I work in adult video. Legacy documentary films, to be specific, but “adult video” is technically accurate and way more fun to say at parties.
Last week I flew from Houston to Sacramento to Portland to Denver and back to Houston. Four flights in one trip. The things I do for a good story.
And this was a good story.
I filmed a gentleman named Homer. Homer was blind. Well, not completely blind. He had something called tunnel vision (some folks call it gun barrel vision), which is about as limiting as it sounds. If you hold a dime out two feet in front of your face, that tiny circle is your entire visual world. Everything else is gone. That’s what Homer lived with.
Homer got his first hole-in-one at age 80.
Blind.
I told this to a buddy of mine who’s a golf pro, expecting him to lose his mind. He wasn’t shocked at all. He said the single hardest thing for a golf instructor to teach is getting people to hold their head still. Golfers are always peeking, always trying to watch the ball, always moving when they shouldn’t be. It ruins the swing.
But if all you can see is a dime-sized circle two feet in front of your face? Well. You’re not peeking at anything. Your head stays perfectly still because there’s nothing to look at. The mechanics just… work.
Homer’s second hole-in-one came ten years later. At ninety.
Stud.
Here’s what I love about this. Most people would hear “blind golfer” and think tragedy. Inspirational overcoming. Cue the violins. But Homer didn’t see it that way (no pun intended, but I’m keeping it). He just played golf. He loved the game. The fact that he couldn’t see most of the course was, to him, a detail. Not the story.
I meet people like this more often than you’d think. People who have every reason to quit, every excuse available, and they just… don’t use them. They don’t even acknowledge the excuses exist. Homer didn’t wake up one day and decide to be inspirational. He woke up and decided to play golf.
The film we made for his family captures exactly that. Not a man defined by what he couldn’t see, but a man defined by what he refused to stop doing.
Four flights. Worth every layover.