There are more charity golf tournaments every year in Colorado than there are Americans suffering with Fanconi anemia (FA), a rare genetic disease that affects roughly one in every 130,000 people. Yet since 2006, the KATA Foundation has raised nearly $3 million to fund FA research through events such as the 8th Annual Art Howe Celebrity Scramble for KATA, which will take place June 20 at West Woods Golf Club in Arvada.
To understand KATA’s phenomenal success, you have only to hear the story behind it.
KATA stands for Kendall And Taylor Atkinson, the youngest of Centennial residents Jeanne and Ken Atkinson’s four children. Kendall and her brother both suffered from FA—which leads to bone marrow failure and vulnerability to early-onset cancer—and died before their 21st birthdays after complications from bone-marrow transplants.
In 2006, shortly after Taylor passed, Jeanne and Ken founded KATA with the volunteer support of their vast network of friends and started the successful Hoot ’n’ Holler, a “come-in-your-jeans, foot-stompin’ good time” fundraiser. Last year’s event at the CU South Denver (formerly the Wildlife Experience) netted a profit of $265,000.
Ten years after that first hoedown, however, tragedy struck again. Ken, a beloved family physician in private practice in Centennial, came home for lunch and attempted to intervene in a domestic altercation between the couple next door. After shooting his wife, the neighbor killed Ken.
“I can’t think of him without shedding a tear,” says Steve Rice, Ken’s best friend and KATA Foundation president. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Rice, who met Ken as a patient, recalls the “stacks and stacks of cards and letters, flowers and cookies” that arrived at the practice, as well as the parade of friends, fellow churchgoers and patients who spoke at his murderer’s sentencing.
In their friend’s honor, Rice and fellow KATA volunteer Dave Kummer bicycled 4,068 miles from Oregon to Maine, raising $80,000 and FA awareness. “In Wyoming,” Rice remembers, “we met a guy from Texas who only found out his daughter had Fanconi when she got cancer…and the chemo killed her.”
The golf tournament had its beginnings in 2010, when Ken’s lifelong friend Dan Adair invited his old teammate from the University of Wyoming baseball team, Art Howe, to the Hoot ‘n’ Holler. The next year they auctioned off a golf foursome with Howe—a player, coach and manager in the Major Leagues for 30 seasons (including one as the Rockies bench coach)—to a guy from Howe’s hometown of Pittsburgh. “He brought pictures from when Art was on the Pirates,” Adair remembers.
“Art and his wife Betty met Ken and Jean and fell in love with the whole scenario,” says Adair. “We’re all in,” adds Howe, who enthusiastically began hosting the charity tournament in 2012. Former Rockies Ryan Spilborghs and Corey Sullivan, as well as local media talents Tracy Ringolsby and Jenny Cavnar, have attended. So do “guys from the Wyoming baseball team—Billy Stearns, Rick Corbin, Bobby Sporrer. If you listen to us talk, you’d wonder why we hadn’t won the national championship,” Howe says with a laugh. “Or why we kept losing to BYU.”
The laughs at the tournament are as plentiful as the food. The event features a “speed hole” in which the four players on a team space themselves out from tee to green on a par 4 and try to hole out in the shortest amount of time (36 seconds is the record). There’s a longest marshmallow drive contest, a $50,000 hole-in-one and other fun contests.
“The tournament nets about $30,000,” Jeanne Atkinson reports. She, her children and friends have seen to it that others have adopted what the FDA classifies as an “orphan disease.” Enormous progress has followed, including a dramatic rise in the success rates of bone marrow transplants, longer life expectancy among FA patients and the identification of 21 FA genes—five of which also indicate breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility.
Although the advancements have come too late for Kendall and Taylor, Jeanne takes solace in helping families who receive the FA diagnosis. She remains the KATA Foundation’s heart and soul and credits her strength in the face of tragedy to “believing in a sovereign God and the hope of eternal life. Without that, I’m not sure how people manage.” katafoundation.org
This article appeared in the 2019 April issue of Colorado AvidGolfer.
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