The World Deaf Golf champion as a 16-year-old in 2012, Jack McLeod defied his disability to become a PGA professional and now bona fide tour player
I was born profoundly deaf. Mum contracted rubella virus when she was pregnant with me. It affects the baby in a lot of ways and one of the effects is hearing loss. I got the right-side cochlear implanted when I was 12 months old and the left one done when I was 11.
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I never really learned how to sign. It was a family decision when I was younger to put me in mainstream school and learn just like a normal child with a bit of hardware.
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The technology is evolving every year. I’ve got implants in my head and then this outside bit just sits in behind my ear. It’s kind of like an antenna; it sends signals to the implant, which go through into my brain or into my ears.
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It’s hard with background noise, especially when I was working in the pro shop at Mona Vale Golf Club. Answering a phone call was pretty hard. I can hear about 95 percent on the right side and 42 percent on the left side with both on, but without them on, nothing. I get some good sleep.
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The only time I take them off is when I’m sleeping – so they can charge – and when I’m in the shower or in the water at the beach. I have to be with other people at the beach so they can tell me which way to go or just help me out. When I’m in the water, I can’t hear the waves crashing without them on. That’s something I’ve never been able to hear.
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Mum was just getting started in golf and would take me around Avalon Golf Course, a little nine-holer in northern Sydney. She gave me a couple of clubs and let me have a hit and I just got hooked on it. I was about 7 then and I joined Bayview when I was 9 and went from there.
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The first time I played golf without my implants was a week before the World Deaf Golf Championships that I won in Japan in 2012. It was so different. So different. You lose your balance a little bit, but it’s more just relying on feel to know if you’ve hit a good shot. And obviously it’s peaceful. You can have a car drive past you and never know it
was there.
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I lost the appetite to play golf for a while. I started greenkeeping and really enjoyed that. But then I started to really miss playing, so Mum and Dad suggested doing the PGA Membership Pathway Program. The whole idea was to play through it but then also have a back-up plan of coaching. I looked after the junior program at Mona Vale and enjoyed coaching.
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My boss, Gerard Kelly at Mona Vale, was so supportive. He was just so helpful with everything. He knew the challenges I had. If there were phone calls and stuff like that and I couldn’t understand, he’d take over for me. It’s tough, but you’ve just got to embrace it. I think it makes you stronger as a person going through these challenges.
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I finished the PGA Membership Pathway Program at Mona Vale at the end of 2022 and then at the start of 2024, I told my boss that my goal was to play more golf. Everyone was asking whether I was going to go to Q-School and my boss encouraged me to go down and give it a crack. The last thing I wanted was to be five years down the track thinking, I wish I gave it a go.
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I was just so happy to get through. It was so stressful. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. So stressful.
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I got through First Stage on the number and then last day of Final Stage I was feeling the nerves. I thought I was gone after 12 holes in the last round. I was seven-over or something and played the last five or six holes in one-under. One of the boys came up to me and said, “Did you make par on the last?” I said, “Yeah, that’s me done.” He goes, “No, you’re in. You’re on the same score as me. You’re in.” Wow. OK. I’ve got a tour card. I’m a tour player. It didn’t sink in until a couple of days later when I was like, All right, now I’ve got to get a team around me and put in some work.
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We always like to have a few inside jokes with my deafness. If someone’s yelling at me from the course they’ll say, “Oh, you can’t hear me.” The guys on tour, they’re pretty helpful. They’re all really good guys. They know what challenges I have and if I misheard them or something, I just say it could be that the wind’s really strong. Then they’ll ask me questions about it. It turns into a conversation rather than, He’s deaf, I don’t want to talk to him.
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Being an example of what we can achieve is a big thing. Yes, it’s hard. Losing one of your senses is hard, and I think hearing is probably one of the bad ones that you can lose because you’ve got to communicate. We’re all ambassadors in our own way; we’re all trying to promote golf together. We just don’t quite get the recognition we deserve.