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“If kids give me a hard time these days, I’m like, ‘Well, if you call 9-1-1, I’m probably going to be there to save your life, so I wouldn’t make fun of me right now,’ ” he said with a laugh.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, Tourette’s affects an estimated one out of every 160 children. Boys are three times more likely than girls to get it. And those who have it are plagued with uncontrollable muscle movements and vocalizations, which are known as tics.
Usually, symptoms lesson with age, but the opposite has been true with Reese. He blinks and bobs his head violently every few seconds and makes involuntary grunts and yelps nonstop.
Most wouldn’t even attempt golf with that malady, much less be able to excel at it. He often explains to his playing partners from the start that he’s not intentionally being a distraction, and he sometimes has to step away from the ball when his symptoms are flaring.
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But breathing techniques and other means have helped him control his body long enough to make proper swings. He averaged 74.96 strokes for 18 holes last season, one of the best marks in program history. He also carded a 5-under-par 67 in 30-mile-per-hour winds at a Division II regional. That score would have tied Scott Aker’s school record, but the round was wiped out when the afternoon wave couldn’t finish.
Reese earned a spot in the Ohio Amateur by finishing second in a qualifier at Moraine Country Club in May — despite having never seen the course before. The four-round Ohio Am — which began in 1904 and whose illustrious list of past champions includes two-time winners Arnold Palmer, John Cook and Ben Curtis — starts Tuesday at Springfield Country Club.
“A lot of us — mom and dad and others — wonder, how can you do this with the head bobbing and the eyes closing all the time. How do you focus and still hit the ball so well? That’s the thing we’re amazed about,” said his father, Chris Reese, the associate athletic director at Cedarville and a former basketball star for the Yellow Jackets.
“When he’s on the golf course, people will eventually ask me or his mother, ‘Does he have Tourette’s?’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ We’ll explain it to them, and they’re like, ‘Wow, that blows me away.’ And I think kids, once they figure it out and are golfing with him, say, ‘That’s pretty impressive.’ ”
With his athletic 6-foot-3, 185-pound build, Reese can bomb drives 330 yards. He has a top-notch short game, which he’s honed on the full-sized, bent-grass green he maintains in his backyard. And he’s learned to shape shots both ways, which is graduate-level stuff for golfers.
Cedarville coach Ryan Bowen is awed by Reese’s ability to manage his Tourette’s and still become the team’s No. 1 golfer.
“I don’t know what he feels like when he’s standing over a ball. I can only imagine the difficulties,” he said.
“But for Jordan, it’s what do you want to accomplish with your life? It’s a matter of, does he want to submit to a condition he has or does he want to accept that condition and still try to accomplish everything he wants to? I think he’s attempting the latter and saying, ‘Hey, let’s go forward and see what happens.’ ”
Not that Reese hasn’t had some setbacks. Like many afflicted with Tourette’s, he tried heavy medication during his senior year at Cedarville High School, but that only made his ordeal worse.
“It’s worked this way with everyone with Tourette’s: it took my symptoms away, so that was good, but it also took everything else away,” Reese said. “I was in depression. I think I’m predisposed to depression anyway. I had suicidal thoughts for a while. It was kind of scary. I never tried anything, but it was in my head.
“All my motivation for everything was gone. It was hard to practice and get out of bed. It took a long time for it to wear off. It was pretty bad.”
He hit another rough patch in college, having become so fed up with battling Tourette’s that he dropped out of school for a year.
Though he can hardly be blamed for wanting to withdraw, his self-imposed exile made him reexamine his priorities.
“It was just me being angry. I didn’t like golf anymore, and it wasn’t fun playing. It’s the only time that’s happened, but I was like, ‘Why me? I have this golf talent, but why do I have to deal with this?’” he said.
“But not playing golf for eight months, I missed it. I had all that time to soak in the feeling of being a quitter. All those thoughts had me feeling pretty weak. All the excuses — what I deal with is legitimate, but you’ve got to suck it up, too. You’re a firefighter and you go save lives and go into fires, but you’re too weak to play golf? I was missing it, and now I’m more motivated than ever.”
A nagging irritation for Reese, though, is that strangers see those head jolts and hear the shrieks and tend to feel sorry for him, and he doesn’t want to be pitied. As he put it, “I’ve accepted that God has made me this way.”
But people can’t help themselves. While he works in close quarters on squad runs, patients sometimes forget about themselves and ask if Reese needs medical attention.
“The last couple years, it’s gotten worse,” he said. “My partners trust me, and I’m good at what I do. But it’s frustrating when I’m in the back of an ambulance or helping, and they ask me if I’m OK.
“It’s kind of embarrassing. I wish I could make the patient trust me more. But I just blow it off, like, ‘I’m fine, let’s worry about you.’ ”
That’s not just a line to divert attention from himself, either. In spite of everything, Reese really is doing well.
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