The Amazing My Shot With Peter Oosterhuis
/As some grim Alzheimer's-related news surfaced in North Carolina in Josh Shaffer's in-depth look at former pro golfer and architect Gene Hamm's murder of a care facility roommate, effects of the terrible disease are being felt by someone we all "know".
Guy Yocom talks to Peter Oosterhuis for a September Golf Digest My Shot in the wake of the English golfing great announcing that he has the disease.
It started like this. I've had OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] since I was a young man. I used to keep super-detailed logs of every shot at every tournament. That statistics program they have on the PGA Tour--what the devil is it called, again?--I invented an early version of that many years ago. When I moved to commentating, the OCD worked to my advantage. I'd study facts, statistics and tendencies and then run them into my commentary. A couple of years ago I found I was coming up blank on this information. When an OCD person can't obsess the way he used to, he starts to obsess about his inability to obsess. The anxiety isn't pretty. Over the years I was prescribed medications to manage the OCD, but there came a day when the drugs stopped working. So I went to a neurologist here in Charlotte, and in July of 2014 I got the diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer's disease.