I'm Matt Lees. I'm a golfer by trade. You wouldn't think it considering I have one hand.
I've been doing it for a long time. I feel like this is what I was born to do.
Growing up only having one hand and being able to be a golfer at a level
that most people can't even come close to achieving even with two hands.
It's been the drive for me in my personal life and in my golf game.
The difficulty of it and being able to overcome.
I would use athletics to kind of make myself even with the other kids that I went to school with.
People would give me a hard time.
The way that I would deal with that is by excelling in sports and beating them in sports.
So when it got to golf, golf is the hardest thing that I could think of that you could be really good at with one hand.
It's funny most people would think that I come from a family that are big time golfers
but honestly I'm not. I actually got my own dad more involved in the game after I had taken it up.
I grew up caddying and the hundreds of thousands of rounds caddying.
That's the one thing that I picked up and said, you know, if you want to learn about a guy
you need to know somebody, go out and play around the golf with him because by the end of the day you'll know exactly the person he is.
Golf for anybody, with any ability, starting out is very difficult.
It's very difficult to learn and to get the feel for it.
See, 90% of the folks out there that want to learn how to play golf, they'll give up on week one
because it's just a very challenging thing to do.
I mean the golf ball is only, you know, so it's a small ball and you've got to hit it with a stick.
It requires timing, it requires hand-eye coordination.
I have a tattoo of this. It says, in golf as in life.
The way that you go through life, the decisions you make, the way you react to problems that arise,
the way you react to good things happening to you throughout the day at a golf, around a golf,
you have obstacles to overcome, some things go your way, some things don't.
You catch good breaks, you catch bad breaks, sometimes the guy you're playing gets lucky.
There's so many things that come up in a round of golf.
For me, it's almost like my mantra, what I live by.
When I'm out golfing, it's not so much practicing my golf swing or practicing pulling off shots
or what my score is.
My goal when I'm out on the golf course is how well I handle my emotions
and how well I handle the things that I come up to throughout a round of golf.
Golf is a mental game and it's all about being able to control your emotions
and always believing in yourself.
It's not what your score is or how well you're playing.
Days where you can handle yourself and your emotions mentally,
if you can do that, then the scores and then the good shots, they come with that.
The one thing that allowed me to stick with it and to continue to pursue my dream
was the support that I got from my parents and my family.
As absurd as it sounds for an eight or nine year old to say,
I'm going to be a professional golfer and you have one hand.
Now that I'm a little older looking back, the support that they showed when I was younger,
that's the reason why I'm still here today playing golf.
They instilled that belief in myself when I was a little kid
and that's kind of always been with me through the years.
Everybody's got their story.
This one's mine.
