GAINESVILLE, Va. — After the second round of the 1992 Sara Lee Classic, Jim and Cathy Gerring talked about a terrific shot she’d hit on her 17th hole Saturday afternoon at Hermitage Golf Course in Old Hickory, Tennessee. She’d come out of a 3-iron, and the ball had dribbled down into the water. Gerring took off a shoe and sock and hit it from the hazard to 2 inches.
“We were laughing about how lucky I was,” she recalled.
Cathy wanted to go hit balls. Jim, the head pro at Muirfield Village, wanted to eat. The players had gotten little notes from the tour, as they often did, asking them to visit the hospitality tent to thank the sponsors. Cathy had just sat down with her plate of food when Jim started raving about the chicken. She went back to the buffet line, where the chef told her that his burner had just gone out and that it would be a minute. A 30-year-old Cathy leaned up against the table to wait.
As a catering employee began to refill the burner with denatured alcohol, he realized that the flame had not gone out. There was an explosion and Cathy, who’d been doused with fuel, was on fire from the waist up.
“You know you hear that stop, drop and roll,” she recalled. “My face was – I could hear it sizzling. … I just ran.”
Jim shot up from his chair and ran after her, pulling off a tablecloth and smothering Cathy as he tackled her to the ground. She turned over and saw the skin dripping from her hands and face. As everyone in the room stood there frozen in shock, it was Cathy who yelled out, “Somebody call 9-1-1!”
Cathy was at the peak of her career when the unthinkable happened. Two years prior, she’d won three times on the LPGA and earned a spot on the inaugural Solheim Cup team. The 1990 Solheim Cup was a who’s who list of American superstars who combined to win 214 LPGA titles and 24 majors. The dream team included Nancy Lopez, Pat Bradley, Patty Sheehan, Beth Daniel, Betsy King, Dottie Pepper, Rosie Jones and Gerring, whose name might be the only one among the eight that modern fans don’t recognize.
As the EMS worker screamed for a MedEvac flight, Gerring thought she might not survive. She asked her husband to take good care of their 3-year-old son, Zach.
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“I was standing on the 10th tee when they air-vac’d her out,” said Pepper, Gerring’s close friend and Solheim Cup partner. “They stopped play.”
The nurse in the helicopter told Gerring that she couldn’t give her any pain medication because her throat was swelling shut from ingesting the alcohol. When she landed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, there was a line of medical staff pouring saline on her hands and face every 5 feet.
“I knew my career was over,” said Gerring, “there was just no way. I had five layers of skin burned off both hands. They did skin grafts. I knew I would never have the same pair of hands.”
Inkster, who often stayed with the Gerrings in Ohio when it was too much to get back to California, went to the hospital after her round.
“Her head was the size of a basketball,” recalled Inkster. “She lost all her eyebrows. It was just such a fluke accident. Everybody has been through a buffet with those things and for it to just blow up in her face.”
Gerring’s mother had taken Zach to Opryland that day. When the mother of six arrived at the hospital, nothing could prepare her for what she saw.
“I will never ever forget the look on my mom’s face when she came into that room,” said Cathy.
It was even harder on her father, Bill Kratzert, the longtime head pro at Fort Wayne Country Club — who’d taught the game to her and older brother Billy, a four-time winner on the PGA Tour. After Bill finished up work Saturday night, he drove to Nashville only to walk out the room in a matter of seconds after taking one look at his daughter.
Bill drove home.
“He couldn’t handle it,” said Cathy.
Laying there in the hospital suffering from immense pain, Cathy often found herself grappling with tough questions.
What did I do for God to allow this to happen to me? Am I being punished? Did I waste the talent that he gave me? Did I not do my best?
She was eventually transferred back home to Ohio, where her primary doctor, who happened to work with the Ohio State athletic department and lived on the first hole at Muirfield, told her that the sooner she could let go of the bitterness, the better.
Cathy took that message to heart and sought the help of a therapist.
“The reality is, accidents happen,” she said. “I could either accept it, or go into a place that was not going to be healthy. I know for certain that having Zach saved me … I had Zach to live for.”
Jim first met Cathy on the golf course and was struck by her competitive fire. He recalled Jack Grout, the legendary teacher of Jack Nicklaus, once saying he’d never met anyone with a greater intensity and desire to win.
“He was quite fond of Cathy,” said Jim. “They had many conversations about what he called championship golf.”
At that first Solheim Cup, Cathy was the only player on the team with a toddler, and Jim looked after Zach while she worked inside the ropes. Jim recalled going fishing at Lake Nona early in the week, and just as he’d hooked a nice-sized bass, young Zach began to scream after stepping into some fire ants. A panicked Jim took him over to Cathy, who stopped her practice round to get the medic involved, followed by some ice cream.
The reason Jim came down to Old Hickory for the Sara Lee that week was so the couple could try for a second child. The timing was right.
Cathy, a strong ball-striker with an enviable short game, could’ve driven herself insane asking all the what-if questions. On top of all that physical pain, the couple suffered more heartache with four miscarriages. The doctors told Cathy the difficulty was likely due to the accident, only to eventually discover that she didn’t have enough progesterone. She gave birth to a second child, son Jayme, in 1994.
Cathy didn’t even watch the 1992 Solheim Cup. Her first rounds of golf came several years later after the accident with Inkster and her husband Brian at Pebble Beach and Cypress Point. She wore special compression gloves to try to keep the swelling down.
“I was burned past where your sweat glands are,” she explained, “so when the humidity was high, my hands would swell, and I felt like the Michelin man trying to hold a golf club.
“I was never going to have that same pair of hands to play golf.”
Cathy settled a $25 million lawsuit against the catering company out of court for an undisclosed amount, her career cut agonizingly short. For two years, Inkster called her every day to check in. Gerring tried to give the tour a second go, but mostly lived vicariously through Inkster’s Hall of Fame career.
A couple months back, Gerring was going through her Solheim Cup travel bag from 34 years ago and found a rules sheet and a pin sheet from Lake Nona folded up in the front pocket. What she also found was an old report card of Zach’s that he’d apparently in stuffed in there to hide from mom.
Zach, now 36, graduated from college magna cum laude with a degree in psychology and works as a registered nurse. Back then, however, he wasn’t too big on school, and that report card showed an “A” in P.E. and “D’s” and “F’s” in everything else.
Gerring got such a kick out of the discovery that she framed the report card.
“I’ve got three big trophies,” she said, “a husband and two children.”
And no room for bitterness.