Supporting cancer community 'near and dear' to Hudson Swafford

Hudson Swafford remembers when it really hit home.

He was 12 years old. Maybe 13. But he distinctly remembers his father giving his mother Jean a pendant with the number 10 spelled out in diamonds.

“And I was like, well, what's that for?” Swafford recalls.

His parents told him that the pendant symbolized Jean’s 10-year anniversary of being free from breast cancer.

“And I was like, oh, that's, that's amazing,” Swafford says. “I mean, it was incredible. So that was big for me because I kind of understood.”

Swafford knew what cancer was. Friends of his parents had died from the disease. But since he was just 2 years old when his mother was diagnosed, he didn’t remember the worst of times.

Jean Swafford underwent radiation and chemotherapy. Her son says she lost her hair and it grew back even curlier than before. Fortunately, though, the cancer was caught early and she’s closing in on 30 years of survival.

“I can't really remember what diagnosis she had -- but she also had melanoma when she was coming out of college,” Swafford says. “So she actually beat cancer twice, which is pretty incredible.

“It's definitely something, I’ll always be very grateful for. And she was kind of the one that pushed me to do anything that I wanted to do.”

Like play golf. And Swafford is one of many men on TOUR with women in their lives who have had breast cancer. Wives, mothers, sisters, friends -- all have battled the disease, and October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Swafford and his wife Katherine, who is president of the PGA TOUR Wives Association, support charities that help fund breast cancer research, as well as the cancer community as a whole. Katherine is on the Victory Board of the American Cancer Society in their home of St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, and is working on the organization’s 50th anniversary gala for next year.

“It's near and dear to our family,” Swafford explains.

When he was a toddler, Swafford says, he made his mother’s life “even more miserable.” Of course, he didn’t know what she was going through and he was a kid. He wanted to play.

“I would get out and run away from her and make her chase me around,” he remembers. “(I was) always wanting to throw the ball or just be outside and be active. I didn't know why at the time, well, what was going on or know why she didn't want to play. …

“Later on life, obviously, it was explained to me and I could comprehend it. It's definitely kind of eye-opening that she fought through it and, and it really hadn't slowed her down, you know?”

While the 31-year-old didn’t want to make his mother “relive those kind of miserable days,” Swafford says that once he got older he talked with her about her battle.

“She was great about it. She’s a pretty happy-go-lucky person; (she) talks too much anyway,” he says, chuckling. “But no, she was great. Told me all about her chemo, which she had to go through and how she was throwing up, trying to chase me around.

“I'm just running out of energy and (she) just needed somebody to help her. It was tough at the time. But she said I was just kind of the one that kind of pushed her, helped push her through things.”

So at the same time, having an active 2-year-old like Hudson may have helped Jean Swafford fight the disease.

“She always just said I was kind of her energy and would keep her moving,” Swafford says.

And thirty years later, the 2017 CareerBuilder Challenge champion is still giving his mother plenty of support.