Anita Weiner, 100, swings a golf club for the first time in eight years

Anita Weiner turned 100 last week, and on Wednesday she took her first golf swing in eight years, on the practice tee at TPC Houston in Sugar Land, Texas, FOX 26 Houston reported.

She did not pick up a club until she was 52, when bad knees ended her tennis. She brought her handicap down to 7, and in 1995 she won the Texas Senior Women’s Golf Association Championship, on the same course she went back to on Wednesday.

She put her clubs away at 92. As her 100th birthday came close, she told her family she had one wish: to swing again.

Her older son said he had worried that she would be in pain, or embarrass herself in front of the people who brought the equipment. “To see the joy in her face and the improvement on every swing that she took to adjust to get there and then hit the ball is pretty joyful,” he said.

The machine

She swung from a VertaCat, an electric machine that holds a player standing up. Anthony Netto, a South African military veteran who is paralyzed and still plays golf, helped develop it, and he flew in from San Diego to fit her into it himself.

“We’re golfers, we like standing up. We don’t like the seated version because I want to have the same fair swing. It’s called the ability, not the disability.”Anthony Netto

Netto said his foundation, Stand Up and Play, has given 300 to 400 of the machines to injured veterans and first responders around the country.

Weiner said she was careful stepping in, but trusted Netto and his crew. Asked what she would tell anyone who thinks they are too old to start golf, she said: “It’s never too late, always just start, just go out. Don’t worry about being good, just worry about having a good time.”

Rice

Twenty years ago Weiner began raising money for a women’s golf team at Rice University in Houston, where her mother was in the second class to graduate. Rice played its first season of women’s varsity golf this fall, and its head coach, Joanne Berglund, came to watch her swing.