Interview: Toby Keith & Friends Golf Classic raises $664,000 for OK Kids Korral

Toby Keith, left, watches as Brock Hart, 3, from Edmond, shovels dirt during groundbreaking ceremonies for the OK Kids Korral, to be built by the Toby Keith Foundation at NE 8 and Laird, in Oklahoma City Friday, May 18, 2012. Photo by Paul B. Southerland, The Oklahoman Archives

From Thursday’s The Oklahoman.

Toby Keith & Friends Golf Classic raises $664,000
The funds will go to the OK Kids Korral, a planned Oklahoma City lodge that will provide housing for pediatric cancer patients and their families seeking care at The Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center and other nearby facilities.

With a little help from his friends, Oklahoma country music star Toby Keith is getting closer to realizing his dream of building a home-away-from-home for Oklahoma children fighting cancer.

The recent Ninth Annual Toby Keith & Friends Golf Classic raised $664,000 for the Toby Keith Foundation, according to a news release. The funds will go to the OK Kids Korral, a planned Oklahoma City lodge that will provide housing for pediatric cancer patients and their families seeking care at The Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center and other nearby facilities.

The total for this year’s two-day fundraiser exceeded the haul for Keith’s 2011 event, which raised $650,000, according to the release.

The May 18-19 festivities kicked off with the formal groundbreaking for the OK Kids Korral at NE 8 and Laird on the south end of the OU Health Sciences Center.

The 28,000-square-foot Korral will feature dayrooms for metro area families as well as overnight suites for families who must travel hundreds of miles from rural Oklahoma towns for their children to receive treatment.

“All they have to do is sit here and live and be a family, and they just cross right over here and do their appointments. I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Keith said at the groundbreaking. “It’s great for Oklahoma … and this is a dream come true.”

The lodge also will include a kitchen, dining hall, learning center, indoor and outdoor playgrounds and a movie theater built to double as a tornado shelter, said local attorney Armando Rosell, a member of the Toby Keith Foundation advisory council. It even will feature a neutropenic wing designed to house children whose immune systems have been suppressed or compromised by their treatments.