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.
“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…
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