Jimmy v what type cancer

The accolade is given to a sports figure who "has overcome great obstacles through perseverance and determination" — just as Jimmy once did. On the court, Jimmy's career soared as the season basketball coach of North Carolina State. In , he led his underdog team to the national championship and won Cinderella style against the Houston Cougars. There, he befriended Dick Vitale , and together they became an iconic broadcasting duo in the sports world.

Then, in at the age of 46, Jimmy was diagnosed with metastatic adenocarcinoma , a glandular cancer a type of glandular that spread to the bones. After getting the news, Dick remembers Jimmy telling him that he was going to "fight and battle this thing" before it "knocked him out. Months later, he was down 35 pounds and was taking 24 tablets of Advil to get through the day, according to Sports Illustrated.

Realizing how sick he was, the ESPY production team considered letting Jimmy sit from his chair and deliver remarks so he wouldn't have to get up on stage at all. That hiring would change the course of program history.

They made it all the way to the championship game, where they pulled off an iconic upset. To this day, college basketball fans remember Valvano running around the court, desperately looking for someone to hug in celebration.

In , however, everything would change. Valvano was diagnosed with metastatic adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. Sports analyst Bob Valvano has been diagnosed with leukemia, he announced on social media Monday. The former college basketball coach, and brother of late North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano, also shared he has an aortic aneurysm and kidney damage. Bob, 64, said he doesn't know "when or if I need treatment for leukemia" but that his doctor said his prognosis is "good.

He has coached five different college basketball programs, his first at Louisville's Bellarmine University in Twenty-four tablets of Advil were usually enough to get him through the day. He braced himself. No doubt someone would approach him this evening, pump his hand and say it. Strangers were always writing it or saying it to him:!

You can do it. Nobody thought you had a prayer against Houston in that national championship game in '83, and you pulled that off, right? Keep fighting, Vee. You can do it again. Not in the same breath. Not in the same sentence, not in the same paragraph, not in the same magazine or book could the two be uttered: a basketball opponent and a cancer eating its way through the marrow and bone of his spine. A basketball opponent and death.

In their fear of dying, people didn't make it larger than it was. They shrank it, they trivialized it. Vee versus metastatic adenocarcinoma. Vee versus Phi Slamma Jamma. Go get 'em, baby.

Shock the world, Vee. No correlation, baby, he longed to tell them sometimes. The cameras, the reporters, the microphones awaited him inside the Civic Center in Tallahassee. A brand-new season. Iowa State at Florida State, year-old Jimmy Valvano's first game back as an ESPN college basketball analyst since he had learned last summer that he most likely had a year to live.

He tried to quicken his pace. His left leg wouldn't let him. Four or five times each day he dabbed his finger in the holy water and made the sign of the cross on his forehead, his chest, his back, his hips and his knees.

Then he poured a little more into his palm and rubbed the water deep into his hands and feet. When he was coach at North Carolina State, Vee used to pause at this point, just as he entered the arena. Having delivered his pregame talk, he would leave the locker room on the lower level of Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, mount the steps that led to the court, and stand on the top one, still unseen by the crowd. For a moment he would not be an actor at the heart of the drama.

He would be a spectator absorbing the immensity, the feeling of it all—the band blaring fight songs, the crowd roaring, the cheerleaders tumbling through the air, the players taking turns gliding to the glass for layups. And he would think, God, I am lucky. What do other people do when they go to work? Go to an office, sit at a desk? I get this! Yes, here was Vee's gift, the gift of the select, to be in the swirl and at the very same moment above it, gazing down, assessing it, drinking in all of its absurdity and wonder.

It enabled him to be the funniest man and most fascinating postgame lounge act in sports; it enabled him to survive the scandal at North Carolina State that stripped him of his reputation and his job. Even during his most harrowing moments, part of Vee was always saying, ''God, in a year this is going to make a great story. Even in the darkness after he had been forced to resign, he looked down at himself lying in bed and thought, Boy, that poor son of a bitch, he's really taking a pounding.

But he'll be back. Give him time. He'll be fine. That was what cancer had stolen. The fear and the pain and the grief swallowed a man, robbed him of detachment, riveted him to himself.

It flooded through him when he walked onto a basketball court—the jump shots with crumpled paper cups he took as a little boy after every high school game his dad coached, the million three-man weaves, all the sweat and the squeaks and the passion so white-hot that twice during his career he had rocketed off the bench to scream He wore Wolfpack red underwear just in case, but it didn't really matter.

A guy could walk around in his underwear at home; Vee was at home. Maybe here, for two hours tonight, he could forget. He looked up and saw a man striding toward him. Kennedy leaned toward Vee's ear and opened his mouth to speak. Those who had been in a bar at 1 a. You weren't listening! Vee was a man with an electric cable crackling through his body; he might walk a couple of dozen laps around an arena after a big win to let off a little hiss, or wander the streets of a city until dawn after a loss.

He was the kind of guy you wanted to cook dinner for or show your new house to, because that would make it the alltime greatest dinner, the alltime best house, terrific, absolutely terrific—and Vee meant it. And now Kennedy's mouth was opening just a few inches from Vee's ear, and there were a thousand thoughts and feelings scratching at each other to get out—''Every day with you was an exciting day.

Every day you had 10 new ideas. Every day you left me with a smile on my face, saying, 'Boy, that Valvano's something else. Certain people give life to other people. You did that for me''—but no words would come out of Kennedy's mouth. Instead he just kissed Vee. This was what Valvano missed most after his coaching career ended in April Nobody kissed a TV analyst, nobody hugged him, nobody cried on his shoulder. The directors would look back as they strolled to their offices after introducing him, and they would see a guy in a floppy Beatle haircut pulling a white rat—a real white rat, gutted and stuffed by a taxidermist and mounted on a skateboard—toward the microphone and roaring to the kids, ''What kind of a greeting is that?

Look how you're sitting! I come all the way here and what do I get? A coupla hundred crotch shots? I'm supposed to stand up here and give a good speech staring at a coupla hundred sets of jewels? Whadda we have here, a bunch of big-timers? I want rats! Let's try it again. You only get out of life what you demand! I'm gonna come to the microphone all over again, and this time I want a standing O, and once I get it you can bet I'm going to give you the best damn speech I possibly can!

Look back a few minutes later and see them crying. Look again and see them carrying Valvano from basket to basket to cut down the nets and chanting,''VEE! He didn't recruit kids to his college program; he swept them there.

He walked into a prospect's home, and 15 minutes later he had rearranged the - living-room furniture to demonstrate a defense, had Mom overplaying the easy chair, Dad on the lamp, Junior and his sister trapping the coffee table.

Where the hell else was the kid going to go to school? In the 30 games Vee coached each season, the speeches he eventually gave each year, the objective was the same: to make people leap, make them laugh, make them cry, make them dream, to move people.

And then one day last spring he was playing golf on a course in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean in the north of Spain. He had weathered the scandal at N. He had won an ACE for excellence in cable-television sports analysis. He had time, finally, for long dinners with his wife, for poetry readings and movies with his , and year-old daughters. He had an assignment to do sideline commentary on a World League football game in Barcelona; he had a tee time on the course just north of the city.

That's how death comes. A pang in the crotch when a man's standing in the sun gazing across the green hills and the bluest goddam sea in the world, deciding between a three-wood and an iron. He laughed at all the inevitable aching-testicle jokes; the doctor was almost sure it was just an infection or perhaps referred pain from the lower backache Vee had been feeling.

He was still laughing while in the MRI tube last June at Duke University hospital, joking through the intercom with the nurses about the heavy-metal music they were pumping into his headphones as they scanned his spine to see if he had damaged a disk, when the radiologist glanced at the image appearing on his screen, and suddenly the laughter stopped and the nurses fell silent.

And the dread, the sick dread began to spread through his stomach as the radiologist quietly said, ''Come with me, Coach. Now look at yours. The vertebrae in his were black where the others were white. And the dread went up Vee's chest, wrapped around his ribs and his throat, but he squeezed out another joke: ''You forgot to use the flash.

No laughter. Coach, I'm 90 percent sure this is cancer. Vee walked into the waiting room and told his wife, Pam, and they held each other and cried and drove home, where his oldest daughter, Nicole, was helping his middle daughter, Jamie, with a Music class project. They were banging on a piano key, beating a wooden spoon against a pot, a pencil against a wine bottle and two candlesticks against each other when the door opened and their dad said, ''I've got cancer.

I'm going to die I don't want to die I'm sorry I'm sorry. Ronald C. It was still incomprehensible five months later. His sockets were a little deeper, his olive skin wrapped a little more tightly around his skull, but the 35 pounds he had lost made his body seem fit, trim. His hair, against all medical logic, had survived massive chemotherapy. He lived in a land where people vanished when they became terminally ill.

Most people who saw him walking through airports, stepping in front of cameras and cracking jokes about his plummeting weight ''Hey, I'm the quickest analyst in the country now—there's not an announcer who can go around me! It was not. What could he say? The crowd at the Civic Center caught sight of him now.