When Paul Wood, a research engineer who oversees Ping's Innovations Department, read an e-mail from Mesa's Jeff Lewis asking if it was possible for the Phoenix-based golf company to build him a set of custom clubs, Wood approached it as he would most requests.
"We're a fitting company," he said. "That's our business model. Every set is custom built anyway. So let's figure out a way to utilize that and get him in the right set."
Simple enough - only Lewis is a quadruple amputee. He lost his hands and feet in 2005, but longed to play again.
"I wasn't very good," Lewis said of his game before 2005. "I mostly played with guys who were better than me and put up with me."
A Mesa Mountain View math teacher, Lewis had been accidentally shot in 1985 by a neighbor boy who broke into his family's gun locker and started firing at his back fence.
Lewis happened to be on the other side of that fence.
He lost his spleen, but the bullet's real damage wouldn't come for 20 more years. That's when Lewis contracted a common strep infection - which became deadly without a spleen to fight it.
He lay in unconscious for three weeks as his body shut off circulation to his extremities.
Doctors recommended to his girlfriend Carol - who now is his wife - that she let him go. She wouldn't and surgeons removed his hands, feet and pieces of his nose and ears to save him.
He awoke with his limbs gone, but not his enthusiasm for life.
Within nine months, Lewis was back in his classroom and taught for 2 more years before retiring.
And what's a guy do in retirement in Arizona? Lewis plays golf. He also bowls, swims, runs every April in Pat's Run Tempe and is somewhat of a pool shark.
Initially, he tried swinging his old clubs with an arm his prosthetist, Randy West of Hanger Prosthetics, built a slot into using electrical conduit.
Lewis couldn't make good contact and it was next to impossible to change clubs.
"I contacted several of the major golf manufacturers," Lewis said. "They all told me they couldn't help me. I contacted Ping and they said, 'Can you be here tomorrow at noon?' "
Not that the project required a rocket scientist, but Wood, who attended University of St. Andrews in Scotland, does hold a doctorate in solar-particle physics.
He challenged his engineers and summer interns to come up with a solution for Lewis.
"We had some real outside-the-box thinking," Wood mused. "One of our engineers asked if we could attach a metal piece to his bone. Jeff's wife said, 'Do you have any idea how painful bone surgery is?' "
Lewis said the first brainstorming session lasted more than three hours.
Krista Schnell, a mechanical-engineering student who is finishing up her undergraduate work this year at Stanford, came up with a workable prototype that would allow Lewis to lock different clubs into a prosthetic arm.
Ping produced a set of five clubs - driver, fairway wood, 7 iron, wedge and putter - that Schnell's device could lock into his right prosthetic arm, which had a longer stump and thus more stability.
But the prosthetic was straight, and Lewis's initial attempts to play didn't go so well.
"I had to tee it up (right of) my right foot and couldn't get the club on the ball," he said.
He asked another prosthetist, Ray Fikes of Fikes Brace & Limb in Mesa, to put an angle in the arm with the Ping locking device.
Fikes built it, and just for - well - kicks, he also attached a clubhead from a wedge to an old sneaker.
That's right; Lewis actually has a "foot wedge."
The angled arm works like a charm, and Fikes came up with a tee that also is easy for Lewis to get the ball onto.
"I'm hitting the ball very well," said Lewis, who plays in a Thursday-morning league at Apache Creek Golf Club in Mesa.
"I don't hit it far. I've had a few pars, a lot of bogeys but no real chances for a birdie yet. I can hit a driver about 150 yards.
"The blessing in all this is that I hit everything right down the middle. I don't have a wrist to break down, so I don't hook it or slice it."
Ping, which also is building a bag that will hold Lewis' set shaft-up so he can more easily change clubs, didn't even charge him for the work.
"The great thing about working here is you can go to a vice president with something like this and say, 'Can we do this?' And they say, 'It's the right thing to do.' " Wood said.
Plus, the company has benefited from the technology. The locking device already is being used in a putter test machine and on "Ping Man," the company's mechanical swing-test golfer to more easily switch out clubs.
Better still, Ping is incorporating the knowledge it got from working with Lewis into sets it builds for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who take part in the Wounded Warrior Project.
It utilizes sports as a rehabilitation tool for servicemen.
Ping already has fit a triple amputee and several double and single amputees, plus soldiers who have suffered brain or other bodily injuries. Those who complete the Wounded Warrior eight-week program get a free set of Ping clubs and a custom bag.
Meanwhile, between speaking engagements and running the amputee support group "Lively Limbs" (you can contact Lewis about it at his website, dontworryaboutme.com) Lewis is hoping to begin playing in National Amputee Golf Association events. He also has Fikes working on a new bowling hand so he can try to improve on his best score of 185 since that brush with death.
"Fitting anyone and gaining them 20 extra yards with the right set is a great feeling," Wood said. "Multiply that by 10 and you know how we feel about helping Jeff. It's a cool thing to see him playing the game and enjoying it so much."
This article is from "The Arizona Republic" Wednesday Dec.8, 2010 by Bob Young
I have posted 3 photos of Jeff (taken by Dave Seibert of "The Arizona Republic") and his custom clubs on the Photos' Page..
