Hero Merits A Good Look
Darrell Fry
The St. Petersburg Times
December 1997
Shawntini Jackson is the kind of person we usually don't notice. We see her, but we rarely acknowledge her.
We search for potential young golfers, tennis phenoms and ice-skating heroines, but we don't go looking for them in her neighborhood. We yearn for our young athletes to have character, resolution and purpose, but we don't expect to find those things in people like her.
We are the less for it.
Shawntini Jackson is a collegiate golfer who has shown as much character, resolution and purpose as Peyton Manning or Martina Hingis.
The lives of some college athletes are jumbled with glamorous decisions such as whether to sign with Nike or Reebok, but Jackson's daily routine is pretty basic: Wake up in the morning. Fight like hell to stay alive. Go to bed. In between, she goes to class (her major is pre-law) and works on her golf swing.
Jackson, 18 is in the Chi Chi Rodriguez Youth Foundation, one of the organizations this weekend's JCPenney Classic benefits.
The foundation, formed in 1979 is a school for "at-risk" youngsters like Shawntini (pronounced Shawn-TEEN-a) Jackson who are taught a full curriculum using the golf industry as an instructional tool.
Not all the 450-plus youngsters in the foundation turn out to be skilled golfers. Nor have all endured the kind of misfortune she has.
Jackson's mother was a drug user, and her father, who has spent time in jail, never was around. She lived for a while in the destitute North Greenwood area of Clearwater with her grandmother, who also reared her half-brother and her two cousins despite having lost her legs to disease.
After her grandmother died in 1994, Jackson never lived anywhere for more than a year or so. She bounced from one home to another, from one side of Tampa Bay to the other.
She usually could pack all her belongings in a brown paper bag.
Once she lived in a group home for abandoned youngsters. She slept on chairs.
Later she lived with a boyfriend. He physically abused her and repeatedly told her she would "never make nothing" out of her life. Twice she got pregnant by him, but she miscarried both times.
She dripped in and out of school, and in and out of golf, but never out of life.
"People like my aunt Lula and my cousin Gretta and the people at the foundation stayed on my case about going to school," she said. "Even though some of the people I was around and who were my friends weren't going to school, they knew I was trying to do something with my life, and they wouldn't try to down that. They would say, "You should go (to school), you should go." "So I just kept going and going and going."
Jackson got her GED and is a freshman at Talladega (Ala.) College on a full golf scholarship. When the season opens this spring, she is expected to be an integral part of the acclaimed program.
"She's doing good now, but her life away from school has not changed," worries Polly Bateman, the foundation's executive vice president. "When she comes home, she's still in the same world she left...It's her internal decision to keep fighting."
Jackson isn't fighting just for herself. She wrote Bateman she plans to work at the foundation so she can "be able to do things for kids the way you and the foundation have done for me....I want to let them know that there is always one around to give love, and help them in difficult situations."
Who knows? Among those mostly disadvantaged, often overlooked youngsters, she might find another Tiger Woods or Justin Leonard.
Or, if we're really lucky, another Shawntini Jackson.
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