Profile in courage: Golf helps bond 12-year-old
and mom

Third Annual Birdies for Breast Cancer fundraiser a huge success due to Kerr, corporate sponsors, and event participants.

Golfweek.com
Fall, 2005

When you bow your head and clasp your hands when seated around the family dinner table sometime Thanksgiving Day, please – please – say a quiet prayer for Dakoda Dowd and her family.

Dowd is a congenial, fun-spirited and talented 12-year-old golfer from Palm Harbor, Fla., who is being asked to grow up faster than any 12-year-old should have to. Her mother, Kelly Jo, is three years into a mountainous health battle. Each day more sand slides out of the hourglass, forever lost.

Kelly Jo is 40, and her body, once proudly shown off in swimsuit calendars, has been infiltrated by cancer. Three years ago, breast cancer surfaced. She dealt with it, as did the family, and they seemed to be flying along with little obstruction last May – Michael doing some final touching up on the new family studio apartment, Mom spending time with relatives, Dakoda playing 36 holes – when Michael's phone rang with shattering news.

Kelly Jo's cancer was back. This time it was in her liver and in her bones.

Stage 4. Most advanced. Life expectancy, realistically, is a matter of months.

"I'm a social worker, so luckily some of the stuff I knew how to do, getting her on disability and retired from work, getting that going," Michael said last week, watching his daughter hit balls on the practice tee at Reunion Resort outside Orlando. "And then there are the things you don't know how to do, because you've never been through dealing with this with your spouse. . . . You just muddle your way through. And you take it a day at a time."

The Dowd clan – or as Kelly Jo calls it, Team Dowd – is an inspirational profile in courage and resiliency. With nothing guaranteed for tomorrow, they live for the day. Trite as it sounds, it's a lesson we all should heed. Thanksgiving Day called for Team Dowd to be visiting in Michigan with Kelly Jo's family, and Dakoda, her trusted golf clubs left behind in Florida, to be surrounded by the love and energy of uncles and aunts and cousins.

"She's looking forward to seeing some snow," Kelly Jo said of her only child. She smiled. "I think she might get to see a little."

Kelly Jo told Michael she feels this likely will be her last Thanksgiving.

"She wants to be with the family, enjoy some good home cooking, enjoy seeing her brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles," he said. "We pray that God gives us another one."

Kelly Jo was looking forward to spending quality time with her own parents.
"It's going to mean everything," she said.

* * *

If only things could be as simple as they sometimes appear. Standing on the green, green grass of a practice tee at Reunion is 12-year-old Dakoda, not a whole lot taller than her driver, hitting shot after shot, her rhythmic swing gently sending each ball on its way into a gray, cloud-filled sky.

So simple. Hard to believe she is 12. In late April, just after she turns 13, Dakoda has been invited to tee it up at the LPGA's inaugural Ginn Clubs & Resorts Open, a $2.5 million event that will boast the best players in golf. Her game, though polished in its infancy, is not yet ready for such a big stage, but she's playing in the hopes that her mother will be there to see a dream come to fruition: her little girl, playing alongside Annika Sorenstam and the very best women players in the world.

"In KJ's mind, she'll have made it, right there," says Michael.

There is a powerful simplicity in watching a child hit golf balls as well as Dakoda, or Koda, as her proud parents lovingly refer to her. Yet zoom out, and more than a half dozen television cameras have her in their collective eye, filming Dakoda for stories to run on media outlets ranging from the local nightly news to ESPN. A 12-year-old whose mom is dying. It's the kind of story that tugs heart strings, and Dakoda is under the media bigtop. Tiger Woods seldom, if ever, hits a bucket of practice balls under such scrutiny.

So much for simplicity.

Nearby, seated on a wooden bench one level away from where her daughter so gracefully swings, is Kelly Jo, pretty but frail, two days removed from surgery in which a cement-like substance was injected to fuse two vertebrae after a compress fracture. Kelly Jo's striking blue eyes stare off into the overcast November afternoon.

She doesn't really know what lies ahead. Nobody does. But Dakoda's invitation to play the LPGA event – extended by Ginn Co. president and CEO Bobby Ginn, who has become a family friend – has given the days and weeks ahead added purpose. Kelly Jo has been treating her cancer aggressively, fighting hard and doing all she can to be there to see that first shot.

"It gives Dakoda something to work toward, a goal, something to stay focused on," Kelly Jo says quietly. "It's given me something, too, to get to the next step, to watch her. It's been a little pot at the end of our rainbow, so to speak. Bobby Ginn has been a little piece of heaven for us. He really has."

Dakoda has collected nearly 200 trophies competing for several years around the Tampa/St. Petersburg junior circuit, but this is going to be a giant step.

"We're just proud and privileged that Mom is going to get to watch it and Dakoda is going to try to do her best," says Michael. "She's going to hit a lot of good shots, and hit a few wayward ones, and she's going to come home with an experience that is going to be irreplaceable. It'll be, 'I know where I'm trying to go, I've already been. I want to get back there.' I told her, this one is a gift. The next one you're going to have to earn.

"For Mom to be able to see Koda play in a tournament like this, she's like, 'Oh, yeah, she's made it.' For her to see that . . . she can rest. She can rest knowing she (Dakoda) fulfilled her dream."

Ginn said he was drawn to the Dowd's story because it was so tragic. Here's a 12-year-old girl who possesses great potential, maybe enough talent to one day be a standout on the LPGA, and her mother likely was not going to live long enough to see it. Many times, there's nothing one can do about things, but in this case, there was something that could be done.

He could invite young Dakoda to play in his LPGA event. So he did.

"I would love to see her mother there for the first tee shot (in April) and for the final putt," said Ginn. "I think that would be a real answered prayer."

* * *

Kelly Jo picked out her daughter's name ("I always loved that name, Dakota," she says) and Michael came up with the unique spelling.

"We couldn't have picked a better name," says Kelly Jo. "She is so raw, and so earthy. It's so her."

In many regards, Dakoda Dowd is like most 12-year-olds. She loves music, maybe more than golf, and jokes that if she doesn't make it in golf, she'll be a drummer for either Nine Inch Nails or My Chemical Romance. Though only in seventh grade, she already knows what it's like to win a state high school title, helping lead Northside Christian High School to a title last autumn, when she was 11. She didn't play this fall, choosing to spend more time with her mom.
Dakoda's dad laughs when he calls his daughter "a goof."

"She's a huge practical joker," he said. "She was the life of the party on her high school golf team last year. Eleven years old, and everybody knew Koda would be the one to come around and get the party started."

When that phone call came last May, informing the family of Kelly Jo's spreading cancer, Dakoda wasn't sure she wanted to play much golf anymore. She quit for about a week, then one day joined her father and walked onto the golf course at Innisbrook, where the family lives. She clearly wasn't herself, making a string of bogeys, and Dad suggested they go in.

"Not until I get a birdie," said Dakoda. "I can fight my way through this. Look at Mom and what she's going through."

There wouldn't be any birdies that day, but Koda showed the fight her brave mother has instilled in her. She and Kelly Jo have a special bond, right down to a weekly mother-daughter day where the two escape to a movie or a mall or go get a pedicure together, talking all the way.

It places a lump in one's throat to think a 12-year-old girl will face a future without that, without being able to share shopping junkets or cruises or just talk the morning after a first prom.

Michael Dowd says Dakoda often keeps to herself about all that is going on.

"I've come to really learn a lot about our daughter through this process," Michael says, "how resilient she is, how tough she is. We talk a lot. We're a very open family. We talk about all of this. We talk about things that are going to have to be dealt with down the road when Mom is not here.

"We pray that we'll get a miracle, but we're realists, and we realize that the likelihood of that, from a medical standpoint, isn't that good."

Dakoda and her dad have even talked about taking a road trip one day, carrying the ashes of Kelly Jo across the country to places her kindred spirit would love to see. Dakoda already has worked out some of the itinerary: "Colorado, Kentucky – I love Kentucky – Malibu, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. Oh, and Arizona," she says.

The words come from a 12-year-old in a pink visor who is not just some little girl, but a young woman who has been asked to handle a lot, and has done so with great love and maturity.

"It's OK," she says, reassuring a reporter who finds the conversation awkward and does not wish to be intrusive. "I understand everything that is happening with my Mom. She's so strong. I have every moment that I can with her.

"I know it sounds corny, but she's going to a better place."

On this particularly blustery November day, Dakoda Dowd plays a few practice holes at Reunion, tuning up for her April date. As all the cameras zoom in, she can barely feel her hands because of nerves, but Dakoda rips a drive on the opening hole down the left edge of the fairway. Though the hole plays into a strong wind, she makes a birdie.

"That a girl!" shouts a solitary voice. It belongs to Kelly Jo.

It's a voice we all hope to hear, need to hear, come April.

Say a prayer.