When Travis was born in April 1975, his father was the manager of the Kennebec Ice Arena. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Yarmouth, Maine, where Lee managed the North Yarmouth Academy rink. One might say that Travis was born to be on the ice. He was twenty months old when he shuffled across the Yarmouth ice in a pair of figure skates. By age three he was skating with kids ages four to eight because his father didn’t have enough players to field a pre-mite team.
Hockey in Maine was not a sport that attracted many kids during the seventies. Over the next four years Lee alternated Travis between offense and defense, so he would learn all aspects of the game. When Lee accepted the assistant director’s job at the Cumberland Civic Center, the home of the Philadelphia Flyers’ minor-league team, the Maine Mariners, Travis would accompany his dad to watch the Mariners practice. At an early age he became a student of the game. When he turned seven, Mariners general manager and coach Tom McVie made Travis the team stickboy and locker-room gofer. He kept water bottles full, carried tape, supplied gum—he was always bringing the players something. It wasn’t long before Travis was an integral part of the Mariners team.
For nine years Travis was in the Mariners locker room, soaking up every bit of hockey knowledge and strategy he could from the likes of John Paddock, Mike Milbury, Rick Bowness, and E. J. McGuire. He skated with some of the players after practice and occasionally went on road trips with the team. By the time he reached high school, he had a knowledge of hockey rare in a teenager and a savvy that offset his average speed and lack of size.
Travis played at Yarmouth High and moved over to Yarmouth Academy, where he made all-state as a forward. In order to get more exposure and play against tougher competition, Travis transferred to a Massachusetts prep school, Tabor, for his junior and senior years, where he distinguished himself. At age eighteen he made the prestigious Hockey Night in Boston summer league. He was one of six players selected from the summer tournament as most likely to make it in the pros.
Academically, Travis had to work hard to maintain his grades, but he brought the same determination to his studies that he displayed on the ice. In the words of one of his teachers, “Travis was an overachiever.”
The summer before college started, Travis worked in Boston and lifted weights to get ready for the season. When practice began, Travis was thrilled to be on the ice of a Division I champion. Midnight Madness opened the season for BU. “We Are the Champions” blasted from the PA system. Travis felt overwhelmed with emotion and pride. He was achieving the goals he had set for himself back when he was fourteen. Jack Parker and Travis’s BU teammates were impressed with his hockey skills and how knowledgeable he was in all three ice zones. It came as no surprise that he made the team.
Two days before the first game, against North Dakota, Parker told him that he would be playing the first shift of the game, and, in the second game, against Vermont, his dad’s college team, he would be skating on the first line. The Roys and Travis were ecstatic at the news—dreams were becoming reality.
Eleven seconds into his first shift all of that changed. Travis was primed to distinguish himself in Division I and professional hockey. All the preparation, the ability to focus, to take nothing for granted, to see all three zones—the big picture—would no longer be needed on the ice. Travis was in a contest for his life.
“I still prepare each day just as I did when I could skate. My equipment is no longer pads and skates, it’s medicine and medical apparatus. My body is lifeless but my mind is alive,” he says. “Do I have regrets? Yes! Am I grateful? Yes! Do I get discouraged? Yes! Do I still have goals? Yes! I take nothing for granted but I live each day thankful that I can still push breath through my lungs. I no longer dodge checks and put pucks in nets. I elude the temptation to dwell on the past and feel sorry for myself. Each day I am determined to use my mind, my attitude, and the ability I have to the fullest of my capacity. I approach life the same way I approached hockey: I give it my best.”
26
Simon Keith
We always talk about the heart of a champion. And that’s one part of Simon Keith’s amazing story. Amazing because the heart of this champion came from someone else. Yes. Simon Keith, professional soccer player, is also Simon Keith, transplant survivor.
I relate deeply to his ordeal because I can identify with his childhood passion and what he went through to achieve his goal. Though I was born in America, my early departure from home to play junior hockey in Montreal deepened my awareness of what hockey meant to every young athlete in Canada. Well, imagine the focus on soccer for young Simon, growing up in Lewes, England, with a father who had played semipro soccer in the fifties. It was so much a part of their lives as a family.
Even after they moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, their passion never diminished. Simon’s father, David, was an assistant coach for the Canadian team in 1982, and Simon started playing when he was four. He was always an outstanding performer. After high school, his exceptional talent landed him a spot on the roster of Millwall, then a third-division team in England.
Good things kept coming. As word of Simon’s talent got around, he was given one of the sixteen spots on the Canadian development team. The team trained in Victoria so Simon stayed at home and enrolled at the University of Victoria in the fall of 1984. He played with passion and dedication, working hard to continue to improve his skills and his love for the game. His heart was in his feet.
As with any well-conditioned athlete, the first signs of physical trouble are often met with a casual diagnosis. It’s in your head! You’re under too much stress! It’s an attitude problem. Maybe you just need a rest.
But Simon knew something was wrong. He tired too easily. He was more vulnerable to the elements than he had ever been before.
“One day at practice,” he says, “I was freezing, so I had my hands in my pockets. My coach yelled at me to take them out. When I did, they were pure white. A few minutes later the coach chewed me out again for having my hands in my pockets. I didn’t even know I had put them back in there.”
The coach called Simon aside and told him he had a bad attitude. Simon and his family saw it differently. They searched for answers. They met with many frustrations, including assorted medical misdiagnoses.
A doctor at Vancouver General Hospital finally nailed it. Simon’s heart had been damaged by a virus. A biopsy revealed viral myocarditis. It had destroyed part of the heart muscle and the heart could not pump blood effectively, causing poor circulation and early fatigue.
Medicine and steroids worked so well that Simon became known locally as the “miracle boy.” He returned to the team and earned all-Canada honors. But once he was weaned from the steroids, his symptoms returned. It took longer to recover from a workout and fatigue grew more commonplace.
In February 1986, Simon again visited Vancouver General Hospital. Another biopsy. Another diagnosis: “Your heart is too damaged. You need a transplant or you’re dead.”
This was a difficult prescription to follow. Simon went first to the biggest transplant center in Canada, University Hospital in London, Ontario. He was accepted as a candidate. Oddly, they found him too healthy to take priority over others nearer death. In essence they said, “Come back when you’re worse.”
Referred to Dr. Terence English, a transplant surgeon at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, Simon finally heard the long-awaited words about a heart transplant: “If you want one, we’ll give you one.”
That summer, a seventeen-year-old boy died of a brain hemorrhage while playing soccer. His heart was transplanted into Simon’s body the next day. Two and a half months later Simon returned to Canada to a hero’s welcome. They loved him and they loved his story. They adopted him. They protected him. “I would go out and want to have a beer, and there would be somebody there saying I shouldn’t.”
In the fall he began his courageous comeback to the world he loved. He enrolled at UNLV and signed up for the soccer team. The concern was over
whelming. Liability releases were signed and reassurances were given. Simon told his coach, Barry Barto, “Look, if I die, I die. But I won’t. I promise you.”
His courage and heart were back in his feet. Named all–Big West his junior and senior years, he was chosen student athlete of the year by the conference and in April was invited to the All-Star Game, an honor given only to the top thirty seniors in the country.
And now the incredible finale. Simon’s collegiate accomplishments were brought to the attention of Cleveland Crunch general manager Al Miller, who made him the first pick in the 1989 Major Indoor Soccer League draft. Certainly there are risks, but Simon made his choice and is an inspiration to all. He says of his fans, “They’re really glad I’m doing what I’m doing because it inspires somebody, somewhere along the line. Whether it’s their sick aunt, brother, dad, whatever, it makes me feel good.”
You could probably say it warms his heart.
27
Karen Smyers
I always marvel at the stern stuff so many of my Companions in Courage find in their hearts and in their spirits.
They cope with horrible diseases and treatments that can be nearly as bad. Yet they throw themselves no pity parties and they don’t expend valuable energy carping and complaining.
That’s one of the most touching things in Karen Smyers’s story. She did not let any of the awful things that befell her keep her from the goal of trying to make the United States Olympic triathlon team. But she did cry once, which I think you’ll find understandable, coming as it did during her battle with cancer, her recovery from a severed artery in her leg, and from massive injuries suffered when a truck hit her as she trained on her bicycle.
The tears burst forth in Ixtapa, Mexico, not long after Karen learned she had thyroid cancer. It was September of 1999 and those swollen glands in her neck were not, as she had originally believed, the result of bronchitis. She raced anyway and, in a collision with another cyclist, broke her collarbone. But that’s not when she cried.
Bandaged, in pain, unable to carry her own luggage, she went to the airport to return to her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and pleaded for a courtesy upgrade to business class. She was turned down. And then came the torrent, forty-five minutes of sobbing.
“Once I got that out of my system, I was fine,” she says.
Fine? How many of us would describe ourselves that way after living through a fraction of the injuries and ordeals she has suffered? Wow. But here’s how Karen looks at life: “If I’ve learned anything, it’s the value of flexibility and resiliency.”
Karen, a three-sport star at Wethersfield High School in Connecticut, swam at Princeton University and continued to run as an additional way to train. In 1984 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she competed in her first short triathlon: an 800-meter swim, 8-mile bike ride, and 3-mile run. She borrowed a bike and won that race. A year later she turned pro.
In 1990 she won the world’s triathlon title. By 1995 she dominated the sport, winning the world championship in Cancún, taking first at the Pan Am Games and in the Ironman Hawaii. She had never missed a race because of an injury or failed to finish one she started. Maybe her competitors couldn’t catch up with her, but fate could, and did.
In April of 1997, while cleaning her house, Karen tried to remove the storm windows. As she held one overhead, the glass broke and one large shard dropped onto the back of her leg, severing her hamstring. She dragged herself across the floor to reach the phone and call 911. Then she spent six months rehabbing the injury.
Jump ahead fourteen months. Having just given birth to her daughter, Jenna, Karen went back into training, energized by motherhood and the time off from her sport. While out on her bike she got clipped by a truck and went sailing through the air. She suffered six broken ribs, a lung contusion, a separated shoulder, and a bunch of bruises.
Worse than missing her second straight Ironman Hawaii, worse than another training setback, was the terrible feeling that she was not being all the mother she could to Jenna. She couldn’t pick up her daughter or nurse her without assistance.
But she healed. A little more than a year after that truck nailed her, she finished second in Hawaii. And then came the cancer surgery in December of 1999, with doctors removing half of her thyroid. Once again she had to jump-start her career, recover from the surgery and that injured shoulder, and claw her way back into the type of condition that the triathlon demands. She finished seventh in the Olympic trials, not good enough to qualify for the trip to Sydney, Australia.
“I just tried to get every ounce of my body that I could, all the way to the end,” she says. “I think I did that and it just ended up not being quite enough.”
Next came another enforced layoff, for radioactive iodine treatment for the thyroid. After that, you can be sure she’ll be back in training, preparing for the next competition. “It’s what she loves doing,” says her husband, Bill. “And it’s the way she wants to live her life.”
Somewhere along the line, Karen Smyers learned that life is not a sprint. It’s a marathon, maybe even a triathlon.
“People look at me now and think of me as this hard-luck kid,” she says. “But I take a look at my life, what I’m doing, what I have, and the life I’ve lived. I keep thinking, ‘I’m incredibly charmed.’ I’ve had a couple hurdles but I think, in the grand scheme of things, I’m so fortunate.”
28
Tom Dolan
Tom Dolan loves to compete. He loves to swim and he loves to excel. There’s only one problem—he has trouble getting air into his lungs. The combination of allergies, asthma, and competitive swimming has not made breathing easy for this world-class swimmer. These difficulties have only strengthened Tom’s resolve to be the best in the world. Believe me, I know about asthma firsthand, and it only makes me respect Tom Dolan more. In the face of others wanting you to cut back or give up, you have to bear down even harder, not only to overcome the lack of air but also the sense that you “can’t do it” or even worse, you “shouldn’t do it.”
Tom’s determination and workout schedule clash head-on with his body when it protests the demands of his training regimen. Tom has a narrow windpipe that does not allow enough air into his lungs. Under normal circumstances his tight air passage, with the exception of some wheezing, might not present a problem; however, Tom’s circumstances never seem to be normal.
His parents, Bill and Jef, have always held their breath while Tom was fighting to find his. Ever since he was a young boy, he would push himself to the edge of danger in whatever he did. It didn’t matter what the activity or sport was, Tom approached it with a devil-may-care attitude. He went full throttle in whatever he did. While his father worries that Tom doesn’t have a well-developed sense of self-preservation, he is proud of Tom’s athletic accomplishments as a swimmer. His mother, recalling his ninety-mile-an-hour childhood thrill rides down hills on his Big Wheel, is grateful Tom is still alive.
Tom began his swimming career at the age of five. He wanted to do whatever his sister, Kathleen, did. She swam, so he swam. And he didn’t rest until he beat her. At fifteen, Dolan won three titles at the Junior Nationals. When he was eighteen he set the world record in the 400-meter individual medley as the youngest male member of the U.S. team. During his career at the University of Michigan he set three U.S. records and was twice named the NCAA swimmer of the year. He won gold medals in the 400-meter individual medley at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, as well as a silver medal in the 200-meter individual medley at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.
There is no question about Tom Dolan’s talent, but I am not sharing his story because of his ability. What inspires me about Tom is that he has never let his physical handicaps deter him. His determination, fueled by his courage, pushed him to succeed at what he loves.
Yes, he has passed out in the pool. Yes, he has had to use an inhaler to be able to climb out of the pool before he drowned. Yes, he has had to grab lane ropes at times to keep from going under. Yes, he has
scared his parents and his coach, Joe Urbanchek. Yes, he developed chronic fatigue from his demanding work schedule.
And yet he lives a full and varied life. When Tom is not swimming, he is playing in his rap band, MC (Mass Confusion), or hanging out with his friends. His zest for just being alive every day reflects itself in all he does. After the 1996 Olympics, Dolan was interviewed by Broderick Turner, a thirteen-year-old. Broderick asked Tom what advice he would give to kids who would love to appear on a Wheaties box. Dolan responded, “Don’t strive for that. Strive to be the best in your sport and to be the best human being you can be.”
How has Tom Dolan been able to manage this delicate balance between life, competition, and death? He loves to compete. He loves what he does. His motivation is so high that his breathing handicap, instead of serving as an excuse, became part of what motivated him to excel.
So often we talk about life in terms of a baby drawing its first breath and a dying person exhaling his last. Think about Tom Dolan for a minute. Why do we so often pay so little attention to all those breaths between the first and the last?
29
Monica Weidenbach
Celebrities and sports heroes certainly get a lot of media coverage and have a tremendous impact on those who admire them. But there is a special place in my heart for the quiet, lesser-known battlers that I see every day. They don’t make headlines, but their lessons are no less powerful. One morning I was waiting for a plane and I read about a local boy who was playing on his high school soccer team. Nothing unusual? Well, this young lad was playing with a walker for support. I thought, “There must be thousands of folk like that, in every avenue of life, filled with personal, courageous stories.”
Companions in Courage Page 10