http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060428/SPT/604280350/1078

 

It will be the most appreciated 74 anyone shoots in golf this year. Also the most poignant. Unquestionably the round most from the heart.

 

Dakoda Dowd is 13 years old, so young to be playing in an LPGA tour event. So young to stand in the middle of microphones and minicams.

 

Certainly too young to watch a mother fight terminal breast cancer.

 

 

You may have heard about Dakoda Dowd, who is doing all the above this week in Florida. No one in sports is on a more significant mission. No one deserves our attention this week more than she.

 

They have carried their story to the public now, which is the whole idea. How Kelly Jo Dowd found a lump in her breast in 2001. How she first tried to ignore it. How precious time went by until she was diagnosed with breast cancer 10 months later. She beat it back once, but it has returned - mercilessly and relentlessly, as cancer can do.

 

Kelly Jo Dowd is at the golf course this week for two reasons. One is to watch her little girl in a pro tournament, because there might not be another chance. The other is to present her own plight as a warning to any woman who will listen.

 

These type of stories are the ones that make sports so important and we can only pray that we get more and more athletes for our children to watch rather than the absent fathers, abusive husbands, arrested citizens, gun-wielding or pill popping athletes we have too many times presently.

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