The Legends Club

by John Feinstein

  Jim went back to television, working through the Final Four. Then, when ABC asked him to be a sideline reporter for a few World League of American Football games in May, he said yes. That was when his back began to bother him.

  By the time he got home from his last game in Barcelona, the pain was so acute and persistent that he began to think it was more than just stiffness. He had just turned forty-six. He’d been on long plane flights for years and never felt anything like this.

  “He called me after he got back from Europe and said he was going to go in and have some tests done,” John Saunders said. “He said, ‘I’ve probably got cancer.’ I said, ‘Shut up. That’s not even a little bit funny.’ ”

  Valvano wasn’t joking. He didn’t necessarily believe he had cancer, but he was concerned. “It wasn’t so much that we thought about cancer,” Pam Valvano Strasser said. “It was that we couldn’t figure out what it was. And that was a little bit scary.”

  The doctors ran various tests to see if Valvano had somehow injured himself or even if he had some kind of virus that might be causing the pain. They found nothing. Finally, they decided to do an MRI on Valvano’s back to see if there was anything they might have missed.

  There was.

  “It was actually one of the radiologists who showed us the test,” Pam said. “He said he really wasn’t supposed to show us, but the doctor was tied up with some kind of emergency and he thought we should know what was going on. So he showed it to us.”

  Later, Jim would tell friends the story about seeing a huge black area on the film the technician put up on a wall for them to look at.

  “What’s all that black?” he asked.

  “Coach,” the radiologist answered. “That’s cancer.”

  One of the people Valvano told that story to was Saunders. Twenty-one years later, Saunders couldn’t retell the story without tearing up. “I think at that moment he knew he was going to die,” Saunders said. “There was an odd dichotomy to the whole thing. On the one hand, Jimmy was very much at peace with his fate. On the other hand, right until the very end, I think he was convinced he was going to find a way to beat it. To some extent, we all believed that. I mean, how could Jim Valvano possibly die?”

  That was the way Mike Krzyzewski felt. “There was no way he was going to die,” he said. “And yet, you could see very clearly that he was dying.”

  When the Valvanos did talk to the doctor, they learned that Jim had something called metastatic adenocarcinoma, which in English is a tumor that springs from the glands. Where it started, why it started, when it started was a mystery. But it was pretty far along.

  “They said a year,” Pam said. “Turned out, they were being optimistic.”

  The next morning Valvano called Saunders. “I was sitting on the edge of my bed when he called,” Saunders said. “He said, ‘I’ve got cancer.’ I guess because it was Jim, I just didn’t believe him. I said to him, ‘Will you please shut the f—— up with the cancer stuff. I told you it’s not funny!’

  “He said, ‘John, I know it’s not funny. I’m not joking.’ That’s when I started to cry.”

  On June 18, ESPN’s Bob Ley made the announcement on SportsCenter. “There is only one way to break this news and it is the way Jim Valvano would want us to do it,” he said soberly. “Jim has cancer.”

  The news stunned everyone who knew Valvano. Of course the first questions asked were, “How serious is it? How early did they catch it?”

  The answers were “Very” and “Not early.”

  Initially, Valvano went to New York to Sloan Kettering for treatment. Sloan Kettering is one of the leading cancer centers in the world. The chemotherapy was awful. His hair didn’t fall out, but he had all the other side effects, notably the nausea. Saunders remembers going to visit him and how upsetting it was to see him so weak and sick.

  But it was also inspiring.

  “I went to see him one evening and Pam and the girls were there,” he said. “I knew how much Jim traveled and I knew how guilty he felt at times about not being there for the four of them more often. But the closeness they felt, the bonds that were so strong, were really something to see.

  “My wife and I had been talking about having a second child. I didn’t want one. I thought one was all I could handle. Seeing Jim and Pam and the girls turned me around completely. I was driving home from the hospital that night [Saunders lives in Westchester] and I pulled off the road to a phone booth. I called my wife and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think we should have another child.’ ”

  Saunders smiled at the memory. “She said, ‘I’m so glad you feel that way, because I’m pregnant.’ ”

  The child, born two months before Valvano’s death, is named Jenna Tiana Vanessa Saunders.

  Valvano’s health slid quickly. Not surprisingly, the chemo treatment made him sick. Eventually he and Pam decided he should be treated at Duke Hospital, if only because it was easier on Jim to drive twenty-five miles to Durham rather than fly to New York when he needed treatment.

  There was no doubt that Valvano was going to keep working for as long as possible. “If he had just been sitting around the house, I think he’d have lost his mind,” Pam said. “He needed to get out and see people. The support he was getting was keeping him going. And, by then, he loved going to the games. It was his therapy.”

  When Valvano started treatment at Duke, he had a frequent visitor: Krzyzewski. Whenever he was going to be at the hospital, Valvano would let Krzyzewski know, and unless he was on the road, Krzyzewski would come and spend time with him when he was getting a chemo treatment. Sometimes, Valvano would come to watch Krzyzewski’s team practice, and on some of those occasions, Krzyzewski asked him to speak to his team.

  Few people understood just how sick Valvano was until Gary Smith wrote a lengthy Sports Illustrated story on what Valvano was going through. There was a photo of Valvano on the cover in which he looked about ten to fifteen years older than he had looked prior to his diagnosis and the chemo. The cover line read “I’m Fighting to Live.”

  In the piece, Smith talked about the battle Valvano was waging with himself.

  “The triviality of it just clobbers me,” Smith quoted Valvano as saying. “You get this sick and you say to yourself, ‘Sports means nothing,’ and that feels terrible. God, I’ve devoted my whole life to it.”

  As he had always done, Valvano poured all his feelings out in his talks with Smith. Now, though, there was little of the Valvano humor. Only occasionally did the guy who became rooms peek out from behind the black curtain. “I’ve lost thirty-five pounds,” he said. “I’m the quickest color commentator going. No one can go around me.”

  As the basketball season chugged through the winter, Valvano went downhill rapidly. He kept doing games, but each one was more difficult. Walking had become difficult. He couldn’t taste food anymore. He was trying experimental treatments—drinking shark’s cartilage because sharks never got cancer and there were those who thought that ingesting something from a shark might stop cancer from spreading.

  “You could see, very clearly, that he was dying,” Pam said. “And yet, I don’t think Jim ever really believed he was going to die, and because of that we didn’t believe he was going to die. The doctors were going to find something in time to save him.”

  Everyone who knew him well felt that way. “Jim had too much life in him to die,” Bob Valvano said. “On the one hand, when I saw him, he looked terrible and felt terrible. On the other hand, he was still Jim. He could still make you laugh in ways no one else could make you laugh.”

  In early February, Valvano had to skip two games he was scheduled to do on TV because he was too sick to travel. North Carolina State had planned a tenth anniversary celebration for the 1983 team for February 21, when the Wolfpack was hosting Duke on a Sunday afternoon. Valvano had been scheduled to do the game on ABC, but he was so fragile by then that ABC had Terry Gannon on standby in case Valvano couldn’t make it to the game.

/>   He made it, walking into Reynolds Coliseum for the first time since he had been forced to resign. Some of his former players hadn’t seen him in a long time and they were shocked by his appearance. Remarkably, he hadn’t lost his hair in chemo, but he was frail and walking was very difficult for him. But when he was handed the microphone during the halftime ceremony, he was Coach V again.

  He hummed the State fight song, talked about how much he had loved coaching at N.C. State. All the anger he had felt when he had been forced out three years earlier was gone. He talked about what he had learned from cancer: “Don’t ever, ever give up,” and for the first time, he spoke the words that became iconic after his death: “Cancer cannot rob me of my mind, my heart, and my soul.”

  There weren’t many dry eyes in the building by the time he finished. Nine days later, on March 3, Valvano was scheduled to fly to New York to accept the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the first ESPY Awards. The ESPYS are little more than a self-promotional vehicle for ESPN, a chance for the network to pat itself on the back and remind everyone how important it has become in the world of sports. The presence of Hollywood stars as presenters and hosts makes for extraordinarily awkward television every year.

  That first year, though, Valvano produced eleven memorable minutes on a night when Raquel Welch famously awarded the 1993 ESPY for college player of the year to “Christine Laettner.”

  The fact that Valvano even made it onstage that night was a miracle in itself. Jim and Pam flew to New York that morning with Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski.

  “I didn’t see any way he was going to be able to stand up and speak,” Krzyzewski said later. “He was so sick. I don’t mean once or twice, I mean the entire flight.”

  At one point, thinking he was finally okay, Valvano returned to his seat—and promptly got sick all over Pam’s expensive handbag.

  “I thought, ‘This is crazy, we shouldn’t be here,’ ” Pam remembered. “He couldn’t really walk, he could barely talk, he should have been in the hospital, not on an airplane to accept an award.”

  With Pam’s help, Valvano managed to get his tuxedo on, but by the time that was done he had chills so violent that he huddled in bed, under the covers, shivering. John Saunders had come to see him, and when he walked in the room, even knowing how sick Jim was, he was shocked.

  “You can’t possibly do this,” Saunders said. “You can’t even get out of bed.”

  “I came this far, I’ve been sick all day,” Valvano said, shaking as he spoke. “I’m going to do this.”

  And so he did. Dick Vitale introduced him. Before he went onstage, Valvano told Krzyzewski, “When I finish, you have to come and get me. I’ll never make it down the [seven] steps without help.”

  Somehow, with the lights shining and the spotlight on him, Valvano turned what looked like an L into one of the great W’s of his life. He looked both sad and tired as he waited for the ovation he had received while Vitale helped him onto the stage to quiet down. And then, for the last time, he became the room.

  He started by blowing a heartfelt kiss to his wife. Then he said, “I’m going to speak longer than anyone else tonight. I don’t know how much time I have left, so I’m going to cherish every minute I’ve got.”

  He talked about Krzyzewski, saying, “As great a coach as he is, he’s ten times a better person.”

  At length, he retold the story about his first game as a coach—when he had just graduated from Rutgers and Bill Foster had hired him to coach the freshman team. He had read a book on Vince Lombardi in which Lombardi told the story about his first pregame pep talk after he had become coach of the Green Bay Packers.

  “Lombardi said he waited until it was three minutes before the team was supposed to go onto the field,” Valvano said. “Then he walked in, tore open the door to the locker room, pointed to the tunnel, and then turned and pointed a finger at them and said to his players, ‘We will be successful this season if you devote yourselves to three things. First, your family. Second, your religion. And third…the Green Bay Packers!’ The players raced through the door, won the game, and the rest is history.

  “So I practiced my Lombardi speech. I was going to tell them, ‘First your family, second your religion, and third…Rutgers basketball!’ I paced up and down waiting for the clock to get down to three minutes. Finally, I walked inside and I went to the door to tear it open…It was locked. I fell flat on my face. But I got up and I turned to the players and I said, ‘We will be successful this season if you devote yourselves to three things. First, your family. Second, your religion. And third…the Green Bay Packers!’ ”

  He owned the room again.

  He went on. He talked about his parents, Rocco and Angelina Valvano. He quoted his late father. And then he talked about his life. “I believe you should do three things every single day of your life,” he said. “One, you should laugh. Two, you should think. Pause and think about your life. And third, you should cry. Get yourself into a state of emotion where you shed a tear. If you do all three of those things—laugh, think, and cry—well, that’s one heck of a day.”

  Eight minutes into the speech, Valvano saw “thirty seconds” flashing at him in the teleprompter that he wasn’t using. “Hey, look at that,” he said. “Thirty seconds. Some guy is telling me I’ve got thirty seconds left. You think I care about some guy telling me I’ve got thirty seconds left? I’ve got tumors running all through my body and I’m supposed to care about a guy telling me I have thirty seconds left?”

  He cursed in Italian.

  By now he had become the room, one last time.

  He finished with an eloquent plea to help raise more money for cancer research. “I am very proud to announce tonight that we are launching the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research,” he said. “Our motto will be ‘Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.’ It may not save my life, but it may save my children’s lives.”

  He paused for the applause to die down. You could hear a pin drop.

  “I hope in the time I have left that I can give some hope to others.”

  And then he repeated what he had said in Raleigh: “Cancer may rob me of my physical powers. But it cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. Those parts of me will live on forever.”

  The audience stood and clapped and cheered and cried as Vitale and Krzyzewski helped him down the steps. He all but collapsed into Krzyzewski’s arms as he reached his seat. When he sat down, Pam leaned over and gave him a kiss.

  “Was I okay?” he asked her softly.

  “Yes honey, you were okay.”

  He closed his eyes, completely drained, and, with the cheers and applause still ringing in his ears, he passed out.

  He had finally found The Next Thing. He had eight weeks to live.

  29

  Five days after the ESPYS speech, Jim Valvano appeared in public for the last time. The final game on his ABC schedule for the season was in Chapel Hill: Duke against North Carolina.

  The Blue Devils were the two-time defending national champions, although clearly not the same team with Christian Laettner gone. Even so, they still had Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill, and they were ranked sixth in the country. They had beaten Carolina in Durham in early February, but the Tar Heels had won eight in a row since then and came into the game with the ACC regular season title already clinched and ranked number one in the nation. Dean Smith’s team was loaded, led by center Eric Montross, forward George Lynch, and three excellent guards: Donald Williams, Brian Reese, and Derrick Phelps.

  Even though there was nothing at stake in terms of the league standings—Carolina was 13–2 and Duke was 10–5—the Dean Dome was electric. Although Carolina had beaten Duke at home a year earlier, the Blue Devils had become the dominant team in the Triangle. They had now won three straight against the Tar Heels—and five of seven—but more important, Krzyzewski actually had one more national championship than Smith. To Carolina fans, that was a horrifying thought. It didn’t exactly
please Smith either.

  Valvano felt very little of this. Much like with the ESPYS, he was there because he refused to not be there, even though he felt awful. He knew that there was an excellent chance this would be the last basketball game he ever worked—or, for that matter, the last basketball game he ever attended.

  As the teams warmed up, he sat quietly at the announcers’ table, surrounded by security because so many people—especially after the ESPYS speech—wanted to say hello to him or wish him luck or tell him how moved they were by his words. Once, Valvano would have been at midcourt, glad-handing and chatting with everyone in the place. Now he sat with a sad look on his face and said, quietly, “I love being here for a game like this. I just wish I felt well enough to enjoy it. All I can really do is try to get through it.”

  Early in the game, Lenny Wirtz, the lead official, called Krzyzewski and Smith over to the scorer’s table. It was clear to him—and everyone else in the building—that both coaches were wound tight.

  “Look, guys, I know it’s a big game, I get it,” Wirtz said. “You’ve both got a lot of adrenaline pumping right now. But you’ve got to give us [the three officials] some space. Let us work the game.”

  Krzyzewski smiled at Wirtz. “Lenny, there’s twenty-one thousand people in here and they’re all against me,” he said. “You three are the only ones I can talk to.”

  Wirtz smiled, maybe even laughed a little at the joke. Smith jumped in. “Lenny, you can’t let him do that,” he said. “You can’t let him try to get you guys on his side by saying things like that.”

  Before Wirtz could say anything, Krzyzewski waved a hand at Smith and said, “Come on, Dean, stop it, just stop it.”

  He turned and walked back to his bench, shaking his head at Dean being Dean—or, as John Thompson would call it, “another Deanism.”

  “If I ever start to act like him, talk like him in any way,” he told his assistants, “don’t ask me any questions. Just get a gun and shoot me.”