Watching Issa Nlareb’s swing, you’d never know he didn’t take a golf lesson until five years after turning professional. For 13 years, observing others and reading two-time major champion Greg Norman’s book were the closest things the Cameroonian had to formal instruction.
Nlareb was just 11 years old when his mom died. Living on the streets near a golf course, he began collecting balls to earn money to survive, eventually picking up the game himself and becoming a caddie. However, his life dramatically changed in 2018 when he contracted bacterial meningitis while at a tournament in Egypt.
The golfer developed sepsis, fell into a coma and required the amputation of both legs and most of his fingers. He wasn’t sure he’d ever play the sport again.
Life has thrown a lot of challenges Nlareb’s way in his 34 years, yet while speaking to CNN Sports, he’s as laid-back and confident as ever, believing he can be one of the top disabled golfers in the world.
Finding golf
Nlareb lived with his dad and stepmom in a house near Yaoundé Golf Club in Cameroon’s capital after his mother’s death, leaving school and taking care of four step-siblings before running away from home a year later.
Eleven years old, “pissed off” at the situation and living on the streets, most nights he was picked up by the police and brought in to sleep in the station. One evening, though, he ran.
“I hid myself in the golf course. When I stand up in the morning in the golf course, I was looking around me and I found a golf ball. And I took two golf balls, I went out, and I see the golf course. When I see the golf course, I was like, ‘Wow,’” Nlareb said.
Impressed by the scale and grandeur of the course and thinking the balls belonged to the players on the hole, he washed and offered them to the men. They gave him a dollar in return.
“That was my first contact with golf,” Nlareb said.
With no school, he spent a lot of his time watching the players at Yaoundé Golf Club, thinking about how the players could improve their shots. He visualized this all without owning a club or having played a round.
There was one man – who Nlareb recalls as “Mr. Davou” – who attempted the same shot day after day on the 13th hole.
“There’s out of bounds to the right, water in front of the green and behind the green. So, the guy was trying to go over the water every time and he lost some balls,” Nlareb said, smiling at the memory. “I was laughing, and he say, ‘Stop laughing. What can you do in this position?’”
Despite never having swung a club, the 11-year-old had been learning the game since earning that first dollar and decided to offer some wisdom: “I say, ‘You got to play to the left, and you come back right to play the green.’ And he said, ‘Come, we make a challenge.’”
Davou handed him a three iron – not an easy club for even a more seasoned golfer. But Nlareb was up for the challenge and made it onto the green following the path he advised Davou to take. His success earned him his first golf club – that hard-to-hit three iron.
Nlareb continued collecting and cleaning balls, practicing with his iron and developed friendships with the golfers. He often helped players aim shots and find their balls on the hilly course.
All that time, he was on his own from age 11 to 17; no family, no school, just the money he could earn at markets and on the course. It was only once an aunt learned of his whereabouts and that he hadn’t heard from his father in six years that Nlareb returned home and went back to school to take his caddie exams.
“I was playing golf when I was 12, but I was not playing the regular golf like stroke play, 18 holes. No, I was playing three holes, one hole, half a hole sometimes,” Nlareb remembered.
Caddying at Yaoundé Golf Club allowed him to play complete rounds once a week – usually Mondays after events finished for the day. Things soon accelerated after that.
“After a year, I was number one of the caddies,” Nlareb said. “So, I turned pro in 2009 in Yaoundé.” He didn’t buy his first set of clubs until after turning professional.
A life-altering illness
“My dream was to be the best player in the world, but my other was to beat Tiger Woods,” Nlareb said. “(But) I realized that there’s a big difference between the course Tiger Woods is playing and the course I play. … So, I (got) my first golf lesson when I was 24 (in 2015),” Nlareb told CNN Sports.
After more than five years competing on African tours, Nlareb set goals for himself to slowly work toward those dreams. In 2015, he decided to try his hand at qualifying for the third division circuit in Europe, the Alps Tour. He had three young children and, with two quick wins at the Gabon and Senegal Opens, was at the peak of his career and personal life up to that point. That is until he fell ill at the Ein Bay Open in Egypt in February 2018.
He awoke from a five-day coma to learn he had contracted bacterial meningitis and had developed septic shock. A terrified Nlareb was told he needed to have both legs above the knee and both arms above the elbow amputated.
“I refused because I was so afraid,” Nlareb said. “I say, ‘Why?’ and I say, ‘No, no, no, don’t do that. Leave me dead.’”
The fear was all-encompassing: Nlareb couldn’t imagine a life with no arms or legs. He waited a month until his visa in Egypt ended and transferred to a Cameroonian hospital. There, he once again heard a prognosis he wasn’t ready to accept.
His stepmother was working in Belgium at the time and called local hospitals to see if they would take Nlareb’s case. He flew to Brussels where his latest doctor sat him down and explained amputation was his only viable option, although things had slightly improved.
“He wrote everything (down for) me. He showed me. And I (saw) that difference between the last two months where I would get to be amputated and where I would be amputated right now.”
Three months after waking from his coma, Nlareb underwent an operation and had both legs below the knee and most of his fingers amputated.
In his recovery process, the doctor explained the importance of taking things slow – starting with just 30 minutes a day of getting used to his prosthetics and building up from there. However, after a further three months in isolation to rebuild his immune system, he was eager to establish his new normal as soon as possible.
“When they put me in the prosthetics, I walked all day long. But it was a big mistake,” he remembered. “I wore off my skin. I was not able anymore to put the prosthetics on my feet.
“There’d be pain for me. I was tight in my heart. I cry.”
Relearning to love golf
Nlareb refused to think about golf after his amputations: “I forget about golf. I give up.” He went “back (to Cameroon) to take care of my family, enjoy my life,” adding that he didn’t “want to play anymore golf because I was so sad.”
However, his friends had other plans. They forced him back onto a course a couple of months post-surgery to help his physical and mental recovery.
His first swing back on the course went “50 meters (55 yards) with one hand.”
For the 6-foot-4-inch Nlareb, who was used to crushing his drives well over 200 yards before his illness, it was a difficult thing to take.
It was at that point that he turned his focus to teaching. He went to school for two years to grow and develop as a golf teaching professional and began coaching a team in Cameroon: “I learned how to share my passion with people.”
However, a tournament at the end of 2019 left him fuming. “They played so bad. … I was so pissed off,” Nlareb said. “How’d they do that? Even me, (hitting) 50 meters, I can make bogey in the hole. How can they play so bad?”
Angry and disappointed, he didn’t expect his then five-year-old daughter to find the solution.
“She smiled and said, ‘Dad, you need to play golf,’” Nlareb recalled. His daughter suggested wrapping a strap around his hands and club to give him the power and grip to swing with two hands again.
“It was eight o’clock – in Cameroon, night comes at seven – I was like, ‘Why don’t you come with (me) and we run and go directly to golf?’” The father and daughter spent all night at the course.
In 2019, Nlareb returned to the pro game via the African Golf Tour. Two years later, now residing in France, he made a remarkable comeback, making the cut in the very Alps Tour tournament he contracted meningitis three years earlier.
Finding a sponsor
The World Golf rankings for people with disabilities was created in 2019, a year after Nlareb’s illness and amputations, while the Golf for the Disabled (G4D) Tour didn’t launch until February 2022. Disability golf events are still in their infancy.
Last year, Nlareb played in the third annual US Adaptive Open – his first time visiting the United States – where he won the multiple limb amputee category and placed fourth overall for men. He won the same category and finished tied for seventh overall this year.
What did he earn for twice winning his category and two top-10 finishes? Nothing.
“There is not currently a purse for the U.S. Adaptive Open,” the USGA confirmed in an email to CNN Sports. “We announced recently that Deloitte will provide financial support in the form of travel-related expense reimbursements to all players in the field this year, and we are incredibly excited about that.”
Nlareb estimated it would have cost $10,000 to take part in the US Adaptive Open if he didn’t have sponsors and hadn’t received an exemption into the tournament due to his result at last summer’s edition.
“You pay for your flight ticket. You pay your reservation hotel, your car, and you pay your entry fee,” the eighth-ranked player in the World Ranking for Golfers with Disability said.
And he’s lucky in that he’s received free prosthetics since 2021 after meeting with Alain Montean, the then-president of a prosthetics company. Without these, Nlareb estimated it would cost him $50,000 every two years to replace.
The exposure gained from the US Adaptive Open is significant, but paying thousands for events is not sustainable. Nlareb needs to play more golf to gain a following, but he can’t play tournaments without sponsors and external funding. It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to see a way out of.
“I know I have good level, but it’s not that easy without a sponsor because it’s very expensive,” Nlareb said. “Just to register in the event it’s very expensive. Today, I’m a dad of three and it’s not easy for me to take care of my children and to play my golf.”
“It’s a big event. … So to be there, I’m coming close to my dream because from there, the world can know about my story,” the 34-year-old told CNN Sports. “I need the support. I need the help. And I got a good game. I live for golf. I can’t live without golf. Golf is my life.”
The post From sleeping on a golf course to turning pro: How Issa Nlareb rediscovered his love of the game after illness appeared first on CNN.
