Golf: Cart changes life

There are not many positives to come out of a life-threatening injury, but Bradley Iles tells DYLAN CLEAVER you can still set out on a quest for perfection.



Most who have come through near-death experiences will happily tell you life, as lucky as they are to have clung to it, will never be the same. Bradley Iles is the same.

New Zealand's most promising golfer admits that the July accident _ where he fell off the back of a golf cart, fracturing his skull and leaving him seriously ill in a US hospital _ has changed him.

"The real thing I've noticed is that I like things to be a certain way," he says from his parents' Papamoa home. "Before, I was just 'whatever'. Now I'm a real perfectionist and I don't know why. It doesn't even feel like it's me that's doing it. I can't stop it, but it's just the way I need things to be right now _ I need them to be perfect.

"It's weird, but I'm hoping it will help my golf."

Last week Iles properly completed 18 holes of golf for the first time since his accident.

He would have rather being playing in Puerto Rico, where New Zealand is competing in the Eisenhower Trophy, but at the moment any course will do.

"I played 18 at the Pauanui opening day last weekend and that felt pretty good," Iles said.

The Bay of Plenty player initially thought he would make the most prestigious amateur tournament in the world, but concedes that was just the morphine talking.

In fact, lying in his Savannah, Georgia, hospital bed, Iles thought he could do just about anything.

"I was so messed up, on morphine with all sorts of needles coming out of me. I thought I was just lying in my bed waiting to get up and go to my next tournament.


"I tried to jump out of bed one day to get out of hospital but I couldn't walk so I just flopped on the ground and they had to chuck me back in bed.


"That's why I thought I was still going to play the Eisenhower, because I didn't think I was too badly damaged."


Iles can't remember what put him there, but has talked to the people who can. To be truthful, "remembering" isn't Iles' strong suit at the moment.

Recent tests have shown Iles to be in the lowest 10 per centile range for memory retention.

"I remember up to about an hour before the accident and nothing until seeing my parents at the end of the bed eight days later," Iles said.

The accident happened when Iles was out looking for alligators at a South Carolina golf club with another couple of highly-rated amateurs.


"I was on the back of the cart, I don't know why because I was in the passenger seat or driving all night."

They then came to a fork in the path and Iles, thinking they were going left, leaned that way. They went hard right.

"I flipped off, spun in the air ... and cracked the right side of my head on the path."

His mates didn't hear a thing and continued on.

"They came back a bit later and found me lying in a pool of blood."

Iles' story created headline news back here and his plight attracted the attention of a multitude of well-wishers, including Inga Tuigamala, Phil Tataurangi, and even a couple who owned a dairy he was a customer at.

But all the wishing-wells in the world weren't going to get Iles straight back on to the golf course _ which, paradoxically, might just have helped his game.


"It's as good as it ever was _ I feel like I'm hitting it longer, actually.


"I didn't have a lot of motivation to do the exercises and didn't stick with them [before]. I was a bit of a procrastinator. I would do them now and then, but most of the time I'd just flag it and go and play golf.

"Now I've got a lot of time on my hands so I'm getting into it and hitting it longer is always nice."

Not that his return to competitive golf will be trouble free.

"I've got side-effects from the seizure medication I'm on _ I get the shakes, which can't be too good for the putting."

There is a historical precedent he can call on here. Harry Vardon (six British Opens and a US Open) contracted tuberculosis when he was a young adult and had to contend with shaking hands for the rest of his career.

Iles suffers from allergies too, and the medication he now takes has exacerbated the problem.

Again, the 20-year-old can call on some pretty impressive company. Australian Steve Elkington, the winner of a USPGA championship and possessor of one of the most technically proficient swings in the game, has found chronic allergies a greater obstacle than the famous Road Hole at St Andrews.

Physically, Iles will carry the scar on the side of his head for life.

"It's a motivational scar if nothing else," he says.

"This has set me back a year, maybe two years.

"I'm just going to work hard through this year. I still know what needs to be done, so I'll be working hard through 2005 and going for a spot on the tour at the end of the year ['05] or the year after that.

"I'll probably go back to the US next year and do the same things I did this year ...

"... except I'll watch out for alligators and carts."

- THE HERALD ON SUNDAY