[StBernard] Crane helps to lift spirits

[Westley Annis]

Crane helps to lift spirits
Golfer didn't hesitate to lend hand gutting 
Thursday, April 27, 2006

A boy walks along a beach and comes upon hundreds of thousands of beached
starfish. He attempts to throw them back into the ocean one by one. A man
approaches and tells the boy, "Son, I'm sorry, but you're not going to make
a difference." Undaunted, the boy picks up another starfish and throws it
out to sea. "Yeah, but I made a difference to that one." 

Much like that boy, two-time PGA Tour champion Ben Crane, who's in town to
play in the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, traveled with members of his
family to this storm-ravaged city in November trying to make a difference in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina. 


Instead of finding starfish, their church-based group from Vancouver, Wash.,
called Forward Edge, discovered mile after mile after mile of devastation. 

"We wanted to help those people who didn't have insurance and basically
didn't have the money to help themselves," Crane said. "We wanted to go out
and meet a need and restore hope. 

"Mother Teresa said to focus on just one. If we can all have that attitude,
we can make a small contribution." 

Wearing a respirator, gloves, boots and anything else to protect himself,
Crane served as head of the group's wrecking crew. 

"I wasn't qualified to do much else except gut homes," Crane said. 

The group used the Abundant Life Church in Harvey as its base headquarters,
gutting by day and sleeping there at night on bare floors. 

Like most who had viewed the destruction from afar, Crane said he was
overwhelmed by what he saw in person. 

"No pictures can prepare you for going through an entire neighborhood that
is literally a ghost town," he said. "You walk into a house that months
prior had been full of life, and everything was just left." 

In Chalmette, the group came upon a 45-year-old woman who was taking one
piece of Sheetrock at a time to the curb. 

"We had just talked about how cool it would be to just pull up in front of a
house jump out and say, 'Can we help?' " he said. "Sure enough, we turned
the corner, and there she was. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about
it. Within a few hours, we had completely gutted the house of everything;
the wood floors, the oven, everything." 

They also discovered some very disturbing things. 

"My brother was up in the attic and found three photo albums of their family
and kids," he said. "I brought them down to her. I felt so sorry for her. I
didn't know what to say. Before we left, we prayed with her and prayed that
God would bless her and her family." 

Crane returns to New Orleans in a much different frame of mind than he did
six months ago. As then, he is on a different sort of mission. He would like
to add to his win total on the PGA Tour; if nothing else grab a significant
piece of the $6 million purse and perhaps give some back to a city in need. 

"This week is much bigger than golf," he said. "At the players registration
trailer, the women in there (Anne Barnes, Bobbie Gattuso, Ann LeBlanc) said
what's so neat about this tournament is for one week we can actually get our
minds away from all the devastation. They said it's just a nice break so
that we can celebrate charities and rebuilding, and we can celebrate good
things for a week before we have to go back in and get our hands dirty
again." 

. . . . . . . 

Brian Allee-Walsh can be reached at ballee-walsh at timespicayune.com or (504)
826-3805.