Courage of a Tiger

By Dave Kindred
Photos: M.J. Lebrecht II/1 Deuce 3 May 2007

The kid's a ham, and you gotta love him. There he stands in the family's great room. His back is arched, his feet spread wide, both arms raised. He has a driver in his right hand and a triumphant smile across his face. His voice is as tiny as he is, and it's as mighty as he is.

He says, "Ladies and gentlemen . . . " Imagining the 2021 Masters. "On the tee . . . " By then he'll be 18 years old. "From Strawberry Court . . . " His condo address today. "ME! Kyle Lograsso!"

From life's darkness into its light he has come. On May 28, he will be 5 years old. He almost didn't make it. He's still shorter than a SasQuatch driver and weighs less than a big bag. Crazy to say, but the kid's a player with a nice little swing. Gets it to 53 miles per hour on the launch monitor, hits it 50 or 60 yards on the fly. Says he likes putting best " 'cause they go in."

Kyle Lograsso is an affirmative answer to the seldom-asked question: Can you become golf-obsessed before leaving diapers? You can, it turns out, if your father is a Marine visiting Korea while stationed in Japan and your television delivers the Golf Channel.

"We have no idea why, but for hours he watched nothing else, just glued to golf," says Jeff Lograsso, a staff sergeant who'd never played the game. In front of the TV, transfixed, the boy made phantom swings in copy of what he'd seen on the screen, mostly Tiger Woods winning.

For Kyle's second birthday, celebrated in Japan, his parents bought him a driver, 7-iron and putter. Now he has PlayStation 2 starring Tiger Woods, and from the far side of the room comes Kyle's sudden narration, "HOLE-IN-ONE!" A minute later, with a fist pump: "DOUBLE EAGLE!" His bedroom is a shrine of Tiger photographs, Tiger books, Tiger games and Tiger club covers.

The great room is a rolling minefield of golf balls negotiated by visitors only at their orthopedic peril. A new bag of tiny clubs stands ready for those emergencies when Kyle must, just must, go hit some balls. Outside the condo door, there's a driving range, sort of.

"We might have 150 balls over there, and we can't go get them," says his father, meaning the yard behind a neighbor's fence in Perkasie, Pa. Once Kyle outgrew that space, the father asked him, "Hey, buddy, you want to go to a golf course?" Hey, Dad, does a bear chip in the woods?

Which Kyle did not say, because he's just a kid. But he will say it when he's grown up, because on that day in the spring of '06, Jeff and Kyle Lograsso went to a golf course together for the first time in what they hope will be a forever trip.

"We played for three hours," the father says. "Kyle was in heaven." A golf neophyte at 32, Jeff Lograsso is an athlete who saw in his boy the inexplicable glimmerings of a prodigy: grace, hand-eye coordination, enthusiasm. So he called around. He tried maybe 10 courses before finding one whose junior-program instructor would look at a 3-year-old.

At Lederach Golf Club in Harleysville, Pa., director of instruction Bob Huber promised the father, "I'll tell you if you're wasting your time."

Kyle teed it up. Though right-handed, he plays lefty, and no one is sure why, save for guessing that it keeps his good eye over the ball throughout the swing.

First shot, a driver, 35 yards, dead straight. The instructor said, "Kyle, can you do that again?"

Not only again, 30 times.

"Y'know what?" Huber told the Marine. "It's hard to believe a 3-year-old can do this. But a 3-year-old with one eye?"

Regina Lograsso, Kyle's mother, had seen something in his left eye. What, she didn't know. A glare. There was also something about the way he moved through the house. Soon, there appeared in the glare, at the center, a little white dot. It seemed to grow over time.

One day, from behind him, the mother moved her cupped fingers in front of Kyle's eye. She almost touched his eyelashes. When he showed no reaction, she felt a chill of fear.

Because it was also time for his 2-year-old checkup, she took her son to a base doctor who ordered him to Hawaii for examination by a pediatric ophthalmologist.

There the diagnosis was bilateral retinoblastoma. That's cancer in both eyes. There are fewer than 100 cases among children in the U.S. annually. Untreated, the cancer that starts in the retina moves from the eye along the optic nerve into the brain, where it is fatal.

From Hawaii, the Lograssos were sent to Philadelphia. On July 2, 2004, they met Dr. Carol Shields, a surgeon in the ocular-oncology service of Wills Eye Institute. "That was the scariest day of all," Regina Lograsso says, "because Dr. Shields told us that without immediate surgery, Kyle would have three months to live."

Dr. Shields says, "Kyle's right eye had four small tumors that could be treated with chemotherapy. The left eye was filled with a massive tumor."