GRAND BLANC, Mich. — Tracy Ramin remembers well the split-second event in 1998 that forever changed his life.
Head of his own construction business in his 20s, while making his way to a job site outside of Grand Blanc one day, the ladder on his truck became loose and fell off into the road. When Ramin pulled off the right side of the busy road and got out of his truck to retrieve it, the driver of an oncoming pickup truck did not see the young man attempting to recover his ladder in time. Ramin was hit by the truck going 80 mph.
“Bones were ripped out and shattered and my left shoulder was wrecked to the point where I have no working muscles left,” he said. “My jaw was broken in two spots, I had a hole in my side wide enough to fit a baseball into and my leg was amputated at the knee.”
Ramin lost virtually all the blood in his body and was given a 2% chance of living.
“I beat the odds,” he said. “Now, every day is a good day.”
On Tuesday of this week’s Ally Challenge at historic Warwick Hills in Grand Blanc, Ramin was on hand to share his story which, given the nature of the McClaren Adaptive Golf Clinic underway, was irrelevant. Whether it was something an individual was born with or something the result of tragedy, everyone that morning was a part of the growing adaptive golf movement.
The Ally Challenge, McLaren Health Care and the McLaren Flint Foundation teamed up with the NAGA and the USAGA to host the clinic featuring five trained adaptive golf coaches. The men and women provided instruction to a group of more than two dozen adaptive (physically disabled) golfers via a wide array of adaptive golf equipment. The clinic provided an atmosphere of camaraderie and included McLaren Health Care physical therapy patients and participants identified by the National Amputee Golf Association, United States Adaptive Golf Association and The Disability Network.
Today, Ramin is the Executive Director of the NAGA, which hosts the National Amputee and Adaptive Championships.
“Many adaptive players are seated players, so you’re typically looking down on them,” Ramin said. “But, nobody wants to hear ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ These men and women just want to be looked in the eye and treated as an equal.”
The best lesson adaptive golfers can get has nothing to do with technique, but everything to do with attitude.
“It all boils down to attitude,” Ramin said. “If you think the world is over because of a setback, well, then, it may be. But, having clinics like these for people at home to either see or read about really does encourage and inspire. They realize that if people with all kinds of disabilities can do it, so can they.”