Redman Can Now Enjoy Greens After Hitting Some Rough Spots

They worked together Friday, talking all the while, Susie Redman hitting the shots and Bo Redman schlepping her sticks.

He kept her calm, chatting about the kids, who are staying with their grandparents in Alabama while Mom goes out to make a living and Pop tags along to do the heavy lifting.

“It’s like a walk in the park, even though this park has got a lot of trouble,” she said after shooting a 68 that included a hole in one--her first--on the par-three 12th. That left her one shot behind after the first round of the U.S. Women’s Open.

The talk was about John, 7, and about Benjamin, 4, and then it was about Jesse, and nothing Susie Redman does on a golf course seems as important. No shot seems as critical now, because she still has Jesse, who is 2 1/2.

Two years ago, she almost didn’t.

“He’s not this little baby anymore that I had that was barely breathing,” she says.

Jesse’s story needs little embellishment. She tells it to other parents in similar situations, seeking to foster hope.

“It was my baby,” she begins. “Two years ago he was 5 months old and . . . at the [1995] Oldsmobile Classic in East Lansing, Mich., he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. It’s a childhood cancer. It’s a solid tumor.”

She was about to tee off for the final round, and was near the leaders in a tournament on the LPGA tour, on which she has never won.

It gets worse, actually, before it gets better, because Jesse Redman had been in the LPGA’s baby-sitting center, and someone there took him to a doctor, who decided Jesse had bronchitis and croup and released him. She was told to pick him up after Friday’s round.

The only good thing that happened from that examination was that the doctor had a precautionary X-ray taken.

It took a day for it to be read, by which time Jesse was barely breathing and Bo and Susie Redman were frantic.

“The next day, on Saturday, I’m on the second hole,” Susie says. “The LPGA comes out to the golf course and they say, ‘We need your child for a CT scan immediately.’

“I said, ‘What is this? What are you talking about? For what?’

“ ‘We found a growth in his neck.’

“ ‘Is it life-threatening?’ They said, ‘No. We just need him in immediately.’ ”

Susie Redman had a job to do: the third round.

“I had finished playing, because they told me it was not life-threatening,” she says, “and they walked in the door and said, ‘Your child has a malignant tumor and within days he’s going to die.’ ”

Jesse Redman weighed about 16 pounds, about 1 1/2 of those pounds a tumor near his airway, in his upper chest and throat. Four months of chemotherapy helped very little, and he seemed to be getting worse at their home in Orlando.

But bills require money, and Mom still had to work, so she went to the Rail Classic, an LPGA event in Peoria, Ill. It was one of her most fortuitous trips.

“I met up with the mayor of Peoria, and the tournament director of the Rail Classic, and these two people put me in touch with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital [in Memphis],” she says. “And that is where we went and they saved Jesse.

“They did surgery on Jesse and he’s well. He’s doing wonderful. He’s 2 1/2 and he’s actually bigger than my 4-year-old. He’s great. And it seems like 10 years ago now. . . . I really, truly believe that he’s a miracle.”

Everything else, the successes and failures, pales in comparison.

“For me, I’m blessed to be out here playing golf,” she says. “I can’t imagine what the alternative would be, of taking care of a sick child, not even be able to do what I always wanted to do. That is to play on the LPGA tour and win a tournament and to be able to do both, be a mom and a professional athlete.”

In that order.

IT’S ONLY ONE

Pearl Sinn, the former U.S. Women’s Amateur champion from Long Beach, was playing a practice round with Annika Sorenstam and Leta Lindley on Wednesday when she holed out a seven-wood on the 194-yard par-three 10th at Pumpkin Ridge.

Her mother, Sue Sinn, who lives in Bellflower, had just joined the group’s gallery and asked for the ball, but Pearl had already tossed it to her caddie, who had put it in a ball pocket with a half-dozen just like it.

Sue says her daughter has “about five or six” holes in one.

THE QUEST

What does a professional golfer do on vacation?

He plays golf, if he’s Raymond Floyd, who recently took his family to Scotland, where the game was born and, Floyd hopes, where he can find his game.

Floyd is struggling on the senior tour, where he is 23rd on the money list and has back problems.

KINDERGARTEN ACE

When young Matthew Draper holed out a three-wood on the 120-yard fourth hole at the Cherwell Edge course in central England, people went scurrying to the Guinness Book of World Records to see if anybody younger had ever had a hole in one.

Draper was 5 years 7 months and 9 days old, which probably kept him from having to buy a round, though the milk was on him.

The apparent world-record holder is Cody Orr of Littleton, Colo., who was 5 when he holed out a tee shot in 1975 in San Antonio, and Guinness is apparently trying to track him down to find out how many months and days beyond 5 he was at the time.

THE FAB ONE

Lest we forget how young Tiger Woods is, he reminds in an answer to a question posed about his impact next week at the British Open at Royal Troon.

Told it would be like when the Beatles came to the United States in 1964, Woods responded, “I don’t know what it’s going to be like, and I wasn’t around for the Beatles.”

ANOTHER NUMBER

Among the various statistics used to describe Woods’ impact on golf, add this one: 30 million.

That’s the number of dollars CBS reportedly is paying to lock up the PGA Championship until 2005, adding the event to the Masters to give the network two of the four majors, two of “only four events each year we know he will play in,” according to Sean McManus, the president of CBS Sports.

And increasingly, the PGA Tour is becoming a series of Woods and non-Woods events, because for all of the talk of increased TV viewership, seven events in which he did not play or was not in contention Sunday had lower final-round ratings than last year.

YOUNG REPUBLICAN

Woods drew a fair amount of criticism when he declined to be with President Clinton at Shea Stadium in April to honor the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s start in major league baseball, but it might have been predicted.

A source close to Woods told the Associated Press that it was actually the sixth time he has declined to join Clinton in a golf outing or ceremony.

SHORT PUTTS

The youngster playing with Tom Watson on the back nine at the Western Open on Sunday was none other than 14-year-old Michael Watson, pacing the old man while subbing for Michael Bradley, who was ill and withdrew. . . . Scott Simpson’s caddie for the Western Open was a new guy, but one with a track record. Bill Murray, of “Caddyshack” fame, toted the bag, for 71 holes, then quit and left Simpson to carry it up the final fairway.

CBS announcer Jim Nantz was struggling in a nine-hole skins game with buddy Fred Couples and other touring pros, Jeff Sluman and Joey Sindelar, at Blue Heron Hills in Rochester, N.Y., on July 1, but the others were playing well enough to generate a four-hole carry-over through the ninth. A 30-foot chip-off ensued, with Couples dogging it so Nantz had a chance, but Sindelar hitting it to three feet and Sluman one. Nantz? To within an inch for $4,000, donated to charity.

Mitch Richmond of the Sacramento Kings is conducting a charity golf event today at Cypress Golf Club in Cypress and a basketball exhibition game Saturday at Pauley Pavilion. Scottie Pippen, Karl Malone, Penny Hardaway, Charles Barkley, Tim Hardaway, Gary Payton, Kevin Garnett, Vin Baker, Juwan Howard, Alonzo Mourning and Reggie Miller are scheduled to take part. The event benefits the NAACP National Endowment Fund, the United Way and the UCLA Scholarship Program. Details: (916) 774-7112.