Update on Mary Bea Porter Since Heroics

It would be nice to report that Mary Bea Porter, since saving a boy’s life 13 months ago, has become a terror on the LPGA tour, that her tee shots are carried by angels and her putts fall like rain.

Not so. Porter is still struggling along, fighting to qualify for tournaments and scuffling to cash an occasional check.

Other than that, the business of being a heroine has not been disappointing. The role becomes Mary Bea, and vice versa. Her story makes people feel good, and that makes Mary Bea feel good.

“It’s still unbelievable,” she says of life since the rescue.

If you don’t remember the original good deed, it went like this:

Porter is playing the 13th hole of the Moon Valley Country Club in Phoenix, trying to qualify for the weekend tour event. She butchers her approach shot, knocking it into a gully near a fence. Approaching the fence, Mary Bea sees a man in Amish garb, standing next to a swimming pool, holding a 3-year-old boy by the ankles and shaking him.

The boy, Jonathan Smucker, has just been found floating in the pool, unconscious. His mother and father, Amish farmers from Pennsylvania, have no idea what to do. They don’t even know how to dial a phone. With the help of her caddie, Mary Bea scrambles over the high fence. Smucker silently hands his son to Mary Bea and walks away. The boy is gray, not breathing, limp.

Using mouth-to-mouth, and pounding the boy on the chest, Porter finally brings Jonathan back to life, then battles to keep him alive, although she has no first aid or CPR training. Forty-five minutes later, the boy is on his way to the hospital, and Mary Bea is rushing back to the course to catch up with her threesome, which has gone ahead without her. She bogeys the 13th.

I phoned Mary Bea a few days after the rescue and she told me the whole story, which was almost as long and dramatic as the rescue itself. For several weeks after that, I would check the LPGA tournament results, expecting, or hoping, to see her name among the leaders. But Porter, who turns 40 in December and has been on the tour off and on since 1973, never appeared among the leaders, and seldom was among the also-also-rans.

What happened to her? How did the rescue and subsequent publicity effect her life? What happened to little Jonathan? I phoned Mary Bea for an update.

She said she finally got an opportunity to visit Jonathan and his family in Pennsylvania. Several months after the rescue, Porter learned that Mrs. Smucker was trying to contact her, so she eventually reached Mrs. Smucker by phone.

“We talked,” Mary Bea says. “She asked me if I knew how Jonathan got the bruise on his chest. I said, ‘I slugged him.’ I can remember holding back a little when I hit him, but I guess I still hit him pretty hard.”

The Smuckers invited Porter to their farm, to meet Jonathan under more favorable circumstances. Porter brought her own 6-year-old son, Joseph.

“When we drove up, little Jonathan was standing in a corner window sill, hiding behind a curtain,” Mary Bea says. “He had just turned 4, and he’s very shy. He’s really a cute little boy. His sister had to half-carry him out to meet me, he’s so shy.

“He was wearing a new shirt that his mother had made him. It was tan, with long sleeves, and it had no buttons. They use straight pins instead of buttons. He was very proud of that shirt, they told me he had saved it to wear when I came.”

Jonathan didn’t talk much, but the visit was a very special family occasion. Mrs. Smucker prepared a picnic. Jonathan’s grandmother was there, and his great-grandmother sent a gift. All seven of their children were there, including the four oldest, who have left the Amish church. The children gave Mary Bea presents--a bracelet, earrings, a stuffed bunny rabbit . . . “It was one of the most relaxing days I’ve ever had,” Porter says. “There are no phones there, no TV, no radio. It’s so quiet it’s eerie.”

Mary Bea has mentioned how undemonstrative the family was at the time of the rescue. She assumed that was because of their Amish life style. I asked Porter if, during her visit, anyone in the family told her thanks.

“Not in those words,” she says. “But you could see it in their eyes. Their feelings came through clearly. They’d do anything for me. The four older children, the ones who are no longer in the church, were very emotional, they hugged me.”

Mary Bea and Mrs. Smucker have had long talks.

“They spent the night (of the rescue) in Children’s Hospital in Phoenix,” Porter says. “The boy in the next bed was brain dead, from drowning, and I think that caused her to realize how lucky they were. She told me they--she and Mr. Smucker--had given Jonathan back to the Lord when they saw him floating in the pool.

“ I wasn’t ready to give him back.

“She told me that the only side effect of the accident is that they live near a rural firehouse, and every time they hear a siren, Jonathan covers his ears and shuts his eyes. Also, he’s a little quieter.”

The outside world has honored Porter. She was given the Golf Writers Assn. of America’s Charlie Bartlett Award, “For unselfish contributions to the betterment of society.”

The Metropolitan Golf Writers of New York gave her a similar award and a singular honor. The next person deemed worthy by the Metro Writers will receive the Mary Bea Porter Humanitarian Award.

Unfortunately Porter’s golf game didn’t turn around when her life did. But she recently worked with a noted golf psychologist-coach, and she says the joy has returned to her game.

“I may not be the best player in the world but I love what I do,” she says.

Last weekend she worked as a TV commentator on the AI Star/Centinela tournament at Rancho Park.

Porter is divorced, and last year she did the tour with Joseph, putting 45,000 miles on their old car and struggling at each stop to make ends meet and to find child care while she played golf.

But while playing in a charity pro-am tournament conducted by King Coach Robbie Ftorek, Porter met a businessman who offered to sponsor her on the tour. Now she flies from city to city, and travels with a baby sitter for her son.

Mary Bea says she will always keep in touch with Jonathan.

“I’m part of the family,” she says.

She also says she is thankful every day for what happened.

“I still feel like me,” Porter says. “But obviously this has made a big impact on my life. I feel if I died tomorrow, I made a difference. I have different priorities on everything now. It has made me enjoy life a lot more. I’m more appreciative of my heath and my son’s health. It’s not that I’m special or anything, but when it’s all over, when all the record books are closed, I still won.”

Last month Porter was back on the Moon Valley course for a qualifying round. When she got to the 13th tee, Mary Bea looked over at the gully and at the fence she had scrambled over so ungracefully a year before, and she smiled.