For Matthew NeSmith, it all started with a fire truck. He and his teammates on the University of South Carolina golf team would raise money for Curing Kids Cancer each year by pulling 14,000 pounds of steel and ladders and hoses across a finish line about 15 feet away. The first responders and golfers and other teams who participated got into the spirit of the event by dressing up in superhero costumes and bunny rabbit suits to honor a child living with cancer, or one who had passed away. “It would be great,” Matthew said. “Like if one was an 8-year-old girl, and they’d be like, what do you want us to wear and she’d be like, I want y’all to be ballerinas. And so, all the fire truck people would be wearing tutus. It was just a really fun time.” For his wife, Abigail, who was a member of the Gamecocks’ equestrian team, it was the CKC Pony Days each spring and fall. Patients from the Prisma Health Children’s Hospital came out to the farm where she practiced to ride horses and play games like the egg-on-a-spoon relay. “We had best time doing things like that,” Abigail says. “Just meeting the families and getting to know them and just providing a day that nobody was thinking about what was really going on.” Along the way, Matthew and Abigail got to know Clay and Grainne Owens, the co-founders of CKC, and their three sons. Clay and the three boys are all USC graduates and the two families bonded over a shared love of football and helping others. Grainne even offered Abigail a full-time job with CKC as she was preparing for graduation. The inspiration for CKC was the Owens’ son Killian, who died in 2003 after a four-year battle with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia that included chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. One of his physicians mentioned an experimental treatment that might have saved his life, but the doctors didn’t have the finances to get it out of the lab and into treatment. Grainne remembers wondering why the doctor told her about this therapy, one that could have been 11 times more effective than the drug that was being used to treat her son. That’s when she realized she needed to raise money so other families wouldn’t be denied. “He says to this day, he doesn’t really know why he said it because he would never normally tell a family about something their child couldn’t have,” Grainne says. “But I know why — it’s because that was what I was meant to do.” So Grainne started CKC, sitting at her kitchen table and sending emails until 2 o’clock in the morning asking people to help. She assembled a medical “dream team” of doctors to serve on an advisory board to review grant applications and decide which trials to fund. And to date, thanks to donors and fire truck pulls and golf tournaments, as well as college football helping to spread awareness, CKC has raised more than $20 million. “I never dreamed ever that we would make $20 million,” Grainne says. “I mean, not in a million years, I would never – I would have laughed at you if you told me that.” So, when Matthew NeSmith won the Birdies Fore Love competition at the Shriners Children’s Open last year, there was no question what the couple would do with the $50,000 grant he earned for the charity of his choice. It went to CKC. Matthew knew he had a chance to win the Birdies Fore Love competition in Las Vegas last year entering the final round. He didn’t tell Abigail because he didn’t want to get her hopes up, and he didn’t mention it to the Owens because he didn’t want to let them down if he didn’t win. Sunday’s 68 landed Matthew in a tie for eighth and his total of 26 birdies turned out to be good enough for the Birdies Fore Love title that week. Not before a few anxious moments, though, as Harold Varner and Abraham Ancer pressed him down the stretch. “I remember watching them on 18 pretty much feeling like I was going to win the golf tournament,” NeSmith said, chuckling. “I needed them not to make birdie. … So, I was like I want y’all to play good, I want y’all to play good. But I need, I would love to make this phone call for my wife and the Owen family.” As soon as he got back home to Aiken, South Carolina, Matthew and Abigail called Grainne. He says it was one of the most rewarding things he’s ever done in his golf career because “I believe in what they do.” “She was excited,” Matthew recalled. “She was like, really? I was like, yeah. And she was like, that’s amazing. I was like, I know, I thought it was amazing, too.” Donations like the one the NeSmith’s made to CKC help encourage the kind of research that went into CAR-T cell therapy. T-cells normally fight infections, but this trial found a way to genetically re-engineer them to target the proteins on cancer cells. Then the T-cells are put back in the patient and their own immune system fights and kills the cancer. “It’s a true sort of medical miracle, really,” Grainne says. “It got approval from the FDA back in 2017 and we were partly responsible for making that happen. So that makes me feel really good.” For the NeSmiths, the work CKC has done can also be measured in the kids and families they met during the five years Abigail worked at the charity, as well as the many fund-raising events they’ve attended over the years, including Monday’s golf tournament in Dallas that raised more than $376,000. One was a young boy named Eli whose cancer had relapsed. Matthew made videos and sent them to Eli as his health declined. And there was Richard, who had a brain tumor, but found joy in riding a horse that the USC equestrian coach brought to his home just days before his death. Another was Aurora, who was also “on her way to heaven,” Abigail says. She loved unicorns and her dad brought her out on a rainy Pony Day. “She was so kind and sweet,” Abigail recalls. “She couldn’t see at this point, but she painted this little horse we had. It was just so special.” Grainne, who found out she had breast cancer a year ago, and the people who work at CKG are driven by all those children – the ones who can’t be saved as well as the ones who are survivors. The $20 million-plus is great but she knows she needs to do more. “There’s always a child I know who’s not doing well, who depends on us,” she says. “There’s always another family who might lose their child. And that’s what I think about, especially having gone through it myself last year. “I watched my child go through it, but watching my family watch me go through it was hard because I didn’t want them to worry. But it just made me more determined to help the children.” So, what would her late son Killian, the one she says looked like a cherub, think about what has become her life’s work? “Oh, I think he’s with us every day,” Grainne says. “I think that we’ve been as successful as we have because of him. I think he watches over us all the time. He’s my little guardian angel. … “I think he was sent here just for this. It’s hard, but I know that one day I’ll see him again and I think he’ll be very happy.”
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