Sports Bright: Davis Phinney & John Challis

Davis Phinney (Parkinson’s disease) and John Challis (cancer) are two athletes exhibiting remarkable courage as they battle their respective diseases.

Sports Bright From a Dim Bulb

DIS usually leaves the brighter, inspiring, uplifting, heartfelt, stories to our erstwhile editor-in-chief, Nate Barlow, and his “Sports Bright” posts.

Your humble columnist prefers to ply his craft in the muck, the darkly humorous, and the gray clouds of pain and controversy–besides, I’m not a very bright guy.

I’ve always seen myself as a very tough guy.

Give me an issue involving men vs. women–false rape accusations, Title IX abuse–PEDs and the players who cheat the fans, or some sports figure I can mock to death and I am a happy scribe.

I spent much of my adult life trying to find a voice as a writer that didn’t bore people and always endeavored to be accurate without letting the numbers crunch my readers’ craniums. I try to be probing and blunt without being too offensive–even if some targets need to be offended–and NEVER want to be accused of sentimentality.

I like to write on an edge and am willing to sustain the necessary cuts to sharpen the readers’ and my own perceptions.

Of course, I’ve convinced myself my approach was due to my innate toughness nurtured by a lovingly psychotic mother who held me to account for every little transgression…

I needed the resilience that upbringing engendered when I faced the challenge of two near lethal strokes–the first, four months before, the second five weeks after my 21st birthday. In between those two events, I found myself stuck in a “Transition Ward” with fifteen Vietnam vets, and several older guys from other wars. All had various rare diseases featuring defective blood, cancerous growths, and mental illness.

Only a few days had passed before I was told they call it the Transition Ward because most of its denizens were going to die. Naturally, the question begging my mind was, “What the hell am I doing here?” My query was answered in the next week, when, during a procedure to track the blood flow to my brain–(insert joke here)–the young resident stared at the monitor and uttered: “Oh, my God.”

He wasn’t having an orgasm, rather it sounded as if he were watching an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

His next sentence was spoken with what seemed like an incongruous intent to comfort me: “Everything I’ve learned in med school… you should be dead.”

After mentally trashing a wise-ass comment about his obviously poor grade in Bedside Manner 101, I responded with, “Sorry to disappoint you, doc.”

For the record, Doc immediately apologized for losing his aura of omniscience, assured me “they” would do everything possible to find out what was wrong, and an orderly wheeled me back to the ward.

When I told my buddies what happened, a couple of them seemed pissed I didn’t have a more definite expiration date. Most of the other guys decided we should celebrate until somebody ran out of calendar.

Boy, did we have a blast.

Poker, sunbathing, chasing women, (mostly nubile nurses), fighting, drinking; it was like Animal House meets The English Patient.

We conducted a Dime-A-Day-Death-Pool. Everyone who participated, mostly the younger guys like me that were too tough to believe they might die–or too afraid to confront the possibility–put in ten cents every morning and bet on who would be the next sucker to croak.

After four months, things ended up with me and three other guys putting in a dollar a day. I walked away with the pool because they got transferred to other hospitals. I think one of them died two weeks later. I never heard from the other two again. Days after they left I had my second “event”.

All of this personal history is written as a lame attempt to explain why I don’t often tout uplifting, inspiring stories like this one about Olympic bronze medalist Davis Phinney: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37199534/ns/health/

I walked out of that Army hospital decades ago a tough guy who survived freaky medical occurrences. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to marry two beautiful women, raise three sons, receive a first class education, and have enjoyed mostly robust heath. The future looks brighter every day–and I hope to never forget many people suffer in this world.

Ask the Challis family in Freedom, Pennsylvania, about suffering:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08125/878966-85.stm

Their son, John, had more character in his pinky toenail than any of the “heroes” we worship in the athletic arena–even the few worthy of such admiration. Read John Challis’ story and you’ll know why I get angry with people who put privileged, elitist athletes on pedestals–the same athletes dying kids make wishes to be near before they die.

You’ll know why I have such little respect for athletes blessed with bodies capable of fantastic feats, who destroy their health to be first in a record book.

Truth is, Davis Phinney and John Challis have more courage than me and most everyone I know; more heart than any fighter in any cage. The reason I pretend to shrug off the emotions their stories evoke is because I don’t want to admit to sometimes crying like a baby.

Yeah, I’m a real tough guy.

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