The skies over Sage Valley Golf Club in Graniteville were overcast on a recent late-March afternoon, but there was no spoiling Jim Byrd’s good mood. He chatted and joked with Bob Talley as they awaited the arrival of Jim’s son (and Bob’s son-in-law), PGA Tour player Jonathan Byrd, from a practice session at Augusta National.
At about 6 p.m., as the sound of bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” wafted across the private club’s grounds, father and son stood on Sage Valley’s first tee, laughing and watching the sun set. The next afternoon, the three men would play golf together at the home of the Masters.
“A belated Father’s Day gift for the dads,” Jonathan Byrd called it.
Memory-building, one also might call it.
And that was merely an appetizer for a special week for the Columbia family. Starting on Thursday, Jonathan, 30 and in his seventh year on the PGA Tour, will play in his third Masters, his first since 2004. Along for the experience will be Jim and his wife, Jo; Jonathan’s wife, Amanda, and toddler son, Jackson; plus older brother Jordan, assistant coach of the Clemson golf team.
Jim, 64, the excitable one in an otherwise reserved family, already was envisioning one moment in particular. “The expectation of standing at the first tee, seeing Jonathan tee off, hearing his name called out ... that is such a thrill,” he said. “I can’t tell you how excited I am.”
Excited ... and grateful.
“Absolutely,” Jim said. “Six months ago, I didn’t know where I was going to be come April.”
Last Oct. 6, while attending the Clemson-Virginia Tech football game, Jim Byrd suffered a seizure and collapsed as he and Jo exited Memorial Stadium. Rushed to one hospital and then another, doctors discovered a mass on the side of his brain — a “golf ball-sized” tumor, according to his surgeon, Dr. Aaron MacDonald. Once removed, it was found to be a gliobastoma multiforme, an aggressive, malignant and usually lethal cancer.
Among Jim Byrd’s first memories after surgery was hearing MacDonald tell his family that GBM patients “usually don’t last but about a year.” Looking back on that, Byrd paused, then chuckled.
“I was hoping to hear the word ‘benign,’” he said.
Nowadays, he hears a different word: miracle.
Six months removed from surgery, Dr. G. Tripp Jones of S.C. Oncology Associates says the elder Byrd is “doing so well, it’s scary.” An ongoing series of MRI examinations shows no signs of reoccurrence. The only visible reminder of his ordeal is a faint scar on the side of his head where the surgery was performed.
Nonvisible reminders depend on who is remembering.
“It looks like he’s in remission,” Jones said. “We don’t say ‘cured’ — we don’t use that word. You’ve got to be vigilant; the other shoe could drop.”
“(GBM) is one of the nasty ones,” MacDonald said. “It’s not curable, but it is treatable. Ten years ago, it was a death sentence. It’s a good time for treating this kind of tumor.”
For at least a year, Byrd will undergo a regimen of chemotherapy five days a month on the drug Temodar, 23 days off. Every one-two months, his body is scanned and the results are reviewed by doctors at Duke University. So far, so good.
“Jim is a total inspiration,” said Clemson golf coach Larry Penley, Jonathan’s former coach and Jordan’s boss. “I told them, ‘if anyone can lick this, it’s your dad. He’s gonna beat the odds.’”
“Everyone’s different,” Jonathan Byrd said. “The life expectancy is a pure average; some people are living 5-10 years out. We’re praying for my dad to be healed. That’s not how this cancer works ... but there’s a chance.”
And what more can a family ask, especially a family as close as this one? “(The Byrds are) going through the idea (of) living each day to the fullest,” Jones said.
“We tell Jim, ‘Go out and enjoy yourself.’”
In other words, go play Augusta National ... and revel in your son’s return to the Masters.
SCARE OF A LIFETIME
Jonathan Byrd remembers tightly gripping his car’s steering wheel as he raced toward Oconee Memorial Hospital that October Saturday, on the tail of the ambulance carrying his father, “praying the whole time I was driving.”
The day had begun as a family outing, a rarity with everyone’s busy schedules: pregame tailgating, then seats in a luxury box at the football game for Byrd, a former All-American at Clemson, plus his wife, son and parents. Later, Jo Byrd would tell her younger son that Jim seemed “weird all day, like he was wired.”
Jonathan also knew his father had been having headaches. he didn’t know they had been going on for a month.
Jackson Byrd, 15 months old, wasn’t enjoying the lopsided loss any more than other Clemson fans, so Byrd took his wife and son back to his brother’s house — Jordan was with the Tigers’ golf team at a tournament in Macon, Ga. — and was returning to the stadium just before halftime.
“I was a few minutes from picking them up when my mom called, saying he had collapsed,” Byrd said. “She thought he’d had a heart attack.”
Emergency personnel at the stadium stabilized Jim Byrd before rushing him to Oconee Memorial. When scans indicated the mass, he was moved to Anderson Area Medical Center, where MacDonald was that day’s on-call physician.
Meanwhile, Clemson’s golf “hotline” was working overtime. Jordan Byrd, after getting the news, borrowed Penley’s truck and headed for Anderson. Penley’s wife, Heidi, had met the Byrds at Oconee — “they’re part of our family,” she said — and then followed another ambulance to Anderson, where everyone seemed to arrive at once.
Three days later, MacDonald operated. “I think we got a complete resection,” he said after removing virtually the entire tumor without damage to Byrd’s brain (paralysis had been a concern). That was good news; what followed was not.
Heidi Penley said she never will forget the look on Jonathan’s face when MacDonald delivered his diagnosis. “He was just stunned, that deer-in-the-headlights look,” she said.
But both Byrd sons soon took charge, researching GBM, finding the best hospitals and treatment available, in this case at Duke. Jim Byrd’s first treatments there were for dangerous blood clots, which required insertion of a filter into a vessel near his heart. Doctors couldn’t use aggressive blood thinners, since bleeding in his brain also could have been fatal.
“We tiptoed through a minefield,” Jones said.
For three weeks, in messages posted on a cancer patients’ Web site, CaringBridge.com, the Byrds recounted a difficult time for Jim Byrd. But on Oct. 29, Jordan wrote that his father was improving; on Nov. 4, Jim was discharged from Duke and returned to his Columbia home, where “that sofa and I became good friends,” he said, laughing.
Slowly but surely, he improved. “As a son, I am learning a lot about how to deal with adversity by watching my dad,” Jonathan wrote on the Web site on Nov. 7. “He refuses to complain and displays an above-average sense of humor.”
And then, about a month after returning to Columbia, Jim Byrd told his younger son he should go back to his own home at Sea Island, Ga., and begin preparing for the 2008 PGA Tour season.
“He told Jonathan, ‘Go play,’” said Charles Warren, a former Clemson teammate, fellow PGA Tour player and friend. “Mr. Byrd told him, ‘You’ve got to get back to some normalcy.’”
Indeed, everyone needed that.
A GOLFER FROM THE START
In 2007, Jonathan Byrd enjoyed his best year on the PGA Tour, winning $1.85 million and capturing his third career victory, which until his birthday on Jan. 27 made him the only American player under 30 with three wins. He finished 28th in the tour’s FedEx Cup standings and earned a return trip to the Masters, the tournament he grew up loving.
In 2008, Byrd has made seven of nine cuts and won $531,054 (his 2,157 FedEx Cup points rank 53rd). He was in contention through three rounds at the FBR Open, and on Sunday he and Warren played in the final group with winner J.B. Holmes. Byrd shot a closing 73 to tie for 13th.
“Jonathan is great at compartmentalizing, focusing on what he needs to do,” Warren said. “More than anything, (his father’s illness) is motivation to go out and play well.”
Especially this week, at a tournament that always has been special for Byrd and his family.
As a rookie in 2002, his 39th-place finish on the money list earned his first invitation to Augusta National. Byrd made the most of it: Hs tie for eighth in 2003 was best among 16 first-timers in the tournament and assured his return. But he battled a hip injury in 2004 and shot 79-74 to miss the Masters cut.
The Byrd family’s love affair with Augusta, though, goes back to before Jonathan began playing; for that matter, before he was born. “You took me to the Masters when we were dating,” Jo reminded her husband. Before they were married, she taught school at Windsor Elementary, and he coached wrestling and football and taught math and chemistry at Dreher High.
After Jordan and, 18 months later, Jonathan came along, Jim and Jo took their sons to the Masters whenever tickets were available. The parents would sit at the par-3 sixth hole or the par-5 15th, while the boys would “take off for Amen Corner,” Jim said. “They just wanted to see everybody and everything.”
Those who know the family say Jonathan (and to a lesser extent Jordan) is his mother’s child: quiet, reserved, courteous but slow to warm to outsiders. Jim is more naturally outgoing and gregarious, traits he used during a career with SCE&G and as head of the state’s independent colleges. But his sons got one thing from him: his passion for golf.
When both boys were toddlers, Jim would take them with him to the driving range or to an open field. “They took plastic balls and clubs; I’d put them on one end of the range, and they just hit and had a wonderful time,” he said.
Jonathan, chuckling, offers an alternate take: “We thought it was him introducing us to golf, but we later realized it was an excuse for him to go hit balls,” he said.
Byrd’s biographical entry at PGATour.com begins with the words “his father introduced him to golf when he was 3 years old.” Upstairs in the Byrds’ home in Woodcreek Farms is an old, cut-down 5-iron that served as both boys’ first “real” club.
“That’s the one thing they might fight over,” Jim said.
Both sons were good all-around athletes, but by seventh grade, Jonathan knew golf was his future. His parents were supportive, but “realistic” about his hopes of playing professional golf — they thought.
Two episodes changed that. Penley, during the Byrds’ recruiting trip to Clemson — Jordan by then was playing golf for Furman — told Jim Byrd, a North Carolina graduate and former athlete, how badly he wanted Jonathan to become a Tiger.
“Larry said, ‘Jonathan is one of the top five players,’” Jim Byrd said, “and my comment was, ‘Larry, do you really believe Jonathan is one of the top five players in South Carolina?’ He looked at me like, ‘You dummy.’ He said, ‘I’m talking about one of the top five in the nation.’
“That just stunned me. He’d won around Columbia, but not to the extent some his age had. My expectations were too low.”
Later, Jo also had to be convinced. “I didn’t want him to do this (PGA Tour),” she said. “I thought it was wonderful he got a free education, but I wanted him to be a normal father and businessman.
“When he was a senior, he told me, ‘Mom, you’ve just got to accept this. This is what I’m going to do with my life, because this is what I’m supposed to do.’
“He knew what he wanted.”
‘JIMMY’S NOT A QUITTER’
Most of the significant dates in Jonathan Byrd’s professional career come as part of family memories. As a Nationwide Tour player in 2001, he won Greenville’s BMW Charity Pro-Am with Jordan as his caddie for the first two rounds, Jim the final two.
Jim also caddied for his son during the rain-shortened Par-3 Contest at the 2003 Masters (Brennan King, a former Clemson roommate, will be Byrd’s caddie this year). When Jonathan won last year’s John Deere Classic, Jim proudly parked his John Deere riding lawnmower next to the street in front of his house.
Besides their nuclear-family closeness, the Byrds all share a deep religious faith. If anything, the past six months have strengthened that, they say.
“It’s strange, but those moments where you have no control over anything ... that’s when you’re closest to God,” Jonathan Byrd said. “This wasn’t the worst of times; we were fearful of what could happen, but we had great peace and contentment.
“If God decided to take my dad, then we’d be thankful we got to have as many good times as we did. But we were going to pray that wasn’t the case, that he’d be healed.”
Jordan Byrd said his father’s apparent good health is, to him, evidence that such a “decision” already has been made.
“The doctors are 100 percent sure some cancer cells are still there,” Jordan said. “At the same time, all of us believe if God wanted to remove every cell, then He did, and (Jim) doesn’t have cancer.
“Knowing what the doctors tell us, but also knowing God can heal ... now it’s a question of waiting to see what it is.”
If it takes an act of God to beat this cancer — well, the Byrds say, it won’t be the first one they believe they have witnessed.
When Jim collapsed, one of the first persons to approach was a nurse, Donna Lowe. “I had stopped breathing and was turning blue; I was dying,” he said. “She gave me CPR until the emergency technicians got there with oxygen.”
Two weeks later, Lowe called to tell Jo Byrd she had had no idea whose life she was saving until reading about Jim and Jonathan in a Clemson fan newspaper.
Other events, too, worked in their favor. “We could’ve been on I-26 at 70 mph when it happened,” Jim said. Or he might have been hospitalized somewhere other than Anderson, where the medical center CEO is a former UNC classmate.
“God sort of planned it that way,” Jo Byrd said.
At Augusta, and especially next week, when everyone gathers at the Verizon Heritage, family stories will flow. A favorite will be the first time Jonathan took Jim and Jordan to play Augusta National, the day after Jim’s 60th birthday in 2004.
“Jonathan and I knew how important it was to him to play well,” Jordan said. “The first hole he almost hit it (out of bounds) and we thought, ‘Oh, no.’
“But later, at No. 14, Dad flew a 7-iron in the hole for eagle. That was pretty awesome.”
Some stories, of course, will be designed to gig the “old man.” Jonathan recalls one father-son experience in particular.
“When Jordan and I started hitting it way past him, that was really frustrating to him,” Jonathan said, laughing. “He couldn’t figure out why. I was thinking, ‘OK, I’m 25, on the PGA Tour, in a lot better shape, you’re 60.’ He’s still trying to figure out why he can’t hit it as far as me.”
With that attitude, perhaps it’s not surprising that, in his battle with cancer, Jim Byrd so far is the leader in the clubhouse.
“I want to be their (doctors’) poster child,” he said recently. “I want to be a 95-year-old saying, ‘This is what good care, and good family, can do.’”
Sitting nearby, Jo Byrd smiled. “We work together as a team,” she said. “We’re a good team,” he replied, and she smiled again.
She paused before adding, “Jimmy’s not a quitter.” That, it seems, also runs in the family.
Reach senior writer Gillespie at (803) 771-8304.
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