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Graham Roberts gets around the course on a scooter designed to make access easier than what would be the case in a regular golf cart. Images: Geoff Helisma

On sturdy legs

Geoff Helisma

“I’ve played sport all my life,” says Graham Roberts, 85, “and then, when I had troubles, I had to, basically, give it all away.”

Up until his “troubles”, Graham was playing golf “about three times a week … and I had been playing squash, as well as tennis”.

Graham’s troubles, as he puts it, would have stopped most octogenarians in their tracks, literally; however, his love of sport was enough to see him through having both of his legs amputated below the knee and getting back to playing 18 holes of golf, three days a week, at the Maclean Golf Club.

As we sit and chat, seated on the back of Graham’s station wagon, one of his golfing partners arrives, stops and gives him a lift to the shed.

“I better go and get my scooter. I’ll come back. All right. No worries. I’ll come back here.”

Graham walks better than expected for someone who has endured two amputations.

“I had peripheral vascular disease,” he says. “In other words, my arteries were blocking up – the femoral arteries – and I had a knee problem. I said, ‘I need a new knee, but also need my circulation to be improved.’

“So, I went down to Sydney and had stents put in my knee, and I got better, and I was happy. [But] my legs were not all that good. I was playing tennis and the shoes were, perhaps, not the right ones, and I lost both big toenails. One healed, the other didn’t, it ulcerated.

“And of course, there [still] wasn’t enough circulation. It got to the stage where the doctor said, and I’m not a diabetic, ‘I can amputate your toe, or I can amputate your foot, but they’re not gonna heal.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll take it off at the right spot for the best place for a prosthetic, basically, just below knee.”

What about the other leg?

“Oh, the other leg? Well, I got cellulitis, my leg swelled up and…”

The first amputation was in December 2019, the second one in August 2020.

“Well, I had plenty of time to think about it,” Graham quips when asked how he coped, “and the pain was excruciating. I couldn’t sleep in bed, I had to sleep in a chair so that I could get enough blood flow to stop the pain.”

Graham says it was “oh, a few months” before he could play golf again. “I had to learn how to walk. I went through rehab, it was marvellous, at Maclean hospital.”

A self-described golfing “hacker”, Grahams’s handicap has suffered, “It’s gone out to 35 … prior to all of that, I was on about 20 to 24. But look, for me it doesn’t matter, because I’m out there doing it.

“And it’s great, socially.”

What kind of encouragement have you received from your friends?

“Well, one of my friends, even after the first leg was amputated, I wasn’t anywhere near ready to think about it – I’d just learned how to walk, and I could just stand up. He says, ‘Come on, you’re coming up; you gotta play some golf.’ I said, ‘I’m not ready for that yet’. He said, ‘You’re coming anyway.’ So up I went, and he stood behind me and held onto my hips.

“The other fellow, who was just here, he was marvellous. I was in hospital when we had all the fires; he came back from New Zealand and, instead of looking after his own place for the fires at Woombah, he came straight up to the hospital to see me.

“So that’s the sort of friends I’ve got here.”

What would you say to other people who have suffered a medical issue that causes a disability? How do you stay on top of the negativity that must have come to your mind?

“Well, don’t forget, I had quite a long time to think about it. And my attitude was, ‘I’ve always been an optimist’, and I thought, ‘well, it’s just something to conquer; I want to get back to golf.’”

Graham laughs when asked about advice provided by his doctor.

“He gave us a lecture, with my wife there. He said, ‘Yeah, you want to play golf again?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I might be able to help you with that. We might be able to get a wheelchair that we can swivel, you know, cut your golf clubs down to half size and you might be able to play golf.’”

Graham says he didn’t react to the doctor’s prediction that ‘he might be able to play golf’ again, but “at the end of the rehab, when I got to the stage of being able to walk with a wheelie walker, he said, ‘I’ll never give that speech again.’

“Because, by then I could walk.”

Graham Roberts was 83 when one of his legs was amputated due to a medical condition; eight months later the other leg was removed, too. His doctor was sceptical about him making it back to the golf course, but now Graham plays 18 holes, three times a week, at Maclean Golf Club, standing on his own two prostheses. Images: Geoff Helisma