by Gary Pinkel
So I scheduled a visit at Ellis Fischel Cancer Center in Columbia and saw Dr. Robert Zitsch. He said we could wait three weeks to see if the swelling went away or take a look right then and find out what was going on. I wanted to find out. So they ordered a biopsy and took a draw of fluid from the lump. They called me the next day and said I’d have to come back for the full pathology report. I asked if they saw anything that would indicate what this might be. They told me the draw initially showed signs of lymphoma.
Wow. Lymphoma.
Dr. Zitsch didn’t give us any percentage of probability but laid it out there as a possibility.
The next day we went back to Ellis Fischel and he gave us the bad news. “You’ve got lymphoma,” he said. It was a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Happy birthday, Coach. You’ve got cancer.
Missy was sitting next to me. I could sense her eyes watering up. I held on to her while we absorbed the doctor’s words. “You mean I have cancer?” I asked.
It’s such a helpless feeling. I had been so blessed my whole life to stay healthy. There was no explanation for how I got cancer, but that was the diagnosis. Going into the meeting I braced myself, knowing what he had already said over the phone. I knew this was a possibility. But when he said, “You’ve got cancer,” the words slammed into me like a truck. That feeling lasted for about two weeks.
Initially, I told a few close friends and my kids, but I had to be careful because I didn’t want many people in our football facility to know about the diagnosis. I told four people at Mizzou: my secretary, Ann Hatcher; my director of football operations, Dan Hopkins; my media relations director, Chad Moller; and my athletic director, Mack Rhoades. He had just been hired to replace Mike Alden, who retired after 17 years on the job. I wasn’t ready to tell my coaching staff. My plan was to keep coaching, so they didn’t need to worry about their futures being tied to mine.
When friends asked me what was wrong with my neck, I just said I had something small that had to be removed. Nothing serious.
I wanted to keep my cancer quiet because I didn’t want it to affect our recruiting. I hoped coaches at other schools wouldn’t use it against us—but you never know. Some just might. “Are you aware Coach Pinkel has cancer? Have you wondered if he might be there next year?” I didn’t want our recruits to hear those things. Slowly, my diagnosis began to sink in. I’d catch myself driving around and looking at my face in the rearview mirror. “I’ve got cancer?” I’d say. “Are you kidding?”
I wanted to keep coaching as long as I could, but I didn’t want to undergo any treatment locally at Ellis Fischel. It was important for me to keep this under wraps. I didn’t want to be spotted getting treated in St. Louis or Kansas City either.
Wes Stricker, an allergist in Columbia and good friend, had done his residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. We hadn’t started discussing treatment options yet, but he recommended I get a second opinion before launching into treatment plans. He set me up with Dr. Thomas Habermann, a renowned lymphoma specialist at Mayo. Starting in May, we scheduled three visits to Mayo for monotherapy and they treated me with a drug called Rituximab. One of the nurses there told me they called the drug “Liquid Gold.” Why? Because that’s how well it worked. On each visit they injected me with the drug over five hours, with Missy always right by my side.
During my first visit to Mayo, while I was in the waiting room, another man waiting there must have recognized me. He looked at me and said, “M-I-Z…”
Oh, no. I was trying to do this as inconspicuously as possible. The last thing I wanted was for the public back in Missouri to find out I was getting cancer treatment in Minnesota. One of the nurses referred to me as “Coach Pinkel” while she was doing my blood work. Of course, I’m not listed as Coach on my paperwork—just Gary. She said to me, “Coach, my mom lives in Columbia.” But I didn’t have to worry about her telling anyone. Confidentiality is sacred to the staff there, which made me feel better.
I was fortunate to not have any strong reactions to the treatment. After my final treatment in June, I got up the next morning back home and worked out harder than I’ve ever worked out. I was trying to make myself healthier, even though I knew that didn’t make any sense. I would live with lymphoma for the rest of my life. That night I paid the price. I jarred my system and gave myself cold sweats all night. I called Dr. Habermann and he set me straight. “Gary, it’s fine to work out, but you can’t overdo it.” Otherwise, I felt fine physically.
So then we waited. In six months we’d find out if the treatment had worked.
I started to do a lot of soul-searching that spring and summer. I never felt sorry for myself. Those thoughts never crossed my mind for one reason: my sister. Kathy fought through her unfortunate challenges without ever feeling sorry for herself. I didn’t allow myself to ask, “Why me?” Instead, I just prayed for the strength to fight this disease as best I could.
Just as my treatments ended in mid June, Missy and I got married in Naples, Florida, a week later on June 27. We were so blessed to have our entire family in Florida for the wedding along with close friends who made the long trip, most of whom didn’t know about my cancer. Most importantly, all of our children and my grandchildren were part of the ceremony. We honeymooned in France and Monte Carlo. It was my first time in Europe, and it was amazing to be part of the culture and soak in all the history. We stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, then flew to Nice and stayed at the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte-Carlo. We were going through customs in Paris and someone shouted, “Coach Pinkel!” It was a guy who played for me at Washington. Otherwise, I was undercover the whole time, which was kind of nice for a change. It was just an amazing experience that I treasured spending with my new bride and best friend.
That summer, thoughts began to bounce around in my mind. How much longer did I want to coach? When July came around I really started to wonder. How much longer can I live this lifestyle? Later in the fall, I knew I’d be getting an update on the drug treatment. They might give me a clean bill of health, or I might need to restart treatment. If I needed treatment, it would have to take place during the season. I started to ask myself a lot of questions. At the time I didn’t discuss any of these thoughts with Missy. I wasn’t ready for that.
By August, we were back on the practice field and the questions didn’t go away. Is this how I wanted to spend my time for the next few years? I kept coming back to the same thought—Am I doing the right thing?
For the first time in my life I felt vulnerable. I always battled when things got tough. Any adversity that came up, I fought through it. You learn to persevere and get through the week so you can coach another week…and then another season, and another season. You overcome the hard times and keep coaching.
But this was different.
Football coaches aren’t supposed to feel this vulnerability. This was certainly a new feeling for me.
I was getting ready for my 25th season as a head coach, but questions started to evolve in my mind. How did I want to spend my time? It became an internal battle, a personal discussion. Did I want to keep up with the grind of coaching and recruiting? At my age, with my family—a new family with Missy and her children—did I want to keep going? Those thoughts really consumed me through July and August, right up to the start of the season.
I kept coming back to time. For 40 years, my time and my family’s time had revolved around my job and the college football calendar. Cancer made me realize my time wasn’t endless. I continued to pray. Was I using what time I had left the right way? And it wasn’t all about me either. I’ve got a new wife. I’ve got my kids and grandkids.
On top of the question of time was the matter of stress. I’m not sure there’s a more stressful job than being the head coach of a major college football program. Yes, we’re well-compensated, but the pressure to win and the pressure to recruit creates remarkable stress, not just for coaches but their
families. You combine those pressures with the demanding lifestyle that keeps you away from home and constantly invested with work and it was enough to make me re-evaluate my future. I wasn’t just 63 years old—I was 63 and diagnosed with cancer. I felt the need to de-stress my life so I could fight my cancer.
These thoughts and concerns were on my mind throughout the weeks leading up to the season. If I thought my job was stressful before, the 2015 season introduced me to another level of stress.
• • •
The adversity came fast. On the first series of our first game of the season against Southeast Missouri State, our starting running back Russell Hansbrough and starting center Evan Boehm both limped off the field with sprained ankles. They both struggled with their injuries all season. Maybe it was a sign of things to come. We were fortunate to beat Arkansas State and Connecticut the next two weeks, but it was obvious our offense was not nearly as explosive as we expected. In the offseason, Dave Steckel, our defensive coordinator, had left the staff to become the head coach at Missouri State. I replaced him with Barry Odom, one of our former assistants who had spent the last three years running the defense at the University of Memphis. Under Barry, our defense was again one of the best in the SEC. We just couldn’t score. The UConn game embodied our team that season; we won 9–6.
A week later we went to Kentucky, and for the first time since joining the SEC, we lost to the Wildcats 21–13. By then, we had a quarterback problem. That would turn out to be the last game Maty Mauk played for Mizzou.
Maty was dealing with some personal problems away from football, and it reached the point that we had to address them. After the Kentucky game, we suspended him indefinitely. This was a new experience for me, having to suspend a starting quarterback. Never in my career did I have discipline problems with a starting quarterback. You can’t afford to have your leader be someone who’s not living up to the team standards. Maty did some great things for our team, and he made some changes in his life after he left our program, but that position is unlike any other on the team. Coach James taught me many years ago you can’t have problems with your quarterback. None. Zero. The position is too vital.
On the field, Maty wasn’t making progress like we usually saw with our quarterbacks. He did some great things as a redshirt freshman when he started four games in relief of James Franklin. As a sophomore in 2014, he helped lead us to 11 wins and made some progress as the full-time starter. But I kept wondering why he wasn’t following the typical trajectory for a quarterback. Why isn’t he taking off? That’s when we realized he had some personal problems. I wish I had known sooner because we could have done more to help him earlier in his career. I was extremely disappointed in him for what he did to the team. It created distractions. He was the quarterback. He was expected to carry himself to a certain standard. That’s the nature of the position. But I still cared about him. I still loved him. You still have to think of these players as your own kids.
Later in the year we reinstated Maty, and he apologized to the team. But he got into more trouble and spent the rest of the season on suspension. Eventually, he was dismissed from the program and transferred for his final season.
As for our team, we failed to overcome the problems we had at quarterback. Drew Lock, a true freshman, took over for Maty and made his first start at home against South Carolina. Drew is wonderfully talented and had some success early but ultimately struggled. He was put in a really difficult situation. Drew had never been a full-time football player like some quarterbacks. He was an outstanding high school basketball player in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, so he didn’t have the complete football background that would help him handle the transition as a freshman. He had to absorb a lot that season, and it wasn’t necessarily fair for him because he wasn’t ready for that role. Quarterback problems get magnified more than anything else that goes wrong, but that’s the responsibility you have as coaches. And we didn’t do enough. We were coming off two division championships, and sometimes after you experience success you have to coach harder to avoid complacency. No excuses. I should have done more.
We beat South Carolina in a game that I thought would help build Drew’s confidence. But our offense never got going. We went three straight games without scoring a touchdown, each game ending in losses, to Florida, Georgia, and Vanderbilt, respectively. I wasn’t accustomed to these kinds of problems on offense. Nothing we tried seemed to work.
• • •
Once the 2015 season started I was able to focus on football and not get too occupied with my health. I had been trained for decades how to manage the structure of the season. The great Coach James lesson—when things get tough, just focus on your job—applied to that season more than ever. We weren’t winning like we expected, but that wasn’t a season where I was facing a lot of outside scrutiny. My pressure came from within, from the secret that I was carrying about my health. But I knew how to focus. There wasn’t enough free time during the season to mope around about cancer. I was too busy. At the time I would get on the phone with recruits, players who had committed to us, and I talked to them about their future. In a matter of weeks I’d have to tell them about my plans to retire. But not yet.
After our eighth game of the season we had a bye week. We were 4–4. In June, I had scheduled my checkup at Mayo for the Monday of that bye week, on October 26.
Around that time I met my daughter Erin for coffee one day and talked about these thoughts I was having. She could tell I was wavering. She knew how analytical I am with big decisions, but she could sense I wasn’t committed to coaching much longer.
I didn’t want to coach three more years then have my tests come back and have the doctors tell me I needed more intense treatment. Because then I would have looked back on those three years I spent coaching and wondered about all the time I could have spent with Missy and the kids. I would have regretted that decision every day for the rest of my life. I was concerned, too, about my body handling the stress of the lifestyle that I had experienced for the last 40 years in coaching.
I was ready to walk away.
I gave the decision a lot of thought and prayer. I talked a lot with Missy. There were many tears. But I made up my mind before we boarded the plane for Minnesota.
I once heard the Hall of Fame coach Bobby Bowden talk about the prospect of retiring. “Do I want to die on the practice fields or die on the beach?” he said. He wanted to die on the field. Not me. I want to die on a beach. I love coaching. I had a great run. I coached great players on great teams. But I never saw myself coaching forever.
The Monday of our bye week, October 26, we went to Mayo for my scheduled PET scan. It stands for positron emission tomography. They inject you with a dye that runs through your body and shows every spot where the cancer resides. On a computer screen Dr. Habermann showed me an image of my body before the drug treatment and another image from the PET scan. The Rituximab was working. My body had reacted well. That was great news. But it wasn’t going to change my mind. I told myself before we went to Minnesota that my decision was never going to hinge on the results of that test. The scan wasn’t going to impact my decision. This decision was about stress and time—not test results.
We hadn’t been home 24 hours when I told Missy my final decision.
“I don’t know how much time I have with you,” I said. “I might have 20 years. I might have four. Do I want to spend those years being gone all the time coaching and recruiting?”
Missy understood, but she didn’t want me to regret any sudden decisions. She challenged me. I was 10 wins away from 200 for my career. She wanted to make sure I was absolutely sure I was ready to quit coaching. She didn’t want me to walk away and by February start kicking myself.
I had so much more life ahead of me, but I didn’t want to spend those years on a field away from family.
Money was never a factor in my decision. Coaching was never about money for me.
But I had just signed a new contract in the spring, and by retiring I would pass on a lot of guaranteed money. My new deal paid me more than $4 million a year—and I had six years left on my contract. I had my closest friends question me, “Are you sure you want to give up a $24 million contract?” My mind was made up. The money didn’t matter.
On Wednesday of that week, October 28, I scheduled a meeting to talk to Mack Rhoades, our athletic director. I needed to tell him my decision. I had told him about my diagnosis back in the spring, but he was surprised by my latest decision. “Gary,” he said, “since I’ve known you I know you’re not the kind of person I can talk out of this. But are you sure you really want to do this? Is there anything I can say to make you stay?”
I went through all the reasons, none of which had anything to do with our record through eight games. We were 4–4 and I expected to get to a bowl game. We could have been 8–0. I had already made up my mind.
“The reason I’m telling you today and not three weeks from now is I want you to have some time to work on hiring my replacement,” I said.
I didn’t want to surprise him at the end of the season and push back the hiring process any longer. I didn’t want to wait until the first of December, after the Arkansas game, and say, “Oh, by the way, I’m leaving.” I couldn’t do that to him. I had worked too hard at Missouri. We had worked too hard. He would need time to find the right candidate, and the next coach needed significant time to recruit based on the circumstances. I was concerned about the program having every opportunity to continue successfully.
I planned to tell my staff and the players either the Sunday before our final home game against Tennessee or the following Sunday, before our final game at Arkansas.
It was incredibly important that I tell my players and coaches on my terms.
That’s why I told Mack I wanted to keep my plans confidential. Mack had to tell our chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. The chancellor would probably have to tell the university system president. They would also have to tell the university board of curators. If Mack had to start looking for a new head coach, they needed to be aware that he was about to launch a search. Also, I hoped I could work out some kind of position with the university once I retired. I loved Mizzou and wanted fans and players to know I would still be on hand to help with fundraising and facilities. To begin those conversations, the curators had to be aware of my retirement plan. They were professionals. I could trust my decision would stay confidential. Or so I thought.