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Doing The Right Thing The Bills' Chris Spielman has taken the season off to care for his ailing wifeBy Peter King
"Maddy," Chris says, "you had that book at breakfast, right?" "Right," she says, "but then I took it upstairs." "All right," he says, "it'll be up there then." Maddy finds it upstairs. Crisis averted. This is Chris's year to find the dog book and to go to Maddy's nursery-school Thanksgiving feast and to try to wean two-year-old son Noah off Lucky Charms and to give him his bath every night -- and to take Stefanie to chemotherapy every other Tuesday. There wasn't much discussion in July when Stefanie, 31, had to have her right breast and 28 lymph nodes removed, and Chris, a four-time Pro Bowl linebacker, said he was taking the year off from the Buffalo Bills to care for her and the family. Although Chris hasn't spent a second regretting his decision, he has been racked with doubts about his football future and a severe case of Missing Football Blues, all the while feeling guilty that he's even thinking about football with Stefanie in the fight of her life. But the man with the Butkus intensity can't help it. At his home in the tony Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington, four miles from the Ohio State campus where he starred a decade ago, Spielman can't bear to watch an entire NFL game. Plays and highlights have to suffice. When he takes Maddy and Noah to the park, he sometimes steers his pickup to a midget league or junior high football practice. An Indian summer has only made things worse, because every day that the temperature is in the 50s is another fall day he misses the game. "You can smell football," Spielman said in his kitchen one afternoon last week, alternately pacing and tidying. "You go outside, and there's a feel of football I'm so used to. A smell. The leaves, the air, the wind. It's so familiar. I don't know what it's like in Florida or California, but I know how football smells in the Midwest, and when I go out, all I smell and feel is football." In November 1997 Spielman had career-threatening surgery to repair a herniated disk that was pressing dangerously close to his spinal cord. But he rehabbed well, and by last spring the Bills were cautiously counting on him as the run-stuffing left inside linebacker in their 3-4 defense. It was shaping up to be a glorious year for the Spielmans because Stefanie was pregnant. However, in April she miscarried. A self-exam soon after confirmed what she'd felt during the pregnancy, a lemon-sized lump on the right side of her right breast. Tests confirmed one large precancerous tumor and a smaller malignant one near the chest wall; two lymph nodes had pea-sized malignancies. On July 15 she underwent surgery. Doctors prescribed five months of aggressive chemotherapy. One late July day Chris walked into the kitchen and told Stefanie, "I've thought about this, and it's the only way. I'm taking the year off from football to deal with this." "What?" she said. "You're crazy! Don't even say that." Her tears of protest didn't change his mind. She blamed herself. "It's not your fault," Chris said. "It's cancer's fault." Now, sitting at the kitchen table, Stefanie takes off the brown corduroy hat she often wears in public. She's not ashamed of the baldness caused by chemotherapy. "I knew he was a great person," she says. "I knew we had a strong marriage. But for what he did for me and our family, I can never repay him. I just hope he never looks back at this year and regrets it." "Never," he says firmly. He needed only a day to reach his decision. "I would have considered myself a fraud if I didn't do this," he says. "Lots of guys would have done the same thing. I'm just blessed because we have the money to do it." What has the season away from football taught him? "Homemaking is difficult," Chris says. "Before I never cared if the kitchen was clean. Now I clean it three times a day. I've learned how important mothering is. Women are the only people who can do it perfectly. I've gained so much respect for mothers, and I've learned patience. Real patience. You sit here waiting for a biopsy report after your wife has had a mastectomy, wishing it was you who had the cancer. You need patience for that." Stefanie writes in a journal every day, and some of her entries sound like a cross between Norman Vincent Peale and Chris Spielman. July 11: "Now is the time to suck it up and follow the path put before me." July 19: "I will beat this thing. I have to. Maddy and Noah are so much motivation. I will do anything for them. Chris too. I need him so much it's not even funny." He has needed her too. When he remarked one day how the family seemed snakebit, with the neck injury and the miscarriage and the cancer, she fired back, "How can you say that, with all the blessings this family has?" She has raised $237,000 for breast-cancer research at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Research Institute in Columbus, and her story has become the centerpiece of a drive to have women do self-examinations and have mammograms. One woman called a Columbus TV station to say she wouldn't have done a self-exam had it not been for Stefanie's story. She found a lump and had it removed. "Sometimes," Stefanie says, "it's hard to believe this is my life and not a nightmare. But I've learned a lot from the way Chris approaches football. He's taught me strength and discipline and motivation." His shoulders have been strong too. In August, a couple of days after Stefanie bought a pricey wig, a hairdresser came to the house to shave her head. Stefanie wondered where Chris was, because he had promised to be there for the trimming. He arrived late in her shearing with a bald head of his own, nicked and cut. He had shaved himself. She cried. She has never worn the wig. He says jokingly, "That was a great investment." "Men go bald all the time," she says. "Why should I try to look like someone I'm not? I'm sick." Chris's voice goes soft. He looks at the tiled floor. "I'm glad you don't wear it," he says. On Sundays, when Stefanie is up to it, the Spielmans go to church. Fortunately, that has been most Sundays. During Mass, Chris's mind wanders to the football field. When they get home, Chris turns on a game in the family room -- the Columbus CBS affiliate has tortured its viewers with the Cincinnati Bengals all fall -- and walks by it, never sitting for any length of time. "I might go for a walk or take a drive or watch a movie or run errands," he says. "I can watch a college game, I guess because I know I'm done with that. But I can't watch an NFL game. It's too hard." Even with the Bills in the thick of the AFC playoff race, it was too hard to travel down I-71 to watch his teammates beat the Bengals in Cincinnati on Sunday. He hardly knows Doug Flutie, so it's strange for him to watch the highlights of Flutie's transforming the Bills back into a playoff contender. "It's a strange, no-win situation," Spielman says. "When they win, I'm really happy for them, but I also feel, Well, they don't need me anymore. When they lose, I wish I could have been there to do something to help." Doctors have told the Spielmans they believe Stefanie's cancer was caught in time. Chris wants badly to continue his career next season. But will he do it in Buffalo? A friend says Spielman was angered to hear that the man playing his position, inside linebacker John Holecek, signed a five-year, $12 million contract extension in October. Spielman says he's happy for Holecek and doesn't blame the Bills for ensuring their future. "But when I come back," he says, "Holecek is going to have to move. That's my position." Spielman is working out three hours a morning, five days a week under Ohio State strength coach Dave Kennedy -- his mother and mother-in-law help with the kids while he's exercising -- and he says he's certain he can return as a starter in 1999. He's so certain that he keeps a calendar counting down the days to training camp. Still, last Thursday he called Bills owner Ralph Wilson and asked where he stood. "I told Chris to forget the rumors he's hearing," Wilson says. "I want him back. We want him back." But as a starter, at age 33, after taking a year off? Spielman is pacing again. He stops to fix his questioner with the same stare he has beamed at the likes of Brett Favre and Steve Young for the last decade. "My neck is healed," he says, "and some linebackers -- Hardy Nickerson, Kevin Greene, Jessie Tuggle -- are playing great in their 30s. When Stefanie beats this cancer, whatever hunger and passion I had as a player, multiply that times three. That's what I will bring back to the NFL." "I would have considered myself a fraud if I didn't do this," Spielman says of taking the season off. Issue date: December 14, 1998
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