|
Aspen, Colo., Aug. 22 - Julia called to say goodbye, sounding rushed. She was planning her funeral, the music, the clothes she wanted to be laid out in, the makeup. She asked Andrea Jaeger to send a photograph of her hand prints in a cement block set along a walkway at the Silver Lining Ranch here.
Jaeger was stunned. "Julia was 14," she said last week, two months after Julia died of cancer. "When I was 14, my biggest decisions were about what to order from room service in five-star hotels."
As a teenage tennis star, Jaeger had her own problems. In Prairie View, Ill., outside Chicago, classmates pelted her with cafeteria food and stuffed her in a locker. She was different; she had no school friends. On the circuit, the older pros made fun of her pigtails and braces, especially after she beat them. She began dressing in the public bathrooms. She had no tour friends.
One lonely day, during a tournament in New Jersey, as she tells it, she impulsively bought some toys and took them to children at the Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, N.Y., a rehabilitation center.
Twenty years later, at 35, Jaeger is rarely quiet, but now she is hyper.
"They made me feel like Santa Claus, I went to give them something and I ended up with the gift," she said with skimpy punctuation. "There was this boy with stubs for hands who wanted to play video games with me and a girl who danced with her IV pole and a girl who asked me to rub her bald head. She was going through chemo and I thought, 'When I grow up I am going to spend my life helping these kids.'"
Jaeger appears to have grown up. She has created, from a teenage notion, a program that has touched several thousand children with advanced cancers over the past 11 years. But her warm, energetic, sometimes howling offerings of life and laughter in the rawness of pain and relapse and death seem to spring from the optimism of the happy childhood she never had.
Her father, a former Swiss boxer, was her coach, never her dad, she says, and although she reached No. 2 in the world and advanced to the 1983 Wimbledon final (she lost to Martina Navratilova), her career was over at 19.
Seven surgeries could not repair her shoulder. She was not the teen-burnout head case sometimes portrayed, but in retrospect she wonders if the injuries were her body's way of taking her out of a life that did not truly absorb her "to a life that I loved and was better at and can do forever."
"I loved the game, but the tennis life became surreal for me after I met those kids," she said. "Here I was, I could order adults to put certain candies for me in the locker room - the would jump to do it - and there they were, thinking about dying. Puts having a bad day in perspective."
|
In her early 20's, she and a friend with tennis club business experience, Heidi Bookout, founded Kids Stuff, now called the Silver Lining Foundation, and began offering sick youngsters a vacation week in an Aspen hotel. Once her $1.4 million savings from prize money was gone, the shoestring operation was fueled by local freebies and maxed-out credit cards. Jaeger and Bookout gave tennis lessons in exchange for donations. Jaeger was a ticket agent at the Aspen airport so she could buy the campers discounted fares.
Two other women, Kate Anderson and Bookout's sister, Beene Smyley, have also been there from the beginning, 11 years ago. The first big donation, from John McEnroe, and his continued support, gave Jaeger fund-raising credibility and opened the door to the tennis establishment.
For kids who can travel, there is now a week at Wimbledon; last year, on a rainy day, Andre Agassi invited a bunch over to his flat for lunch. A group of New York kids too sick to travel will attend the United States Open with Dr. Jim McKinnell, a pediatric oncologist at the Brooklyn Hospital and Silver Liningšs medical director. Once pros with heart meet the kids, they become involved. In the middle of a recent tournament, Pete Sampras pulled off a highway into cellular range to call a boy in intensive care.
But the soul of the program is here at the 10-acre ranch in the palm of a green valley surrounded by the pricey Aspen mountains. Completed last summer on land donated by the local Benedict family was the 18,000-square-foot, $6 million lodge with its medical suite, stage, single bowling alley and eight bedrooms, each decorated in a phantasmagoric motif starry night, Hollywood, rainforest, San Diego Padres as different as possible from the white walls of a hospital. The principal benefactor was the financier Ted Forstmann, who donated $1.7 million early.
|
While Jaeger spends much of her time fund-raising (the program costs $2.3 million a year) with the shameless ferocity of an old moonballer rushing the net, she is also the wise and silly head counselor. Twenty youngsters, usually between 9 and 17, come for a week at a time, typically from two or three hospitals around the country. Each group is usually accompanied by a nurse. The campers have been chosen because they are well enough at the moment for the adventure, but their prognoses are poor. Of the 12 Chicago youngsters in Jaegeršs first session 11 years ago, only one is still alive; but she is a mother.
"Nobody knows if you have tomorrow," Jaeger said, "whether you have cancer of not. I want them to have life while they're alive, to be in a place where nobody isolates them because they are different."
Life at the ranch includes horseback riding, swimming, tennis ("Did Andrea play pro once?" a kid asks), whitewater rafting, fishing at Kevin Costneršs nearby spread (the movie star patiently poses with each camper) and skiing in winter. The talent show is as hilariously awful as any camp's, even though some of the chorus-line wigs are on bald heads, and some of the high-kickers wear seven-pound braces.
There are rituals. At story time, Jaeger gently leads them to talk about the friends who turned away because they thought cancer was contagious, the doctors who didnšt listen, the guilt they feel for what their parents are going through, and the freedom they feel in a safe have where everyone shares the dreads. After the gondola ride up Aspen Mountain, Jaeger crows "good job, good job" as throwing up, leukemia, dad not visiting in the hospital, chemotherapy, spinal taps and losing hair are named and cast into the gorge, a stone at a time.
The sendoff at the airport is wrenching; despite the promise of newsletters, phone calls, holiday gifts, home visits, counselor jobs, family retreats, even college scholarships Jaeger's decision to keep the groups small makes a lifelong follow-up program possible all know that there are faces here who will live on only in the videos of their time together. At the gate, Jaeger reminds them of her 800 number. Call anytime, she shouts, if you have a relapse or just want to talk. Many do.
Cherish called to say hello, sounding rushed. She was planning her wedding, and wondered if she could spend part of her honeymoon at Silver Lining. She said she wanted her husband to see what had saved her for him, what had kept her going seven years ago when she needed to know she was not alone.
(Photo of camper & Andrea Jaeger on rock-climbing wall:
Andrea Jaeger helping a camper. The children's problems, she said, put "having a bad day in perspective.")
|
