GUARDIAN ANGEL : Andrea Jaeger Still Gives Everything She Has, but Now She Gives It to Ailing Children

The 15-year-old girl wins another tennis match, loses another friend. She walks into the locker room and senses them staring, hears them whispering.

It’s her body. They are making fun of it. The other top professionals look at the underdeveloped figure and laugh, a teenage girl turned freak of nature.

Andrea Jaeger walks out of the locker room and into a public restroom. For much of the rest of her career, that is where she will dress.

*

Sixteen years later, an uncertain teenager is lifting her shirt again.

Her name is Pam. She wears a pair of bright boxer shorts on her head to hide her baldness. She reveals a recent cancer surgery scar that winds around her pale abdomen like a zipper.

Andrea Jaeger does not whisper, does not laugh.

She asks Pam about the scar. Asks if it hurts. Asks if it scares her.

Jaeger peers at this girl who has been given no chance of surviving a massive tumor in her chest, and says, “Do you know how incredibly cool you are?”

In the next breath, she adds, “Whadya say we try to market that boxer-shorts look?”

Respect and hope. The concepts have replaced serve and volley in the life of America’s most charitable former pro athlete.

Jaeger preaches it daily during her camps for children with life-threatening illnesses, camps that become clubs that become families.

Respect and hope. She talks it at 10 a.m. for a child afraid to take off his wig for a swim . . . at 2 p.m. for the child afraid of skiing with his chest-implanted medication port . . . at midnight for those children who are afraid, period.

Respect and hope are the only currency now for a woman who has traded fame and riches for the full-time company of the young and dying.

Jaeger is asked why she would make such a deal.

It is that 15-year-old who answers.

“I’d be getting dressed before big tennis matches, and fans would find me in the public restrooms and slip autograph slips underneath my stall,” she says.

*

Andrea Jaeger then:

Flying pigtails. Soaring temper. A child prodigy who, in retrospect, makes today’s spoiled brats look like so many Shirley Temples.

Smashing rackets against walls. Screaming at linesmen. Publicly calling Chris Evert a “cheat.” Once tanking a match when mad. Keeping a computerized list of perceived wrongdoings by her foes. All in the name of a world ranking that crept as high as No. 2 in the mid-1980s.

Andrea Jaeger now:

Owns no car. Makes no money that she keeps. Forgotten about the existence of a hair brush. Wears nothing but baggy sweat suits, carries around nothing but an old backpack.

Lives in the tiny basement room of a worn mountain chalet. Spends her days bouncing around the street of serene Aspen like somebody half her age, giggling and shrieking and unafraid to scream at anybody who gets in her way.

Doesn’t date. Doesn’t try to date. Only jewelry is borrowed, only makeup is sweat.

Much too busy chasing kids into the mountains with squirt guns.

“Andrea feels she lost a lot of her childhood on the tour. . . . This is her second chance,” said Evert, a part-time Aspen resident. “For the first time, she is in her element. She is home.”

That home is not the chalet, or the city, but The Silver Lining Ranch, a mythical place that is host to real children.

Five weeks a year, for the last four years, Jaeger and her unlikely team of five have been host to about 20 kids with life-threatening illnesses from around the country.

The kids come to the mountains, all expenses paid, for things like rafting and horseback riding in the summer, skiing and snowball fighting in the winter.

There are kickball games, dance contests, water basketball and a lot of just hanging around.

Kids talking about hair loss. Kids talking about the moment the phone rang with the news that made their parents cry.

Kids talking to some of the only other kids in the world who would understand.

“The people here don’t call me Leukemia Master, they don’t call me Baldy,” said Justin Romano, 12, of Roseville, Mich. “I once pushed a kid’s face into his salad because he made fun of me. Here, I can make friends.”

Jaeger understands.

“I was different all of my life; I know what that’s like,” she said. “I never had a peer group. Neither do these kids. Until they get here.”

Jaeger takes an extra step that further separates her unconventional camp from dozens of other retreats.

Before the children fly home, they are given a toll-free number, enabling them to phone Jaeger or team members at her home at any time.

“Yeah, they all use that number,” said team member Heidi Bookout, a former tennis resort manager who lives upstairs from Jaeger. “And yeah, they don’t look at the clock before they call. But it rings, and we’re there, and it’s cool.”

Kids are also put on a mailing list for a monthly newsletter edited by a former camper and filled with updates from past campers.

It is as if, a week after taking their first uncertain steps into this high altitude, they are welcomed into a well-grounded family that will remain with them for life.

And in death.

About every three weeks now, that toll-free line rings with the news of the passing of a former camper.

The phone can be heard from Jaeger’s basement bedroom. If the voice on the other end is a parent, she knows what comes next.

“We got through that first year in 1993 with nobody dying and we thought, ‘This is great!” Jaeger said. “But now . . . “

Kevin Smyley, a streetwise former New York City commissioner and team member, explained: “This is like, you’re going full speed down this road, and you’re just hoping there’s not a wall at the end . . . because you can’t stop,” he said.

Smyley, who became involved because he was engaged to another team member, tennis teacher Beene Bookout, flies to Aspen at least five times a year from his Washington, D.C., home to help out.

He uses vacation time from his employer, Lockheed Martin, for the days. He uses his own money for the air fare. He uses the top floor of Jaeger’s chalet for sleep.

He recently had these dreams, of two special campers, bright and alive and laughing, two of his favorites. He awakens, shakes his head quickly, and reminds himself that they are dead.

“This is not phony stuff,” he said.

They are going full speed down this road with a homemade gearbox and soapbox frame.

The ranch has no permanent housing. No permanent cafeteria. No full-time fund-raising executives. No tear-jerking TV commercials.

Much of the early money came from Jaeger’s now-depleted $1.4-million career winnings. Her official charity, Kids’ Stuff Foundation, is funded through her small income from exhibitions and TV jobs, and donations she can coax from anybody she can charm.

When she is not arranging or working the weeklong camps, she is trying to charm with handwritten faxes and homespun speeches and lengthy notes often signed with a smiley face next to an arrow that says, “ME.”

“I remember doing a one-hour tennis clinic for her kids, and she sends me this three-page fax thanking me for all that I give,” Evert recalled. “I said to her, ‘Andrea, I gave one hour . . . you give a thousand hours! Nobody gives like you. And you’re thanking me?’ ”

A hint: Jaeger is not somebody to whom you can leave a message saying, “Call any time.” Because she will call any time. She begins work at 5 a.m., and wonders why the rest of the world doesn’t.

Another hint: If you do not want to donate, you do not want to sit next to her on an airplane.

“What am I supposed to do?” Jaeger said, giggling. “I start talking about the ranch, and before the plane lands, the person is giving me his card and sending me a check.”

The ranch has only two adult full-time paid workers--Jaeger is not one of them--and its counseling team is filled out with more unlikely heroes.

Besides the city commissioner, resort manager and tennis teacher, the team is filled out with another tennis teacher, Katie Anderson, and Mamta Shah, a registered nurse.

And to think that they spend only about two hours during the week actually playing tennis.

Even when you include the advisor that each hospital sends each week with its group of children, the camp isn’t exactly run by the Mayo Clinic.

But it’s not supposed to be.

“We’re not child-life specialists, we don’t do dying,” Smyley said.

Nor funerals. It is their policy not to attend them, partially for the same reason they never use the word “terminal.”’

They’re too busy living, even at its simplest form.

Jaeger is trying to raise $3 million to build a facility on $5 million worth of donated land, but until then . . .

Sometimes the team feeds the kids off the grill behind her house.

Sometimes they spend evenings sitting at a downtown Aspen mall, secretly hoping that juggler drops that torch down his pants.

Sometimes they spend time just bobbing next to each other in swimming pools.

Jaeger is one of those people who talk in exclamation points. By the end of each week, even the most subdued campers are doing the same.

“This is really cool because they just let us hang out with each other, they give us the freedom to talk, everything is not totally organized like in other camps,” said Pam Thompson of Coos Bay, Ore., the girl with the scar.

“Everywhere else, everyone treats us different,” Thompson said. “I hate it that people either try to suck up to you, or feel real sorry for you.”

Jaeger and her team do neither. They scream while trying to whip the campers in ping-pong, they leap to block their shots in water basketball. They scold the selfish ones, give space to the quiet ones, move into their circles without trying.

Shortly after Thompson showed Jaeger her scar, she applied blue dye to Jaeger’s blond hair in preparation for the upcoming dance contest.

“Cool,” Jaeger said, and she meant it.

In a team meeting before a recent arrival of campers to their middle-class hotel, there arose a typical Silver Lining Ranch debate.

“I think we should limit this week’s squirt-gun fighting to below the waist, so nobody gets irritated,” Smyley said.

The winner of several national humanitarian awards stood up.

“Are you kidding?” Jaeger said. “What fun is it to squirt somebody below the legs!”

*

The 15-year-old girl was trying to practice hard, trying to please her father, but she was thinking about things.

Maybe about the kids in the school cafeteria who threw food at her because she was different. She spent her lunch periods grading papers after that.

Or maybe she was thinking about the older tennis pros who once wondered, aloud, whether her father paid fans to cheer for her.

Whatever it was, she was thinking, and thinking, and soon she wasn’t practicing hard. Soon her father was not happy.

Soon she felt his hands on her pigtails, lifting her in the air by her hair. Then she felt those hands smack her body.

She was still not thinking about tennis, but about how somebody’s hands could inflict such harm. She would never take that chance, she decided.

And that is why the hardest thing for Andrea Jaeger to give her campers is a hug. It is something she will never give anyone else.

*

Sixteen years later, another uncertain young adult is scared again.

Her name is Rhea Olsen, she is 20, she lies dying of cancer in her tiny trailer home outside Chicago.

There is a knock at the door, and in walks Andrea Jaeger.

Two years earlier, Olsen attended the first Silver Lining Ranch week. She didn’t want to go.

“She thought Andrea was one of those pick-a-disease celebrities, and she didn’t want any part of it,” recalled her mother, Elsa.

But she went, and felt such a sense of belonging that she began returning regularly as an employee.

“This was not just a neat experience for my daughter, it was a life-altering experience,” Elsa said. “At the ranch, everybody was equal, nobody was judging how sick anybody was, and everybody sincerely cared.”

None, perhaps, more than Jaeger, who flew to Chicago to share a few of Rhea’s final days in February 1995. When Rhea could talk, they talked. When Rhea slept, Andrea laid on the living room couch.

When Jaeger was preparing to leave shortly before Olsen’s death--remember, she doesn’t do death--she was struck with not only sadness, but irony.

“For the first time in a long time, I really wanted to hug somebody,” she said. “But Rhea was in such pain, she couldn’t.”

Jaeger flew home and her dream grew ever stronger, her hugs of children coming ever easier.

*

The vision had begun after she moved to Aspen in 1989 to recuperate from an auto accident.

Her tennis career had already ended after nine surgeries. She had no real friends. She had no idea.

“She was, like, socially stunted,” said Heidi Bookout.

The Bookout sisters “adopted” Jaeger--took her to dinners, showed her around town--in an attempt to help her grow up.

But Jaeger realized, she didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to go back.

“I had worked with kids before while on the tour and I realize, that’s who I’m most comfortable with,” she said. “That’s who I can relate to. That’s where I can do some good.”

Soon, she had assembled a plan and a team willing to try miracles.

Like the time they were greeted at the airport by a group of campers who were obviously deaf.

“None of us knew sign language so I thought, ‘It’s going to be a long week,’ ” Katie Anderson recalled. “But with Andrea, you just do it. So I started making all these exaggerated motions about where to pick up the bags, and how I was going to drive them to the hotel . . . “

Then everyone sighed when some bald kids stepped off the plane.

“Wait a minute,” Jaeger shouted happily. “Those kids are ours.”

All sorts of wondrous things happen around Jaeger these days.

She remembers inviting longtime Aspen resident Fabi Benedict to a barbecue, hanging up the phone, and then hearing it ring five minutes later.

It was Fabi.

“You want some land for your project?” she asked.

Turns out, Benedict was staring over her sink at seven empty acres behind her house when Jaeger had called.

“I was asking the Virgin Mary for a sign about my property, and that phone call was a sign,” Benedict said.

The land has since been zoned and approved for construction. If Jaeger can raise the money, building can begin as soon as next spring.

Not that she will ever want to invite many more than 20 kids.

“This is about them, and if gets much bigger, it gets away from that,” Jaeger said.

Heaven help anyone who crosses those kids. Jaeger is not afraid to shout at passers-by for their insensitivity, scold vendors for not delivering exactly as ordered, glare at team members for being five minutes late.

Good thing that phone line into her house is toll-free. She sometimes gabs with former campers for an hour, particularly if there is a good TV show that both are watching.

Friends say since she finally found this safe place, she may never leave.

“She has always played to a different drumbeat,” Evert said. “While I always craved to be No. 1, she always craved relationships and friendships. Being accepted was more important to her than Wimbledon.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaeger said, “but I’m just more comfortable with the kids. It’s just me.”

Her father and former coach Roland, who Jaeger says both physically and mentally pushed her during difficult teen years, is angered by those who say she is re-creating her childhood.

“Even if she grew up like everybody else, she would be doing something like this, it’s her nature,” he said. “Everybody in the media talks about this lost childhood. It is the kids who stay home and get in trouble, those are the kids with the lost childhood.”

What she is reinventing, he said, is the abuse.

Besides, he said, that childhood was not as bad as she claimed.

“Yes, I laid my hands on my daughter, but it never had anything to do with tennis. . . . I spanked like any other father would spank a child,” he said from his Florida home. “And that pigtails thing . . . I think Andrea likes to say that to add character to the story.”

Typical of Jaeger, she giggles about her father and says they are close friends.

“Why would there be a problem?” she asked. “I understood what he was trying to do. I’ve moved past all that.”

She is always full of surprises. Last month, while accepting a Jefferson Award for public service by an individual 35 or younger, Jaeger raised officials’ eyebrows in the Supreme Court chambers by recognizing one of her campers in the crowd.

It was Joanna Potter, a college student with cystic fibrosis who had just buried her sister Noelle, who also had cystic fibrosis.

Joanna had made extensive arrangements to crash the party as a thank-you to Jaeger for her support. Jaeger made her stand up, giggling while she did it.

Later, back in her tiny Aspen office in a building where she cannot afford a parking space for the car she does not own, Andrea Jaeger finds Noelle’s picture on the wall.

It is a wall filled with pictures, all of smiling kids, some in a jacuzzi, some at a Christmas party, some playing tennis, Noelle wearing a formal gown and headed for a ball.

More than one-fourth of these children are deceased.

Every three weeks, the toll-free line rings and there is an adult on the other end and that number increases.

“Isn’t this like, a wall of . . . death?” she is asked.

“Funny,” Andrea Jaeger said. “I was thinking you were going to say life.”