New Zealand phenom Sarah Bradley played golf with a natural’s grace and instinctive ease. Then a dark curtain descended, and in an instant it was gone: the pre-shot routine, the swing thought, the timing, the target, the cadence. All of it vanished the moment a car stopped her head the way a floor stops a falling egg.
The sophomore golfer at Oklahoma State had been dreaming a troubled dream on the drive home from a post-Christmas visit to Mount Maunganui on New Zealand’s east coast. The sun shone bright that late afternoon, Jan. 5, 2008, the beginning of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Brad, the sleeping girl’s dad, had the wheel. Sarah, fatigued from a day of golf and swimming, dozed in the fully reclined front passenger seat. In light traffic, Brad rolled southwest along Highway 1 at about 65 miles per hour. It was Sarah’s last night in town; she’d be flying back to the States in the morning.
And then they were skidding. The Bradley’s gold Highlander swerved to the right, into oncoming traffic (they drive on the left in New Zealand). Three tons of car and humanity pirouetted – until another car T-boned their vehicle on the passenger side. Did Sarah feel her neck become the tip of a whip, or the humerus inside her left arm tear away from its scapula, or the split-second onrush and impact of glass and metal? She doesn’t remember.
Everything she “knows” about the accident Sarah learned later: that she lost consciousness for 15 minutes; that it took two hours to cut her from the flattened tin can of the family car; and all the hubbub of sirens, doctors and Waikato Hospital. Memory returned 10 days post-accident. Only then did she recall that she was already in pain before her head hit the door.
A lot of Sarah Bradley simply disappeared that afternoon, not least her identity. She was a golfer – who in a violent instant forgot how to play golf. “I’d look in a mirror and not know who I was,” she recalls. “I’d always been ‘the golfer,’ and then suddenly I was ‘the girl who’d been in an accident.’ People define themselves by what they do, and what I do was snatched away from me.”
Bradley asked the mask in the mirror the most profound philosophical question: “Who are you?” Now, she thinks she knows.
New Zealand slumbers in the South Pacific, its two main islands separated by the 20-mile wide Cook Strait and united by incomparable natural beauty. Sarah Jessica Bradley hails from Cambridge, on the North Island, a leafy village of 16,000 between Hamilton and Rotorua on the Waikato River. Her quiet, left-handed twin sister, Loren, majored in photography and art. Loquacious Sarah, a surfer turned (right-handed) golfer, was the jock.
Bradley was delighted to accept a scholarship to Oklahoma State, a force in women’s golf, and she thrived in Stillwater on every level. She earned good grades, developed deep friendships and made the All-Big 12 team as a freshman.
But a couple of weeks before her return home at Christmas of her sophomore year, Bradley, then 20, presented a fake ID in a college bar and got busted. The Stillwater justice system demanded a night in jail, a public rebuke and 75 hours of community service. Humiliated, Bradley lost weight and her sunny disposition. She turned inward upon her return to Cambridge and worked out like a maniac several times a day. And then, her troubled mind suffered that horrible blow.
As her separated shoulder and whiplashed neck healed, Bradley confronted the frightening, surreal aspects of life with a traumatic brain injury. For a few months sound and light felt like pure pain; later, colors popped more beautifully than ever before, and music sounded deeper, richer and more nuanced. “It was like I was seeing things for the first time,” she says. “I was becoming more like my sister.” With her logical left brain mostly shut down, Sarah felt more altruistic and spiritual, but Loren was distressed that her twin – “the strong one,” she says – now seemed “reliant on help and unable to trust her instincts.” Loren told Sarah to snap out of it. She couldn’t.
Bradley’s fight to get her groove back is not the standard epic of an athlete recovering from knee surgery, cancer or a broken bone. No cast came off to tell her she was better. “It was all unknown how long it would take me to heal,” she says. “A constant mind game: If I had a headache, was it just a headache, or my head injury causing me grief?” Insomnia, nightmares, dizziness, headaches, and crippling fatigue plagued her. “It’s like I’m in a loud, loud tunnel with hundreds of busy people,” she told a friend. Amnesia made the past so dim it was hard to see; new information – such as who she’d seen the day before, and what they’d talked about – was elusive, like sand slipping through her fingers.
Bradley’s first comment about the aftermath regards her father – who was also concussed, and may have had a seizure, causing the accident: “It was a really hard time with Dad. He took the blame and got charged. For four or five months, he couldn’t look me in the eye.”
She retreated to a neighbor’s house two blocks away. The home of Mark and Gaylene Eyre was quiet as a library and came equipped with three miniature schnauzers, each of whom snuggled with Sarah in a giant red recliner during her long afternoon naps. “She had lost her usual zest and sparkle,” recalls Gaylene. “There were moments of total frustration and even tears because her memory was so limited. She expected to get up and get back to her old life but had to accept that her old life was gone. She had to find a new path to discover who Sarah Bradley was.”
Advised to stay positive at all costs, and to keep a record of her progress, Bradley started a diary. Her journals juxtaposed affirmations from self-help manuals – “Focus on radiating out into the universe feelings of joy and happiness” with “was feeling great, no problems, then after an hour I had some sort of panic attack” and “focus was bad. Reading things I couldn’t get the hang of. Didn’t follow the schedule. Got a bit itsy-bitsy with everything.”
At a high school soccer field with a satchel of practice balls and a couple of clubs, Sarah searched for her identity as if it were a lost coin. She applied her old pre-swing mantras – “Up and at ‘em!” and “Move your ponytail!” (follow through) – to no avail. “I’m not sure golf hurt or hindered my recovery,” she recalls. “It was really frustrating. I would stand over the ball, look at my target, and by the time I looked at the ball again, I’d forgotten what I had to do next.”
In April, with Sarah’s fingernails dug into the seat cushion and her right foot stomping a non-existent brake pedal, she and her mother drove two hours north to Auckland. “Suffers significant phonophobia painful sensitivity to sound and copes poorly with stimuli,” reported neuro-psychologist Dr. James Cunningham. “Cognitive fatigue and can only concentrate optimally for up to one hour at any time … significant cognitive deficits in non- verbal learning, visuo-spatial abilities and retarded psycho-motor speed … ” It all sounded like disaster for a golfer.
But by this time Sarah’s brain was re-wiring itself, and she had undertaken a deeper journey than merely recovering her golf game. She had read and re-read “My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuro-anatomy instructor whose left-brain cerebral hemorrhage led her to discover that deep inner peace came from the circuitry of the right brain. We should all try to get there, said Taylor. Bradley was there. At various retreats in the gorgeous New Zealand wilderness; at chi gong and yoga practices; and while feeling acupuncture needles altering the electrical flow in her body, the golfer who was no longer a golfer asked again: Who am I?
Dr. Cunningham finally cleared her to travel. In July, seven months after the accident, Bradley left the dead of the New Zealand winter for the 110-degree heat of Oklahoma.
It was a bad trip. San Francisco customs detained Bradley for most of a day, her name having popped up from that fake ID fiasco. On the last leg of her journey, a violent thunderstorm over the Oklahoma panhandle bucked and shook the jet on its way into Tulsa. On the ground, the exit door wouldn’t open. “Looks like God don’t want somebody in this plane in Oklahoma,” quipped a passenger. Cell phones wouldn’t work because of the electrical storm, so Sarah couldn’t call a friend for a ride. It was 2 a.m., and she was exhausted. She lay in a corner on the terminal floor and cried, her first tears in months.
At first golf provided mental ease. “I’d go out and play a few holes at Karsten Creek OSU’s home course at dawn. Incredible – it was like I was walking through some sort of dream.” But on her first attempt at a full round, dizziness and vomiting overcame her on the 16th hole, and she had to be hospitalized. Thereafter, golf often overloaded her circuits to the point that spontaneous naps were imperative, not optional. A piece of shady ground was a bed, her golf bag was her pillow. Once, a grounds worker nudged her awake with his foot. “You OK?” he asked.
“Sarah wanted to get back up to full speed but none of us, including Sarah, understood the full scope of her injury,” says OSU associate head coach Alan Bratton. “She was her old, smiling self, and her swing looked better than ever, but she fatigued so quickly.”
By Christmas break the disappointing truth couldn’t be avoided. The school offered Bradley a medical red shirt – she’d keep her scholarship, but not her place on the team. She decided instead to just go back home to New Zealand, and no hard feelings. But Donnie Darr, an assistant for the OSU men’s team, suggested she consider a transfer to his alma mater, Kent State. That Kent is a mid-major powerhouse is no secret in the world of college golf. Its men’s teams have produced 2003 British Open champion Ben Curtis among a handful of tour players, and a sixth-place finish in the 2008 NCAA. Its women’s teams have won the Mid-American Conference tournament every year since the program began in 1999 – with an average winning margin of more than 37 shots. Women’s coach Mike Morrow has been named MAC Coach of the Year nine times.
Bradley visited frigid Kent in January, but reluctantly, almost as a favor to Darr and to Morrow, who seemed so nice on the phone. She felt at home immediately. “Mike had complete faith in me, and he’d never seen me hit a shot,” says Bradley. “I thought, ‘I can just be me here.’