SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008
Overcoming obstacles
By Dennis McCann

The evening before I was to meet with Kevin Erickson and his family I went down the street from my motel to storied Lambeau Field to take in the Packers’ night practice. It was the day Brett Favre had left town for good so I watched the new-look team until the last pass had been thrown and, when the lights dimmed, wandered to the end of the field to watch the local tradition.

In an age when money and sports are too often combustible, it’s a cool thing. A small army of kids was waiting to offer their bikes – chariots for their gods, you might say – to players who were happy to get a ride across the wide street and expansive parking lot to their locker room. And each time a player climbed aboard a borrowed bike the youthful owner would grab his hero’s helmet or shoulder pads, or sometimes both, and trot alongside or ride on the back, for brief moments on a warm summer night. It’s a part of the Green Bay Packers tradition. Part of a world that, for most, would be otherwise beyond reach.

“I look at Special Olympics,” said Erickson’s mother, Holly Dudley, the next day, “as giving Kevin one of those bikes.”

It’s an apt comparison. Special Olympics, through its golf competitions, has carried Erickson places that might have once seemed unimaginable – to manicured fairways across this land and beyond, to a dream pairing with David Duval, to a scramble with Max McGee and Jan Stenerud for partners, and who knows where it will take him next. It has given him a room filled with gold medals and golden memories, from a pair of Duval’s signature Oakley sunglasses to the bib Duval’s caddie wore that magical round.

“Kevin,” Duval wrote on it, “thanks for including me in a great day.”

It was not a day that, some years earlier, anyone would have seen coming. In 1983 Erickson was born with a brain tumor, which was detected only after he began suffering seizures. At 4 months he underwent surgery in which one-third of his brain was removed, including the part that affects speech and motor skills. Later there were other surgeries, one to remove a cyst and scar tissue, another to insert a shunt for drainage.

“It was scary,” Dudley said. And in what might be viewed as wry understatement she added, “It was a tough start.”

But Erickson was tough, too, as it turned out. He was introduced to golf at age 3 when his grandmother, Rita Houston, herself an accomplished amateur, tired of helping him with his speech and took him out to hit golf balls instead. In this sometimes confounding game there was both refuge for Erickson, and relief for Houston.

“It was a relief for me because I used to baby-sit him (a lot) and you can only do flash cards so long. I got tired and he got bored, so I got my shag bag out” and went outside, Houston said. She gave Erickson a laundry basket and told him to see if he could hit balls into it.

For the next three hours he did just that. And was hooked. After that day he would go to his grandma’s house and get the shag bag himself.

He later walked by himself to an uncle’s house to hit wedges. He practiced hitting balls over his mother’s car – a few dings in the paint suggest he was not always successful – and if the family’s house wore a few broken windows it was all for a good cause. There’s some debate about his first 18-hole score – Dudley remembers a 142, Erickson thinks it might have been 147 – but his scores would eventually drop sharply. He began to play with anyone who needed company, his grandmother especially, but also with others of all ages. And beyond being a playing partner, Houston provided her grandson with instruction and, in the case of her old Ping putter, inspiration.

“I said you can have it when you beat me,” she said. “He’s had it for about 10 years.”

Erickson played in his first Special Olympics golf tournament when he was in seventh grade. Dudley had her doubts about that at first. Because of the nature of Erickson’s disabilities she wasn’t sure that he qualified for Special Olympics – at least in her view of the program at that time – but the more she looked at it the more she saw that it would provide opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable to him.

“He’s a gray-area kid,” Dudley said. “He doesn’t fit in with his normal peers, but he’s high enough that he doesn’t fit in with (more severely handicapped).”

Golf offers him a chance at competing on an equal footing, she said, a place where he would only be judged on his play. In his first Special Olympics tournament he fired an 82, and it was only the first of many competitions to follow.

“I think I liked the challenge,” Erickson said, not a man of many words – in part, Dudley said, because he was taught to let his golf speak for itself. Erickson turned out to be quite athletic, not only in golf but also in soccer, bowling, volleyball and other events. But golf is where he found his greatest success. In high school he made the golf team at Southwest High School in Green Bay and played all four years.

As if he needed additional challenges, he was diagnosed at age 18 with cancer of the sinuses and had to endure treatments that left him weak and tired. Still, he continued to play golf throughout that period, crediting the game with keeping him mentally and physically active. Today he carries an 8.5 handicap index, he said, and plays several times a week after his work at Century Drill and Tool Company in Green Bay. At Ledgeview GC in De Pere he recently shot what was, for him, a fairly mediocre 43 on the front nine but toured the back in a tidy 36 – with nine 4s.

“He birdied the par-5s and bogeyed the par-3s,” his mother said.

Even that card wasn’t as memorable as the one from the 2003 Special Olympics Golf National Invitational Tournament when Erickson became only the third Special Olympics golfer to record a hole-in-one, this one on the 16th hole of the Wanamaker Course at PGA Golf Club in Florida. Erickson won the tournament – his fifth national title – and also holds the Special Olympics low-round record for his 75 in the final round at the 2005 national tournament in Ames, Iowa.

This is golf, though, so not all of his stories involve success. In the 1999 world games in North Carolina he was leading by 12 shots on an oppressively hot and humid day that eventually got the best of him. He lost the lead and the tournament to a South African player who turned in the best round of his life.

How did you feel, I asked Erickson, imagining choices from disappointing to shattered.

“Hot,” he said.

The round with David Duval came in 2004 at Timuquana CC in Jacksonville, Fla. Initially the event was to feature Duval and Sergio Garcia along with two Special Olympians, Erickson and Oliver Doherty of Ireland. When Garcia’s schedule didn’t work out, Duval’s father, Bob, a Champions Tour player, stepped in as Doherty’s partner, and the made-for-TV exhibition (you can find a five-minute video on You Tube to get a flavor of the event) was on. Duval hit his first tee shot into the trees, while Erickson’s slight draw found only short grass.

“At least one of us is in the fairway,” Erickson told his partner, who had merely won a British Open and numerous other tournaments around the world.

“Fairways,” Duval replied, “are overrated.”

He and Erickson went on to win the match 4-and-3 after Erickson made 6-footers on the final three holes, one for birdie. Duval, whose career-threatening slump was in full bloom, said at the time the experience of playing with Special Olympians was humbling. For Erickson, the experience was thrilling, and the gifts exchanged that day – everyone got a silver plate, and there was that little matter of his partner’s trademark sunglasses – still have a prominent place in his bedroom.

Dudley credits the major golf organizations for being generous supporters of Special Olympics and its competitions. For national tournaments, players are given access to practice facilities and instruction at the finest courses, and such golf big shots as Dr. Trey Holland, past president of the United States Golf Association, help with rules and tournament activities.

“Grandma calls him Dr. Holland,” Dudley said. “Kevin calls him Trey.”

Dudley, obviously, has come full circle on the benefits of Special Olympics. She now works at the Special Olympics office in Green Bay, working with about 70 athletes in local, national and even international events.

“We like to provide opportunities,” she said. “We sent seven athletes to Ireland ... When do they get opportunities like this? They just don’t.”

Kevin Erickson, too, got an opportunity, and through golf he has found a place in the world that otherwise might have remained foreign.

“I think he found that one first,” Dudley said. “I think he can find other things, (too).”