the more scurrilous rumours that accompanied his illness. He was, according to various people and at various times, supposed to be suffering from Aids, from cancer and from obesity. “Tell me,” he said, “where do such things come from?” although he conceded that one of the drugs he had to take when it was thought he had rheumatoid arthritis was also used to treat cancer patients, which could have been the source of that mistake.
As it is, the daily physiotherapy, the exercise, the three hours or more on the practice range and all the time spent on the golf course have left him looking superbly fit. “I have put on three kilos,” he says, “and it is all muscle.” It shows, too.
He has no idea where the rumour of obesity — he was supposed to have soared to almost 127kg, an increase of some 57kg — came from, and the suggestion of Aids can only be pure malice. Olazabal is 31 and still single and once told me: “I would love to get a girlfriend, but what can I offer her? Constant travel and a few days at Christmas.” I asked him if he had not had time at home recently: “Yes. Of course. But I was a prisoner. I could not go out. If I wanted an apple, or a drink of water, I had to ask someone else to get it for me. I could not walk even the shortest distances, and driving was also impossible. I would like some time to be at home and be able to live normally.”
Olazabal is still not free from the problems with his right foot. Although he appeared to walk normally and hit some great shots during the course of a friendly four-ball at Hossegor in France last week, he said afterwards: “My situation is not clear. It is like if I smash you very hard in the face four times a day — you do not like it very much. But if I smash you only once in the day, you say ‘Shit, this feels good.’ The pain I have now is heaven compared to what it was.”
Olazabal, who when he was forced to stop was indisputably one of the world’s great players, only began to believe that he may be able to play competitively again some six weeks ago. Last week, after that round, when he was four under the par of 71, he said: “I had begun to think that I would have to go into course design. One person in my company said that he did not wish me to be ill, but it was certainly good for him because I gave more time to designing.
“But it was not really what I wanted to do. It was something that I could think about to take away my thoughts from the pain. I would get very, very depressed. I never thought of suicide because always in the back of my mind I hoped that I might be made well again and that I could play golf. For a very long time, though, it did not seem like that. For six months I did not touch a club. I did not even go to the pitch and putt green outside the house where I used to live.
“When I was a boy I used to spend most of the day there. When I was 15, I was not very long off the tee, the other boys would be 30 or 40 yards past me, so I had to have a weapon. My weapon was to chip and putt and when I was not on the golf course, I was on that putting green. I could spend 10 hours a day there. But when my foot was at its worst, I could not stand on it for 10 minutes.”
He might still be enduring those agonies were it not for a chance meeting and a chance remark. Because the whole sporting world suffered with him, people kept suggesting things that he might be able to do. One such suggestion came from Adidas, who thought that they might be able to build something special for him.
Olazabal and his manager agreed to go to Munich for measurements and a fitting, although Gomez at one point thought they might not make it. “We had to go via Barcelona and walking through that airport was like something I have never seen. Jose- Maria was walking like an 85-year-old. He was so slow I could not walk slowly enough for him and had to keep stopping. He was bent over like a very old man and he was trying to walk on his heels because he could not bear to put the weight on his feet. At that point,” said Gomez, shaking his head sadly, “I did not know what could happen to make him well again.”
But an amazing thing happened when that flight got to Munich. Olazabal did a double-take when he saw the Adidas man who was meeting the flight, for it was Ulrich Schulte, an old friend from amateur competition days. Olazabal had played with Schulte in Hong Kong in the Eisenhower Trophy and in Chantilly in the European Amateur Championship and as a result, what might have been just a simple guiding job from airport to factory turned into a long conversation.
During its course, says Gomez, the German “saved the life of Jose-Maria Olazabal”. What Schulte did was to ask oh so casually had Olazabal seen Dr Hans-Wilhelm Muller- Wohlfahrt yet? The answer was a blank look and the reply “No”.
Although Olazabal’s condition was not life- threatening, Muller-Wohlfahrt undoubtedly saved the Spaniard’s golfing existence and, quite certainly, gave him a quality of life that in the middle of 1996 had seemed impossible. “I wanted just to walk again at that time,” says Olazabal. “Golf was a very long way from my mind.”
Muller-Wohlfahrt questioned the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, put his patient through a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan and found that there was a hernia between the fifth lumbar and first sacral spinal bones. That, he thought, could be treated, but he wanted to know if Olazabal would do what he was told.
Gomez told him: “He would hit his head 100 times against that wall, he would jump out of that window if it meant he would get better.” That was the start of the healing process, something that has continued to the point where the former Masters champion wants to see, under competitive conditions, how far he has really progressed.
He has put out of his mind the money that he has lost, for this is a man who has never been bothered by it. It takes his manager, naturally, to point out that in prize money and associated fees at least 2-million has gone.
This is a substantial sum, but nothing to the joy that registered in Olazabal’s face on the fairway of the 16th at Hossegor. Going for a drawn tee-shot at a right-hand dogleg, he had overdone it and was behind trees and low overhanging branches. It was difficult, it was a four-iron distance, into the wind and with a front bunker to be carried.
He took his time studying the shot, took a five-iron because he knew that deliberately hooked shots go further, and purposely hit the ball 30m right of the trees. Just when it seemed to be going into the trees on the right, it began to curve back and back and back, until it just carried the bunker, pitched on the green and ran up to 4m from the hole. Even the opponents had to applaud; even they looked happy at what Olazabal had done.
After that, it was a given he would hole the birdie putt, which was also the match- winning putt. “We played just for pride,” said Olazabal, “not even for 100 pesetas.” But that shot was the shot of a champion, a champion who has been badly missed and who the whole world of golf will rejoice to see back on the course. And back as a champion again.
ENDS