To give someone a chance. In some instances, a second chance. To see the similarities, not the differences. To understand we are all connected in some way through our humanity and to foster that connection. This is inclusion in action. And in golf, it lives in Empower Golf.
The story of Empower Golf is the story of two remarkable men who suffered catastrophic injuries and then set about helping others. It is the story of the inspiring people they serve. And it’s a story of love, fate and the game underpinning it all. It is a powerful story, all of it, and it’s not finished yet.
As a youngster, James Gribble was exposed to a range of sports by his parents, but wasn’t really into golf until his university days, when his godfather, on a visit from the UK, insisted they play together. A couple of good shots later and he was hooked.
Such was his passion for golf that one summer he played 36 holes for 20 days straight, bringing his handicap from 15 down to four, thereafter hovering between two and six. Not surprisingly, thoughts of a career in the game germinated.
Alongside this, he completed an economics degree at the University of Sydney before moving to the UK, where he applied for both corporate positions and jobs in golf. On the 12th of November 2001, his parallel journeys collided.
“I had this sliding doors moment. I got two phone calls within 10 minutes of each other; one was Roehampton Golf Club, saying there was a position in the golf shop, and the other was from Halifax Bank of Scotland with an offer to join its graduate program,” Gribble told Golf Australia magazine.
For practical reasons, he chose the latter.
With his corporate career seemingly set, rising to senior level at several banking institutions, he had an enviable lifestyle which indulged his passions of golf, adventure and travel.
But redundancy during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 had him considering other options in search of a more impactful career. Microfinance goes where more commercial banks generally don’t, making loans available to people and communities of low means in an effort to improve lives and challenge poverty.
“That was one of the reasons I went to Africa; I wanted to explore opportunities, explore more of Africa and try to catch a tigerfish,” Gribble said.
In search of this elusive predatory game fish, he headed to a remote island along the Zambezi River in Zambia.
The night before the intended expedition, Gribble was dehydrated after a long run in 40-degree heat. He blacked out while sitting on a stool and fell backwards onto sand, severely bruising his spinal cord and breaking the C4 and C5 vertebrae in his neck. When he came to, he was staring at the thatched ceiling, unable to move, and knew instantly he had sustained a spinal injury. In fact, he was now quadriplegic with voluntary movement from the shoulders up only.
It would be 12 hours before a Medevac helicopter could reach him and, crucially, 30 hours before he reached a sophisticated neurological hospital in Johannesburg, where he spent 10 days in intensive care following surgery to fuse the fractured vertebrae.
After five weeks, Gribble returned to Sydney, initially a patient at Royal North Shore Hospital, before extensive rehabilitation in The Royal Rehab Centre in Ryde and even longer at home to allow him to try to gain further movement.
You might think golf was furthest from his mind through all of this – especially as he was told in the early days he would never play again – but not so.
“It was one of the first things on my mind,” he said. “In the first couple of nights in ICU, I would play rounds of golf in my mind – shots, holes, courses. My journey back to golf started straight away in my mind, but the physical side wasn’t until later.
“In recovery I pushed back on playing golf as a disabled person. I genuinely believed, even three years, that with time and work I’d be able to play normally.”
The realisation, when it came, that this wasn’t going to happen hit hard.
“It was very confronting. Not just golf-wise but life in general. Transitioning from a mentality of it’s only a matter of time and work to, hey, maybe this isn’t going to work, that’s when the real grieving happened, I think.
“But I’m lucky; I didn’t grieve as much as others because when the reality became concrete, I’d been in a wheelchair for three and a half years, so my life was being lived anyway.”
One day, by now – incredibly – able to walk a short distance on crutches, Gribble and his father Roger went to the local park with a golf club. Roger strapped it under James’ arm and removed the right crutch so he could swing. It was a powerful moment.
“Standing up and hitting a ball for the first time after so many years and so much effort, that was pretty emotional. Even now it makes me well up a little bit. It was only a second of movement, but thousands of hours of work and people went into that one golf swing.
“That was my first taste of golf as a person with disability.”
His interest was piqued further by having attended a tournament for disabled golfers and becoming aware of the Paragolfer wheelchair. He was also keen to help others like himself in some way.
The concept of what was to become Empower was the distillation of these ideas and experiences, cemented by the thought: “I can’t be the only one who wants to get back into golf after losing ability.” And so, Empower Golf was born.
It started at Moore Park in Sydney, initially with demonstration days, then clinics and lessons and with growing interest.
Four months in, Gribble received a call from Ben Tullipan.
Tullipan shouldn’t, by rights, even be alive. On a business trip to Indonesia, he wandered into the Sari Club in Bali on October 12, 2002. The world was on high edge after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, but Tullipan just needed some water.
He was standing a mere five metres from one of three bombs detonated that night, killing 202 people – 88 of them Australian – and injuring hundreds more. Every person within a 15-metre radius of the bomb died, bar him.
Tullipan’s injuries were so severe, he was deemed to be dead and a cloth was put over him. Only when someone detected small movement was he triaged and sent to hospital, where he was given just a five percent chance of survival. In summary: he lost both legs, most of his stomach muscles, broke nearly every bone in his body and skull, suffered 63 percent full thickness burns to his body, was electrocuted by power lines hitting him and lost much of his hearing.
“I remember everything. I was conscious through the whole lot,” he told GA.
Tullipan was airlifted to Darwin, where he remained for months, before being flown by a Learjet to Sydney’s Concord Hospital for extensive treatment, then transferred to Royal Brisbane. He was nearly a year in hospital and did extensive self-rehab at home in Queensland after his discharge. Over the next two years he took his first steps and learned to walk using prosthetic legs.
Like Gribble, Tullipan was told many times what he would not be able to do and, like Gribble, was determined to defy it.
But unlike Gribble, Tullipan was not a golfer. Until 2007, five years after “the bomb”, that is. When someone said he wouldn’t be able to swing a golf club, it fired him up. But he didn’t get into the game by any traditional route. No sirree.
“I found this ad in the paper for the Australian Amputee Open and I signed myself up to that. I didn’t have golf clubs; I had no idea at all,” he said.
“I came dead-last by a long way, but I had the absolute best time.”
RIGHT: Destined for golf: James Gribble with daughter Sienna. PHOTO: Empower Golf.
One thing quickly led to another and by 2008, he was vice-president of Queensland Amputee Golf and its president from 2009 to 2015.
By 2014, Tullipan was energised to expand services from amputees to multi-disability, but was unable to garner local support. He contacted Gribble.
“I said, ‘Mate, are you operating in Queensland yet?’ And he said, ‘No, but I’d like to grow.’ So we had a chat about things and we had the same goals and ideas. We decided to set up a clinic at the 2014 Queensland Amputee Open and see how it went,” said Tullipan.
“I had an absolute ball; loved what I was doing. We had four or five people in wheelchairs and a blind golfer there. After that, James sent a Paragolfer up to Parkwood International and we ran our first clinic there. And it just grew and grew.”
So, how does it all work?
The stated mission of Empower Golf is: “to facilitate and promote the world’s most inclusive sport for people with disabilities”.
“We don’t hold tournaments ourselves; we focus on the pathway,” said Tullipan. “They come, try golf, get some lessons, maybe join a club and play some club comps, and then move on to play the inclusive championships and other events. That’s our aim.”
RIGHT: James Gribble and his partner Deidre Joubert. PHOTO: Empower Golf.
There are collaborative relationships with Golf Australia, the PGA of Australia and with the European Disabled Golf Association, a large not for profit organisation with member countries around the world which promotes and delivers golf to players with disability. Empower is also partnered with Special Olympics Australia and with Blind Golf Australia.
The tasks within Empower are divided between Gribble, Tullipan and more recently team member Richard Yann. Rather than a strict structure, it’s a case of many hands making light work.
“We all, within reason, do a bit of everything,” Gribble said. “I do strategy, compliance, legals and meet with courses and pros, attend clinics when I can. Ben’s more involved with physically delivering programs alongside pros, building partnerships and operational stuff, as well as assisting clients with their National Disability Insurance Scheme [NDIS] plans, speaking with clubs and doing some fundraising. Richard’s more partnerships and business development.”
For his role, Tullipan achieved All Abilities Coach Accreditation through the PGA learning portal in 2015 and qualification as a Community Instructor in 2016 through Golf Australia.
Initially clinics and lessons were run by Empower staff, but with the growth of PGA All Abilities-accredited coaches in Australia, the model has been changed so they largely deliver services.
Empower itself is both a registered charity and a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR), as well as the only nationally registered NDIS provider for golf and the only one registered to deliver assistive technology and adaptive equipment.
The clinics are generally free, the result of donations and philanthropy, while lessons and equipment can be accessed through the NDIS, meaning there is no financial barrier to people wanting to participate.
Adaptive equipment has boomed in the last 10 or so years. The introduction of the Paragolfer, an all-terrain wheelchair which raises the player to a standing position in order to hit the ball, was a game changer. It is now superseded by the Paramotion, a similar vehicle with upgraded features.
There is various other more targeted assistive equipment – gloves, connecting devices, longer clubs, tee-up devices and high vis ball-picking-up devices, for example – which Empower has designed. Careful matching of coaches with skills in certain areas to players also makes for optimal and personalised experience.
Clinics are mostly held at public or public access facilities and are available in all states bar the Northern Territory, although there are feelers out to deliver there as well.
There are so many similarities in the stories of Gribble and Tullipan: Gribble was 29 at the time of his accident and Tullipan 26; both were successful in business and their respective sports (in Tullipan’s case, boxing); both are incredibly positive people determined to make the best of what life has handed them; both were engaged in seemingly innocuous activity when their accidents occurred, and both have since been back to the accident site.
“I have been back probably 14, 15 times,” said Tullipan. “I think reliving it is what got me through. Going over it with the Federal Police, talking about it, meant I never really had any downside. And by not going back, ultimately the terrorists win, don’t they?”
“I felt I was physically and psychologically ready to go back,” Gribble said of his return in 2017.
“I wanted to live whatever emotions came out, good, bad or ugly. The emotions were definitely unique. There was accomplishment, there was relief, there was enjoyment in having some of the closest people in my life there with me, including the South African guy was who was next to me when I fell and stayed with me.”
Gribble was wheeled across sand in a manual wheelchair to the very spot he fell.
“There was an aura about the space. It literally had not changed; the blanket was on the ground and the stool was there. It was surreal.”
For both men, there is no bitterness, only sound perspective.
“Just understanding how lucky I am to be here and that I’m here for a reason,” Tullipan said. Gribble concurred: “Going back consolidated my view that it was meant to happen. It is a little fishing hut in the middle of nowhere. Only days before I’d been gorge-swinging (a 70-metre free fall to 120 metres above Victoria Falls) and this was just a few feet fall. It was fate; there is no other way to describe it.”
Fate was also to enter their personal lives. Tullipan reconnected with former partner Kerrie a few years later and they are now married with two kids, Sheridan and Rory. Gribble met his partner Deidre on his return to Zambia and the couple now has a 15-month-old daughter Sienna, born at Royal North Shore Hospital, where her father was admitted 15 years earlier with serious injury. The poignancy was not lost on the family.
Asked how they would describe themselves, Gribble offered “adventurous” while Tullipan hesitated before Kerrie declared him “unstoppable”. Both words are apt for these two adventurers.
If their mission is to empower others through golf, there is no doubt their benevolent compassion has also empowered them, even more so than their own significant playing achievements.
“I think when we get the most complicated cases of disability back on the golf course, that’s where I get the most enjoyment and most satisfaction; when you see in someone’s eyes hope become reality,” Gribble said.
“I don’t know what I’d be doing without golf,” Tullipan said. “It’s like a new lease on life. Watching the smiles on people’s faces is amazing. I believe there’s a way you can do everything if you put your mind to it. It might not be how you used to do it, but you can still do it if you get out and have a go.”
Neither sees himself as remarkable.
“I’m just an everyday guy who had an accident like anyone,” Gribble said. “You get up, you try to do the best you can, you enjoy life, be a good person and try to make an impact.
“I think we’ve done some great things with Empower. We can still do great things and we want to do more.”
A documentary – Tigerfish – exploring James Gribble’s journey culminating in his return to Zambia, will be released later this year.
For information on clinics, lessons and adaptive equipment available through Empower Golf, or to support its work, please visit www.empowergolf.com.au.
Related Articles
Feature Story: Oakmont Unleashed
Ogilvy: U.S Open's toughness means testing limits
