
One day, when Deanne Farrow was unable to get out of work to pick up her daughter Grace from school, Dawn Coe-Jones was there.
The former Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) standout, a golfing buddy of Farrow’s, hopped in her red convertible and scooped Grace up from her carpool drop off at the Publix in Tampa Palms, and immediately snapped a picture of her and the Tampa Prep student and texted it to Deanne.
“I have the package,” it read.
A few minutes later came another picture, this one of Grace enjoying a frosty drink.
“Her first Slurpee,’’ Farrow recalls. From that day forward, it became a tradition — whenever Coe-Jones picked up the now-14-year-old Grace, it was off to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee.
It’s moments like these that still wet the eyes of Deanne, when she looks back on the imprint Coe-Jones left on the lives of so many golfers at Tampa Palms Golf & Country Club (TPGCC).
“That’s the kind-hearted person she was,’’ Farrow says. “I hope that’s what we can all take from her. How she treated Grace is how she treated everybody.”
On Nov. 12, Coe-Jones, a member of the Canadian Golf Hall Of Fame, passed away in hospice after a battle with dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer. It was discovered in March, and required full knee and partial tibia replacement surgery.
And, even though her golfing days ended after the surgery, she would still occasionally hop in a cart and ride along for a few holes with her Friday morning group at TPGCC, cracking jokes and cheering them on.
“She was a great friend,’’ said Pat Rogers, who also played in that same Friday morning group.
Coe-Jones was 56 years old when she died. She is survived by her husband Jim, whom she married in 1992, and son Jimmy, a former standout golfer for Freedom High School, as well as her brothers Mark and John Coe.
Jimmy played golf at Freedom High, as well as, naturally, hockey. His mother grew up as a big Montreal Canadiens fan in British Columbia (before converting to the Tampa Bay Lightning). Jimmy followed in his mother’s footstep on the golf course, winning the district golf title as a sophomore in 2011.
He attended Florida Southern College for two years (where he was a semifinalist for the Division II Jack Nicklaus Player of the Year award earlier this year) before transferring to the University of South Florida in June.
Born on Oct. 19, 1960 in Campbell River, British Columbia, Coe-Jones won the 1983 Canadian Women’s Amateur before embarking on a nearly-25-year career on the LPGA Tour. She won the 1992 Women’s Kemper Open, the 1994 Palm Beach Classic and the 1995 Tournament of Champions, and finished in the top 10 in 41 other tournaments. For her career (1984-2008), she earned more than $3-million.
Her best finish in a women’s major championship was third at the Women’s LPGA Championship in 1990 and at the du Maurier Classic in 1993.
A former college All-American at Lamar University in Beaumont, TX, Coe-Jones was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 2003 and later played on the Legends Tour, the LPGA senior circuit.
Coe-Jones was honored as the recipient of the 2016 Colleen Walker Spirit Award during the inaugural Dawn Coe-Jones Golf Classic at Tampa Palms on Oct. 14, a golf fund raiser for the Amandalee Fund, which benefits Sarcoma Research at Moffitt Cancer Center.
The Amandalee Fund has hosted two tournaments every year, and this year’s event raised a record $51,000.
The Colleen Walker Spirit Award is presented yearly to a Legends Tour Player who best exhibits the tenacity, determination and never-give-up attitude that Walker demonstrated throughout her life and career. Walker, who won nine times on the LPGA Tour, died of cancer in 2012.
Coe-Jones was known by many on tour for her kind heart, especially for the Canadian players she would often take under her wing.
“She treated everyone equally,” Lori Kane told Golf Week magazine. “Being on tour and walking the fairways with 144 women each week, there’s not many that you can say treats everyone the same. But Dawn Coe-Jones did that.”
It was that humility that helped win Coe-Jones friends at TPGCC, where she became a fixture.
Farrow says that when she met Coe-Jones about four years ago, all the LPGA golfer wanted to do was make friends and play golf. “You would never have guessed she was a professional golfer,’’ Farrow said. “She was just one of the girls.”
She became part of a group of golfers referred to as the “Tampa Palms Girls,” and the members exchanged texts with each other all week in between rounds.
When Coe-Jones was diagnosed with cancer, Farrow said it was never discussed. “We didn’t really talk about it because we didn’t want to believe it,’’ she says.
But, month after month provided more and more bad news.
“It was heartbreaking,’’ Farrow says.
Rogers says she met Coe-Jones three years ago, but it was 20 years ago, after being transferred to Saskatchewan for work, that she would read about the Canadian golf legend in the newspapers there.
She told Coe-Jones this after a few holes of golf one morning. Duly impressed by her game, Rogers simply said, “No wonder they wrote about you.”