Mary Bea Saved Life of Child, but Not Par

Mary Bea Porter is a golfer.

Last year, she won $955 in prize money on the women’s pro tour, an average of $45.48 a tournament.

She lost her husband through divorce, her life savings, her home, her car and her other worldly possessions, most of her clothing, her innocence and 21 golf tournaments.

Not a banner year, in other words.

She has won $420 in three events this year. Last Thursday, she saved a life, so things are picking up for Mary Bea Porter.

It happened when Mary Bea was playing the Moon Valley Country Club in Phoenix, trying to qualify for this weekend’s Turquoise tournament on the same course. Porter was playing the 13th hole, which was the fourth hole in her round. She was even par through three.

No. 13 is a par-5 hole, but it took Porter about 45 minutes to play it, what with stopping to save a life and all.

“I can’t say I’ve always believed in fate, but on the 12th, I had hit a tee shot too far left and it ended up embedded on a dirt maintenance path,” Mary Bea says. “(While awaiting a marshal’s ruling) I elected to play two balls.”

Thus ensued the stuff of a golfer’s nightmare. She was into and out of two bunkers; she bounced shots off two trees, and she finally got both balls on the green, needing to sink putts of 10 or 12 feet to save a bogey.

“It was like I was never going to finish the hole,” she says.

The reason hole No. 12 is important to this story is the timing, the delay on No. 12 that delivered Mary Bea to No. 13 at an opportune time. She continues the tale:

“At 13, I’m sort of flustered. You can make the green in two, but I figure I’ll just lay up. I hit the ugliest hook-roll-snap you’ve ever seen, 15 feet off the ground, over into a gully by a fence.

“My caddy Wayne (Sharpe) and I walked to the green and stepped off the distance back to the ball. As I was walking back (to the ball), I look up and see Mr. Smucker, fully clothed in Amish attire.”

It turns out that Christian Smucker, his wife and three of their seven children are visiting Smucker’s cousin, who lives in a home fronting the rough off the 13th fairway. Smucker and his family are Amish; the cousin-host is not. One of the Smucker children is a 3-year-old named Jonathan. The home has a swimming pool. The host family is not home.

“Just as I saw him, Mr. Smucker jumps into the pool,” Mary Bea says. “I can still picture him in midair. I look down at the water to see why he was jumping. There was a child floating in the water, face down. I was going to help him, so I was flipping my shoes off as I was running. As I come up to the fence, Mr. Smucker has the baby out of the pool, holding him by the ankles, shaking him up and down.

“It was a wrought-iron fence, 6 feet high, just bars straight up and down with no crossbars to climb on. I hear Mr. Smucker very calmly ask his wife if she knows CPR. She doesn’t. He is saying, ‘Get help.’ He doesn’t say, ‘ Call for help,’ because his wife has never used a telephone.

“I yell at Wayne, ‘Do you know CPR?’ He doesn’t. I’m at the fence on one knee, with my hands out to help (boost) Wayne over the fence. He looks at me like, ‘Are you nuts ?’ He’s 6-4 and 240. (Mary Bea is 5-7 and strong, but not that strong).

“Next thing I know, he has sailed me in the air. All I remember is Wayne throwing me over the fence. I hit the top of the fence with my right foot, then landed on two feet, stumbled forward, scraped my knee and my hand.

“Mr. Smucker handed me the dead child and walked off back toward the house.

“His wife is on the patio, holding a telephone. She’s saying to Wayne, ‘What do I do?’ Wayne says, ‘Dial 911,’ but she gets no answer, maybe she didn’t dial correctly. Wayne says, ‘Dial the operator.’ I’m there with the baby. I’ve never had CPR, I’m ashamed to say. Have you? I’ll sign you up.

“The baby had thrown up. I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know it was a drowning. I assumed the child could swim. My son (now 5) learned to swim when he was a baby. I’m thinking maybe he choked on something, so I’m trying to clear out his mouth. I start giving him mouth-to-mouth, but I feel my breath on my own cheek and I realize I forgot to hold his nose.

“He wasn’t breathing. He was gray, and he was flat, like a pancake, his chest and stomach were flattened out. I’m thinking, ‘Maybe if I hit him in the heart.’ I know I’m pumped up and I don’t want to hurt him, but I hit him pretty hard.”

Wayne, meanwhile, is unable to scale the fence. The next-door fence is scalable but protected by a snarling Doberman. So Wayne is standing at the fence, helpless, in tears.

“I had my hand in the boy’s mouth and I forgot to hold his nose again,” Mary Bea says. “I held it, and the next time I blow, he bites my finger. I think, ‘That’s it.’ I don’t know anything about death, but I thought this was his body’s last jolt, and rigor mortis or something had set in.

“I’m focused on his face and chest, but I hear his sister say, ‘He moved his arm.’ As I feel for his heart, he goes totally limp again. But now I’m excited. On my third breath his heart starts beating. It was like I had started a lawn mower engine. You could’ve heard his breath all the way back in L.A.

“He starts choking and moving his eyes. Wayne is yelling, ‘Bring a blanket or a towel!’ It’s a windy day and the pool is freezing. The boy is wearing underpants. I’m comforting him, holding him, stroking him.

“I’m looking at his face, but I see two people come up, and I’m telling him, ‘It’s OK, your mommy and daddy are here.’ I’m really emphasizing the mommy, but the father says, ‘No, Jonathan, it’s daddy and (name of sister).’

“I look up in disbelief. He hands me a towel and walks to the back of the patio. The mother is on the phone, I hear her saying, ‘That’s OK, he’s fine, we don’t need any help.’ I’m yelling, ‘No! No! No!’

“I hand the baby to the father so I can go grab the phone. He starts slapping the boy on the back.”

The paramedics on the phone tell Mary Bea to keep the boy on his side. The father is holding the boy face up, head back.

“I’m yelling at the father, ‘No! Get him on his side!’ I’m sure a woman had never spoken to Mr. Smucker this way. It was like God has just spoken.”

Meanwhile, back on the golf course, the two other women in Mary Bea’s threesome wait a few minutes, letting the next threesome play through. One of her playing partners comes to the fence briefly but apparently decides there was nothing she can do. So Mary Bea’s threesome putts out and continues with the round, lighter by one golfer.

Back at the house, the emergency continues.

The paramedics need the address. The Smuckers don’t know it. Porter frantically searches for mail, finds a bill or a letter, gives the paramedics the address, and then Smucker hands the boy back to her.

“He’s still choking. I walk into the house with him, they stay on the patio. I’m trying to get out front, but I can’t get the door open, the blanket’s falling off. At this point the baby began to expel a clear, very thick mucous. The paramedics told me later this was the lining of the lungs.

“There was a lot of it. His mother and I were pulling it from him, there was so much that it took both of us. He’s also losing his stomach (throwing up), and there’s a lot of water coming out, too. I’m trying to comfort him. (His mother) says, ‘I’ll get some paper towels.’ I figured maybe we were standing on an expensive carpet, but I looked down and we’re standing on a linoleum floor.

“I hear the (rescue) trucks, and the boy starts to scream for the first time. That was music.”

Several fire and rescue vehicles arrive. The reaction from the men on the trucks surprises Mary Bea. She figures they see this kind of stuff all the time and will treat this as just another house call.

“Every man hugged me or shook my hand, as if I had just saved their child’s life,” she says.

Smucker is standing nearby. A fire chief asks him if there is anything he would like to say to Mary Bea.

“I’m just a farmer from Ronks, Pa., and we’re here visiting,” he says.

“Don’t you want to thank her?” the fireman asks.

“Well, yes . . . “

Mary Beth is embarrassed for Smucker, realizing that he must be in some kind of shock and has things on his mind other than the observance of proper etiquette.

Wayne, the caddy, finally arrives and joins the front yard scene. Two women are standing in the next yard, observing and talking. One of them calls out to Mary Bea, “Was it your ball?”

“Pardon me?” says Mary Bea.

“Was it your ball that hit the little boy in the head?”

Wayne steps in, barely under control. “The baby drowned,” he tells the women. “Mary Bea saved the baby’s life.”

As Mary Bea and Wayne are walking away, Smucker appears from out of the bushes.

“By now I’m waiting for Rod Serling to appear,” Porter says. “Mr. Smucker pulls out a checkbook. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no. God has not yet invented this number (the payoff for saving a life).

“He pulls out a deposit slip with his name and address. ‘I want to thank you, and if you’re ever in our part of the country, please look us up.’ ”

Through it all, Mary Bea has been cool. No panic.

Now it is time to go back to work, to finish her round of golf.

“Wayne handed me a club,” she says. “He could’ve handed me a Coke bottle. I had a 62-yard shot, over a bunker, to a tight pin, in the wind. I hit the shot, it was going right at the pin. I said, ‘All right!’

“But it starts to flutter in the wind, hangs, and lands in the bunker. I start to laugh, like, ‘God’s got more important things to do than worry about golf shots.’ ”

Mary Bea bogeys the hole when her putt lips out. She finishes with a 76, three strokes too many to qualify for the Turquoise Open.

That’s the story. There are a few postscripts.

Jonathan is OK, apparently having suffered no permanent damage. He spent that night in a hospital, and his parents have taken him back home.

Mary Bea Porter is caught in a whirlwind.

“The response has been totally overwhelming and mind boggling,” she says. “What has touched me is how much this has touched other people. When I left the scene, when I walked back to the course, I felt that was it. I’d done what I had to do, and that was it.”

That was not it. For starters, there was an immediate movement to persuade the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. to give Mary Bea an exemption to play in the Turquoise Open, even though she had failed to qualify.

An LPGA official said, “No way!” but Sally Little and Alice Bauer got up a petition, got 50 golfers’ signatures within minutes, and the LPGA relented. It is an unprecedented exemption.

“Knowing how strict the LPGA is, how they never make allowances, to me (the exemption) was thank-you enough,” Porter says.

But there has been more. Porter has been besieged by interview requests. She will be honored by one TV network as athlete of the week. She will be honored at two banquets and at halftime of Saturday night’s Sun-Piston game in Phoenix. She has been flooded by telegrams, letters, phone calls. The other LPGA players are treating her as a true hero, and one tour golfer even wrote Mary Bea a poem.

The stereotypical reaction would be for the central figure to shrug and say, “I’m no hero. I was only doing what anyone would have done.”

Mary Bea says, “I tend to play things down, like it was no big deal. But it was a big deal, to save a life. It’s hard for me to feel that I deserve all this, but I do feel I deserve it, that I deserve something good.”

Some background is helpful here. Mary Bea Porter grew up in Los Angeles and attended Arizona State, where she was an All-American golfer. She joined the LPGA tour in 1973 and played for eight years, never earning more than $12,000. She married in ‘80, dropped off the tour except for one or two events a year and some TV commentary work. She gave birth to a son on Christmas Day of 1982.

Last year the marriage blew up, and the blow-up included bankruptcy to the tune of $1.5 million, a result, she says, of her former husband’s business dealings.

Mary Bea rented her Scottsdale, Ariz., home to someone who broke his neck before moving in. She then allowed a friend to use the house. The friend wrote $3,000 worth of checks on her account and stole everything in the house and garage.

Mary Bea decided to go back on the tour last year, back to the only thing that had any meaning in her life. She rented a motor home, which had several breakdowns and eight flat tires along the LPGA trail.

But this year, at 38, she plays on. She has made the cut in one of three tournaments, finishing 66th and winning $420.

She seems comfortable in the sudden role of hero.

“I grew up in the ‘60s, where everything was ‘Love one another.’ I feel we lost that in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I felt I had done what any human being would do, but I found out that’s not so.”

She is referring to the reaction of the other golfers on the course at the time, and to people who have told her they could not or would not have reacted as she did.

“I have come to the reality of taking responsibility for what I did,” Mary Bea says. “I now recognize that it is different to what others might have done. . . . And we’re so inundated with bad news, it’s refreshing to read good news. It’s good to be a hero, to know that we are rewarded. It’s nice to hear something good. It’s nice to get all this attention, and to celebrate this little boy’s life.”