by Craig Sager
—Dan Gilbert, owner, Cleveland Cavaliers
It was an odd feeling being back. The outpouring of love and support from fans, players, and coaches was truly overwhelming, but as much as I appreciated the gestures, I really just wanted things to be normal. Normal meant talking about basketball, gathering some information, and reporting on the game.
The Bulls did a nice video tribute in my honor, and the standing ovation from the United Center crowd almost brought me to tears as I thought about all that I had been through to get back to this place.
The next morning, Stacy and I flew back to Atlanta, as I had previously scheduled labs at Northside Hospital. I was preparing to go on the road for a few weeks to cover the NCAA Tournament, and the doctors wanted one last checkin before my long trip.
I was in such a great mood that I didn’t even mind suffering through yet another bone marrow biopsy and an array of blood tests. It was actually good to see some familiar faces, which again gave me perspective on just how far I had come.
One of my favorite nurses, Janet Benn, was a forty-something barrel of laughs and energy. We would talk golf courses and basketball, and she admitted that she had been a big fan of mine for years. One reason she was a favorite was that she was the only one at Northside who performed a bone marrow biopsy on me that didn’t send me into delirious screams.
So when Janet walked into the room a few hours after the biopsy and blood tests, I was buoyed by her presence.
“So what’s the good news?” I asked.
Her eyes told me all I needed to know.
Dr. Holland came in shortly after to let me know that I was no longer in remission. And it was bad. It wasn’t just that the leukemia had returned but that it had returned with a vengeance.
“Three to four weeks,” he said.
How would you react if someone told you that you had three to four weeks left on this earth?
I had no choice but to simply decide right then and there that I was not going to die in three weeks. I never gave the matter much consideration. I had too much to live for. I was not going to let the leukemia win.
When Stacy broke down in tears, it broke my heart. We were both emotional that day, one of the worst days of my life. It was actually a wake-up call to me. I finally realized, after almost a year, that leukemia would not be defeated easily and could eventually kill me—but, I decided, not anytime soon. After I went into remission in 2014 and had the successful transplant in July, I had figured I was home free. But after all that, plus the chemo, the pneumonia, the gout, the pain, here I was again. My fight was not over.
Dr. Holland put me on a ten-day round of chemo, which failed to make much of a difference. My pneumonia came back strong, and I was hospitalized again in late March and stayed for a few weeks. My condition was worsening, and my options for recovery were narrowing fast. After another biopsy came back with 30 percent blasts, Stacy and I were desperate and needed to try something different. We consulted with Dr. Holland and decided that we would go to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which is world-renowned for its care and for its many clinical trials, which are often last resorts for patients who are running out of treatment options.
By this time, I had already blown past the three-to-four-week death sentence from Dr. Holland by a few months, but I understood that time was critical. Funny how time takes on new meaning when others tell you that you don’t have much of it left.
We went home and packed our bags for a stay at MD Anderson, and my first concern was, what was I going to wear on my first day in Houston?
18
THE COLORS OF ME
Many young children have their “thing,” usually in the form of a well-worn blanket, a stuffed animal, or maybe even an unexciting piece of cloth. For me, I was obsessed with my Wyatt Earp costume. On a trip to spring training with my family when I was seven, my parents bought me a Wyatt Earp ensemble, complete with a black hat, white shirt with red stars, and black bow tie. I was thrilled to proudly wear it to a Boston Red Sox spring training game, and it made for some funny looks while I got autographs. But after Red Sox infielder Billy Consolo thought I was adorable in my Earp outfit, he took me back into the locker room, where I got all of the players’ autographs, including the great Ted Williams. When I returned to school in Batavia, I wore that costume every day for the rest of the year. Every day. Maybe I thought it brought me good fortune, or perhaps it was a comfort thing for me at the time—a security blanket in an unusual way. Or maybe it was just the seed of my lifelong love of fashion.
Batavia High School was like thousands of other small high schools in small towns in 1969—boring, conformist, and ordinary, and the senior portraits in the yearbook reflected just that. Every boy was required to wear a black or navy blazer with a white collared shirt for his senior yearbook photo, and each year, every portrait looked the same. One after the other. I wanted to mix it up, and a Monkee gave me an idea.
The Monkees were a pop quartet in the late 1960s with their own popular television show, and their initial albums created many a hit, including “Daydream Believer.” Davy Jones, one of the lead singers, fashionably wore an electric-blue Nehru jacket with a white collar, a hip-length coat inspired by the former prime minister of India and a look made popular by the Beatles. I found myself a Nehru jacket in a nearby town and decided that it reflected my personality.
When I walked in for my school portrait, the photographer thought I was joking, and my classmates did not believe I would go through with it. But I argued with the photographer, and he finally relented when he recognized I was not budging and that the photo would have to be retaken anyway. He was wrong on the second part. The 1969 Batavia High School yearbook has a lot of boys wearing blazers, but not me.
At Northwestern, when I joined the cheerleading team and became the mascot, everything in my dorm room closet was purple (the school color). I was all in, and wearing bright colors—like purple—just made me feel better.
My insistence on bright, colorful outfits continued in a rather odd way once I entered the professional world. When the meteorologist job opened in Tampa, I picked out the yellow-blue-and-white seersucker suit. In Fort Myers, I jumped at every chance to wear the school colors of a host high school for pep rallies and football games. When I moved on to Kansas City, which had cold winters, the bright colors did not fly as much on-air, but I still managed to wear lively shirts and coats. After I was hired at CNN in 1981, Ted Turner told me that CNN was fighting for credibility and that I needed to tone down my look. I did my best, some days just wearing a colorful tie on-air, but as I became more entrenched at the network, I felt comfortable pushing the boundaries of my wardrobe.
But the attention on my attire really took off when I began to do sideline for NBA games on TNT in the 1980s. By then, my closet was full of hundreds of colorful shirts, suits, ties, and shoes, and I attempted to never wear the same combination twice. For the 2001 NBA All-Star Game in Washington, I picked out a dashing black-and-silver jacket with a black shirt and silver tie. I ignored some of the smirks as I got set for the broadcast, but I was devastated halfway through when my producers told me that I had to change jackets by order of the NBA commissioner and the president of the network. I felt like a part of me was being ripped away. I changed into a less shocking jacket and finished the broadcast, but I was hurt.
When Commissioner David Stern instituted a league-wide dress code for coaches and players, he expected their network partners to do the same. So when I knew the commissioner would be in attendance at a game I was covering, I always tried to tone it down. But one game, unaware that Stern and his wife, Dianne, would be in the stands, I wore a typical Sager outfit and could tell that he was giving me the once-over from his seat. I went over and shook his hand, and when his wife complimented me on my outfit, noting that “sports is fun,” the commissioner seemed to change his demeanor. From then on, I never felt like I was under his microscope.
Now there is pressure for me to deliver bold ou
tfits game after game, city after city. The players often approach me before games to talk about my selection or to give me suggestions on tailors or designers.
My clothes reflect who I am. I believe that life should be fun and so should your clothes. It’s not about attention or even sending a message; it’s about feeling good about yourself and being who you are. After my diagnosis, I began to wear a lot of orange on-air once I returned to the broadcasts. Orange is the color of the leukemia awareness effort, and I even had a bright orange blazer specially made for me.
In Houston it was difficult for me to create colorful ensembles as a leukemia patient every day, but I did wear multicolored shorts or shirts to brighten the day a bit. (A good friend, Steve Koonin, had a sequined hospital gown made for me, and Marv Albert had a Superman cape tailored for me for hospital needs.) And I was thankful for these gifts, as I needed every ounce of brightness.
PART III
HOUSTON
19
DR. P
In the early twentieth century, Monroe Anderson and his partners ran the world’s largest business in the cotton trade. Based in Texas, Anderson amassed enormous wealth, and with some of it, he established the MD Anderson Foundation, mostly so his heirs could avoid hefty estate taxes upon his death, which occurred in 1939. In the ensuing years, the foundation’s trustees, with no specific direction from the founder on how to distribute the monies, decided to allocate $500,000 to the building of a cancer hospital in Houston, which would bear Anderson’s name.
Today, MD Anderson Cancer Center is ranked the number-one cancer hospital in the world. Its more than 20,000 employees serve 135,000 patients annually, with 9,400 patients in clinical trials. Not only does MDA excel in patient care, but it is known throughout the world as the leading cancer research institution, investing almost $1 billion a year in research. It is part of the Texas Medical Center in downtown Houston, a sprawling 1,345-acre campus of twenty-one hospitals, hundreds of buildings, and an impressive record of saving—or extending—millions of lives, including those of the more than 160,000 daily visitors.
With my blasts at more than 30 percent and the chemo given to me at Northside Hospital no longer effective, Stacy and I were pinning our hopes on the professionals at MDA. Our initial appointment was scheduled for May 6, so Stacy and I flew down a day early, as I am always more comfortable when I have the lay of the land. We checked into the hotel and walked around the medical center grounds, locating the buildings for my appointments the following day. I wasn’t nervous. In a way, I was excited. I had hope.
I was overwhelmed when we walked through the main entrance on the 6th—by the size of the building, the number of patients, and the schedule handed to us upon checkin. There were dozens of appointments scheduled over the next few days, on all floors of multiple buildings. Blood tests on one floor; scans on another; consultations on yet another. Everywhere we went, there were cancer patients, in various visible stages of their fight.
Number 1144411. Those digits are now me. It is my identity within the hospital walls. It is unique to me, of course, but also a reminder that I am just one of thousands who come to MD Anderson seeking help.
After an exhausting day as a guinea pig, we finally met with my assigned doctor, Naveen Pemmaraju. I didn’t know what to expect from yet another doctor, but I know I was expecting a miracle. It was clear from just a few minutes with “Dr. P” that we had come to the right place. Dr. P is a brilliant hematologist, oncologist, and leukemia specialist with a witty, compassionate, effervescent personality who would just as soon discuss Kobe Bryant’s retirement, Tiger Woods’s slump, and Michael Jordan’s drive as he would the mechanics of platelet dysfunction, the specifics of leukemia cell kill, and the inner workings of clinical trials. After reviewing my medical history with me, Dr. Pemmaraju was candid in his assessment but also optimistic about our game plan: to get me into a clinical trial and get me healthy. I liked his brand of positivity.
Clinical trials are the saving grace for thousands of cancer patients around the world. A clinical trial allows doctors to offer early-stage drugs to patients before they have been approved by the FDA, although just getting permission for a clinical trial to begin can take up to two years.
Patients, desperately in need of new treatments, benefit, of course, if the drug works. The doctors benefit, as their research helps determine the success rate of drugs on various strata of patients. The drug manufacturers benefit by using clinical trials to test the effectiveness of their drugs, which helps them gain approval from the FDA—which enables them to make billions.
Trials are divided into four phases, each with varying sizes of pools and goals, depending on the rarity of a particular cancer. Phase I allows doctors to find a safe dosage of a drug for patients, who typically number between fifteen and thirty, to determine how a new treatment should be given and to monitor its effects on the body. Phase II has fewer than one hundred patients and focuses on the effects of the new treatment on certain cancers and the body. Phase III can have from a hundred up to thousands of patients, and doctors use Phase III to compare a new treatment with the current standard treatment. Finally, Phase IV looks at a large group to study long-term safety and effectiveness.
A clinical trial was likely my only hope, but first I needed chemo—and fast. Dr. Pemmaraju came up with a plan. Nurses showed me the isolation unit where they planned for me to stay, but there was no way I was doing isolation again, despite the risks—especially after they told me that even Stacy couldn’t come into the room. I would have died from a broken heart before leukemia got to me.
When I was finally admitted on May 14, my blast count was 34 percent and rising, and Dr. Pemmaraju and the head of the transplant department at MD Anderson, Dr. Muzaffar Qazalbash, put me on a four-day dosage of toxic chemo. Would it work? Would a second transplant save my life?
*
Once I had completed my work for NBC Sports at the 2001 Wimbledon Championships in England, I announced to Stacy, who had come with me, that I was going to fulfill a bucket-list item by running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. She knew me well enough to know there was little to convince me to not do something on which my heart was set, so we flew to Barcelona and rented a car for what we thought would be a two-hour drive. I don’t like long car rides. Never have. For someone like me who is always on the go and who is always ready for the next thing, sitting in a car for more than an hour or two is like being held hostage by time, so when we passed hour number two and were still on the road, I turned the car around and drove back to Barcelona, and we flew to Pamplona.
For those of you who have been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras or Brazil for Carnival, the festival surrounding the Running of the Bulls is ten times as crazy, festive, and full of life. The city itself was overrun by tourists, tens of thousands of people dressed in white from head to toe. We were the victims of an attempted pickpocketing shortly after arriving, which I guess should not have surprised us. After checking into a hotel in the center of town, I began to plan my attack the following day. I would dress in all white and make my way to the starting gates very early; Stacy would meet me at the bottom of the course near the finish.
I was up at the crack of dawn and even managed to get in a little run before the town fully came alive. I was in Pamplona for the first time, and I am sure that we rookies stood out, if not for our confused looks, then for our rushing to the starting line. See, I figured I could give myself a safe cushion if I started to run downhill before they opened the gates and let the bulls loose. What I didn’t know is that anyone who tries to take off running before the bulls are released gets dragged back and thrown in the front again.
My heart was pounding as the gates holding in the animals swung open and a loud roar consumed the street. I ran. Ran like Forrest Gump and didn’t stop running. I kept running past the throngs along the street, past the bakeries and shops that lined the course. I ran until I saw Stacy at what I thought was the finish line. When I stopped for her to tak
e a picture, I glanced behind me and saw no running bulls. I didn’t even see bulls. I had outrun them all. Of course, as per custom, I was not allowed to exit the street until the bulls had passed me by, so I waited … and waited. Suddenly, like a large wave building as it nears the shoreline, a flood of screaming men dressed in white, some covered in blood, came flowing into my path, with the raging animals mixed in among them.
The wave carried us all into the town’s stadium, where organizers unleashed another group of bulls onto the crowd. I found a barrel on the turf and jumped inside.
Never again, I thought to myself.
But sitting at MD Anderson, I found myself thinking that if I outran the bulls, I could outrun leukemia. And yet again, I would have my son running alongside me.
20
A Second Chance
My dad’s relapse with leukemia in the spring of 2015 brought about a sense of guilt and failure that I hadn’t seen coming. The image of my dad and me celebrating in the parking lot after the first transplant replayed over and over again in my head. The more it replayed itself, the more I missed that feeling. I had hope, but I was playing an exhausting game of tag with my confidence.
My uncle—my dad’s sister’s husband—had fallen ill while visiting my father and ultimately died of congenital heart failure on May 9 at Northside. At his funeral, I was consumed by a deep-rooted helplessness, and I felt the pain of my entire family at once. The first transplant meant more to me than just being a donor for my dad—I had felt like I was saving my family in a sense, and now I was watching it fall apart again.
I tried to mimic my father’s positive approach in any radio or television interview I was asked to do about my father’s battle, but the void between the words coming out of my mouth and my actual feelings kept expanding.