Pioneering treatment sees Couples return

Dubai: Fred Couples, out of most of last year's senior Champions Tour with chronic back injury, has been nursed to full fitness from near retirement, ahead of the Omega Dubai Desert Classic, thanks to a non-traditional blood augmentation treatment in Germany.

Not yet approved in the US but cleared by the Tour's anti-doping officials, Couples followed Vijay Singh and a host of other sportsmen in receiving Orthokine therapy.

Without using any foreign substances, the treatment uses autologous proteins derived from a patient's blood and uses that as the medication, extracted and pumped back into the patient at certain points in the body to rid the patient of osteoarthritis.

Quite how it works and Couples couldn't explain: "A lot of my friends have gone since I went and 90 per cent have come back not just happy [but in tears]. It's like when you see someone cure cancer and you've seen your wife ill and you sit there crying with them. But I've known people cry just because they can move again.

Simple routine

"It's a pretty simple treatment, it's five days and you can do whatever you want after you're done and it takes like 30 minutes to do. I don't know what they do but as long as it works I don't get too involved in asking," Couples, the first American to win the Classic in 1995, said.

"This guy [Peter Welling] has done like every soccer player. He's worked on the Pope. My agent was calling him and he wouldn't give names — its not his style — but when I got there, I'm looking at the walls and Kobe Bryant has been there and LeBron [James]. He wanted me to start hitting balls straight away so its not the type of surgery you need to take one month off for.

"It's expensive — it would be hard to swallow spending that kind of money and not feeling better. I can promise you that. But the guy is amazing."

MENA Golf Tour

The second edition of the Mena Golf Tour will have six events, five in the UAE and one in Saudi Arabia, organisers of the region's only full-fledged tour announced yesterday.

The Tour, boasting a combined prize fund of $325,000, $100,000 more than that of the inaugural year, kicks off at the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club on September 24. While the season-ending Mena Tour Championship will be held at the Al Ain Equestrian, Shooting and Golf Club from November 5. The top three professionals and the leading amateur on their respective Orders of Merit will be invited to compete in the 2013 Omega Dubai Desert Classic.