Swanson: Jake Olson, USC’s blind long snapper, remains driven to succeed

HUNTINGTON BEACH – You’d call it a long shot, the prospect of a blind guy competing in a long-drive golf event.

You’d chalk it up as far-fetched, the idea that he could hold his own against some of the biggest hitters in the world, step up and, like those guys and gals, smack a golf ball so far you lose sight of it.

Or you would – if you didn’t remember Jake Olson taking the field for the USC football team in 2017.

Because if you were paying the slightest attention to sports that fall, you would have been privy to the season’s most inspiring story: The Trojans’ blind long-snapper coming on for a fourth-quarter extra point in a victory over Western Michigan.

I doubt you’ve forgotten it six years later; it was such a remarkable feat.

Olson, a kid who’d been born with retinoblastoma, a form of eye cancer, and who lost his sight totally at 12, learned to snap under the patient tutelage of an Orange Lutheran football coach named Dean Vieselmeyer, who died last year. “He kind of was a visionary,” Olson said Sunday. “I don’t know what in him made him want to do that with me … but there’s always that one person that’s crazy enough to chase your dream with you. All you gotta do is find that one, and he was that one for me.”

Vieselmeyer helped Olson get an opportunity at USC, his dream school. And then the kid took it from there. Bulked up, trained hard and earned the opportunity to get on the field at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Proving, as he is prone to, that where there’s a will, there really is a way.

“He’s always looking for that next challenge,” said Devin Whipple, his pal since they began playing golf together at Orange Lutheran, and a member of Olson’s party Sunday, along with his service dog, Quebec. “It’s always onto the next thing.”

Such as, say, shooting to become the first completely blind golfer to defeat golfers with less severe cases of visual impairment in a tournament setting.

The U.S. Blind Golf Association classifies its golfers as B-1 (no vision), B-2 (little usable vision) and B-3 (better usable vision), and Olson – a 12 handicap – thinks “it would be nice, because I don’t think a B1 has ever beaten all the B2s and B3s, to do that. To be the best out there, period, regardless of sight division.”

Already, he’s won his category, so you wouldn’t bet against him, especially after you hear him say: “It’s really not too far off.”

And you wouldn’t have doubted him Sunday, either, when Olson teed off on his latest challenge: The World Long Drive MB Celebrity Shootout, an exhibition before Monday’s pro event that raised $25,000 for pediatric cancer research.

It was a home game for Olson, the event at Huntington Beach’s Huntington Club, where eight groups of three – each trio featuring a male and female touring long-driver and a celeb – took turns smashing balls into orbit. Or trying to.

Former Dodger Shawn Green took some cuts, as did former Laker and Clipper Norm Nixon. Actors Ross Butler and Galen Gering got into their parts as competitive golfers. And skateboarder Sean Malto outkicked all the other celebs, sending his ball 323 yards.

But it was Olson – yes, the first blind golfer to participate in a long-drive event like this – who got the loudest reception, and who put on the best show.

With his father, Brian, lining up his swings – “it’s funny,” the ever good-humored Jake said, “to see how into it whoever’s lining me up becomes, because it’s a little like they’re playing a video game” – he hit the first five of his six balls out of bounds.

But then, on his final attempt, Olson stepped up and pummeled that poor pink ball down the middle, 283 yards. (You can catch a replay on one of ESPN channels on July 11.)

It felt good off the club face, he said, but it was the goose bumps on his arms that really let Olson know how well he’d hit it: “I could tell by the crowd it was a good one,” he said. “And it’s good, man. Any time you can fire up a crowd like that, it gives you goose bumps.”

Olson has been firing up crowds since he was 13, which is how old he was when he started his public speaking career.

He made his first address to a group of financial advisors in Thousand Oaks: “The only thing I really remember about that one is sitting in the hotel room beforehand, before the speech, trying to come up with what I want to say with my mom,” Olson said. “I remember I made a comparison to my tumor being like the machine in ‘The Incredibles.’ Once you try to beat it, it figures out the way you’re trying to beat it and it comes back and is that much more hard to beat. That was little 13-year-old me.”

Those grownups had wanted to hear from the little guy because they’d seen him profiled on ESPN, which broadcast the story of his relationship with the Pete Carroll and the USC football team, including how Olson had gone to a game the day before the surgery that made him completely blind, and how the Trojans had welcomed him as one of them.

Now 26, the 6-foot-3 Olson still is looking the part of a Division 1 college football player. He’s serious about working out – which helped him be ready in a week’s time for a surprise long-drive invite. He’s working on the second edition of Golf With Jake, a charity golf tournament with 1880 Capital in June to raise funds for the Swim With Mike, the longstanding foundation that granted Olson his scholarship to USC. And he’s been working on a book about his life that’s due out later this year.

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Inspired, fittingly, by his experiences as an in-demand speaker, a few years ago Olson launched a web-based platform that offers a streamlined and trustworthy process for booking people for speeches or other events. At the moment, he said it serves about 4,500 clients, many of them thinkers and experts from the business and art worlds, but some athletes too; college hoopers like North Carolina’s Armando Bacot and Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson are among the highest-profile of that crowd.

And you can book Olson too, of course. One of sports’ all-time great stories.

He’s a reminder that what’s happening on those playing surfaces goes deeper than the game, that sports is more than the score. That, at its best, it’s the stuff that gives us goose bumps.

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