HEAR HER ROAR – Ladies European Tour

Deaf LET Winner Diksha Dagar Defies Expectations

By Steve Eubanks, LPGA.com

There’s a chance you have never heard her name, which is fine. For years, Indian professional and Ladies European Tour winner Diksha Dagar didn’t hear it either. That’s because the 21-year-old, who was one of a dozen players to qualify for the AIG Women’s Open this past Monday at nearby North Berwick, was born deaf.

Today, Dagar holds the distinction of being the only golfer in history to compete in the Olympic Games and the Deaflympic Games. She qualified for the former in Tokyo after South African Paula Reto came down with COVID and had to withdraw. The latter she has played in twice, once in Turkey in 2017 where she was a silver medalist, and in Caxias do Sul, Brazil in 2021 where Dagar won the gold medal.

Every step she takes these days is historic. She was the youngest Indian and the first deaf player ever to win an LET event when she captured the 2019 Investec South African Women’s Open. And on Thursday, she will become the first deaf woman to compete in a major championship at Muirfield.

“I was playing in the practice round and it was a complete headwind and I thought ‘oh my god, this is going to be tough’ and I was thinking about how to deal with it,” Dakar said of her qualifying attempt, even though her statement could have been a metaphor for her life. “On the actual day it was an opposite wind, on the first hole it was headwind before, and it changed to a tailwind. I knew every shot was going to be important and I tried to save my shots as much as I could.

Dakar also played at North Berwick when she was 15 years old in the British Girls Amateur Championship.

“When I played at North Berwick, there were some sweet memories,” she said. “With over 100 people playing for 12 spots, I tried not to think about the field or how many spots. I told myself to go for it and play as if you’re alone. So that’s why I played well.”

Tuning out the distractions is nothing new for someone like Dagar. Those with hearing impairment live that life every day, through no volition of their own. According to statistics from the World Health Organization, more than 360 million people in the world are functionally deaf, most from poor countries with little or no access to auditory specialists. Those people struggle in ways few can imagine.

Deafness is hard to describe because it’s impossible to simulate. You can’t remove your auditory receptors for an hour or…