Playing against the odds: Girl with the greatest handicap of all

There is more than one reason that MacKinzie Kline has been generating headlines in the United States lately. The most obvious of them is that she suffers from an incurable heart defect that will probably kill her before she is 30, and yet she has managed to work her way on to the women's professional golf circuit at the tender age of 15.

That might be enough to grab anybody's attention. What makes this girl really compelling, though, to both newspaper columnists and the high-profile golfers who have taken her under their wing, is that she doesn't play the victim very well. In fact, for someone who needs a constant supply of oxygen and tires easily, she is both charming and, at times, downright pushy.

Three years ago, when she was 12, she secured a place on a pro-am golf tournament near her home in southern California. She made sure she was in the same group as John Daly, the oversized former PGA champion from Arkansas with the "past parallel" swing and a chequered history of alcoholism and run-ins with the law. She showed him her best stuff, shooting 72 on the demanding South Course at Torrey Pines outside San Diego. Daly was not only charmed, but he won the tournament, marking a return to form that his fans had been awaiting for years.

As he celebrated, he put in a call to Kline's family, who live just up the road in Encinitas, and invited them to join him for a victory party on board his massive tour bus. He told Kline then: "I don't watch women play golf, but when you play in the LPGA [the US women's professional circuit], I'm going to be watching."

That same year, MacKinzie - or Mac, as she is known to her family and friends - spotted Annika Sorenstam, the world's pre-eminent female golfer - in a car park at a tournament. She approached the Swedish champion and charmed her into having their picture taken together.

Sorenstam never forgot the experience, tracking Kline's progress as she played one pro-am competition after another while struggling with her health - and still acting as a national spokeswoman for the Children's Heart Foundation. In January, Sorenstam extended the invitation of a lifetime to the tender young player - to join her at a new LPGA event, the Ginn Tribute, hosted by the Rivertowne Country Club in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, at the end of this month.

"MacKinzie is a very unique and determined young lady and we are thrilled to have her play in the Ginn Tribute," Sorenstam said at the time. "What she has accomplished, not only in golf but for the community is extraordinary." Kline graciously responded: "I've always had the dream to play on the LPGA Tour and Annika has made this a reality for me. Words cannot express my appreciation for this honour."

Mac was born with a condition known as heterotaxy, or single ventricle with transposition of the greater vessels. What that means in practice is that blood is pumped only by a single chamber in her heart, which causes oxygenated blood from the lung to flow in the wrong direction. That leaves her constantly short of oxygen, which has to be provided externally and places extraordinary strain on her whole cardiac system. To complicate matters further, she was born without a spleen, and with a liver on the wrong side of her abdomen.

She had open-heart surgery when she was only 11 weeks old, and then again when she was just shy of her second birthday. All her life, doctors have been telling her and her parents - her father is an estate agent and her mother a flight attendant - that she must avoid aerobic exercise, or anything that places undue strain on her system.

Mac hasn't observed that admonition especially carefully. At school she's always enjoyed dodgeball - a popular American playground sport that involves hurling balls at each other and trying either to dodge or catch them - even though a hard ball to the chest could do her serious harm and even kill her.

When, in 2002, the Children's Heart Foundation was looking for a new poster child, they quickly settled on her as the perfect choice. "What better person could represent our foundation than a child who has endured and has overcome a congenital heart defect in the manner that MacKinzie has shown?" the foundation's then executive director, Sarah Bilississ, said. "Mac is an excellent example of what positive things can truly happen to infants born with a congenital heart defect."

Still, the path to the professional golfing circuit would have been barred to her but for the pioneering example of Casey Martin, a golfer suffering from Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a degenerative circulatory ailment who went all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for the right to play the professional game travelling in a cart rather than walking the 18 holes of a full-sized course.

The Professional Golfers' Association fought Martin tooth and nail, arguing that the six miles or so that players walk each day are integral to the sport. In fact, in a game that requires so little in the way of speed or stamina, the walking might be the only thing that qualifies golf as a sport at all.

The Supreme Court disagreed, and found in Martin's favour by a 7-2 margin in a ruling handed down in 2001. Martin never actually played on the professional circuit, because his game fell off around the time of the ruling and he ended up taking a job as a coach at the University of Oregon.

That came as a relief to the likes of Jack Nicklaus, who viewed his initiative with deep suspicion. Now that "Mac" Kline has come along, though, the professional sport has adopted a very different attitude. Perhaps they have no option - who, after all, wants to go on record for attempting to dash the dreams of a teenage girl with only a few more years to live? - but they have welcomed Kline with open arms and expressed nothing but admiration for what she has achieved.

She, too, will need a cart - and a plentiful supply of oxygen - to make her way around the course in South Carolina. She already requested, and obtained, permission to use a cart on the amateur girls and women's circuits, which she has been using since last summer. She too, intriguingly, raises all the same awkward questions about how much of a sport golf really is. Certainly, looking at the rolls of fat sagging beneath John Daly's golf shirt, it's hard to make the case that these people are athletes in any recognisable sense of the word. Clearly, the issue is a sore point.

"In sports, everybody brings their own strengths and weaknesses to the game and whoever can overcome their weaknesses and maximise their strengths is going to do well. It's maybe not fair, but I just think it's the way it should be," veteran Steve Pate said at the time of the Martin ruling. He hasn't said boo about Mac Kline.

Last summer also saw a medical setback for Kline, when her doctors noticed she was turning blue. When they tested her, they saw her oxygen saturation levels were dropping into the low 80 per cent range and discovered a hole in her heart. They repaired the hole in a five-hour catheter-procedure, and Kline bounced back so fast that within three days she was playing golf again.

The operation also showed up a blood clot attached to her heart, in a place too dangerous to attempt surgical intervention. Kline and her family now hope to keep the clot under control with drugs.

Living under the shadow of ominous medical news is nothing new for this teenager, however, and she appears to have decided to live life to the fullest for as long as she can. To make more time for golf, she has dropped out of conventional schooling and works instead with a tutor.

She plays for several hours every day - enjoying her pick of a number of idyllic courses along the breathtakingly beautiful coast of northern San Diego county. It is her positive attitude, as much as her golfing prowess, that appears to have won so many people over. Sorenstam sounded a note of deep satisfaction when she talked to the San Diego News-Tribune a couple of months ago about her decision to invite Kline to her pro tournament in South Carolina.

"This is her dream," she said. "I want her to enjoy it. She doesn't have to do anything to impress me. She already has impressed me."