As Time Runs Out

Get up! Yell! Fight! Punch! He tried. He refused to put on the gown when he checked into the hospital every sixth week for massive doses of chemotherapy. He refused to take the prescription pain pills. He talked to God out loud. He marched into the salon and ordered them to buzz off all of his hair—he would take it off, not the chemotherapy. The same way, in the last minute of a tie game when the other team had the ball, he flouted convention and ordered his players to foul and risk handing the opponents the game-winning free throw—Vee wanted the rock at the end, Vee wanted the last shot. He refused to sit there, cringing on defense, waiting for fate to happen to him.

But the joke was on him. The hair grew right back and never fell out. Every tactic in this new war came back at him turned upside down. Every stoking of his fever to live increased his horror of death. And he would remember that astonishing flood of emotional letters that dying people had written to him after N.C. State had shocked Houston nine years earlier, people thanking him for giving them a reason not to give up, and he would sit there, shaking his head. Could he explain all that during the next timeout? Could he let everyone know that he only had to see his three daughters walk in the house in order to cry now, that a TV commercial showing a dad accepting a bowl of cereal from his little girl, hugging her and saying, "I must be pretty special for you to bring me bran flakes," brings tears to his eyes because they're just so goddam happy and lucky?

Iowa State guard Justus Thigpen's jump shot was descending a good foot in front of the rim, a fine opportunity for Vee to say, as he had with a slow, stupefied shake of his head two days earlier at home, "Justus Thigpen! Can you believe it? Who knows how much time I have left, and I've been sitting here poring over Justus Thigpen's stats in the Iowa State basketball brochure. I'm sitting here reading, and I quote, that 'Justus Thigpen was twice selected Big Eight Player of the Week' and that 'he scored 11 points at Kansas and 17 points in ISU's overtime win on ESPN versus Colorado.' What the hell am I doing? The triviality of it just clobbers me. You get this sick and you say to yourself, 'Sports means nothing,' and that feels terrible. God, I devoted my whole life to it."

He might say that to a million and a half people. He could say that. He was a man who converted feelings to thoughts and thoughts to words with stunning ease—solid to liquid, liquid to gas; it was beautiful and terrible, both. Sometimes he would look at his daughters or his wife and say, "God...I'm going to miss you," and it would rip their hearts in half. What were the rules after you had dragged out of the doctor the fact that only a few patients with metastatic adenocarcinoma diagnosed in its late stages, like Vee's, lived more than two years, and most were gone within a year? Did you tell the people you loved all the things that were banging at the walls of your heart, or did you keep them locked inside to save your family the agony of hearing them? Nobody taught you how to do this; what were the rules?

Maybe it was time now for the TV camera to focus on his hands, the left one balled and the right one wrapped around it, desperately trying to squeeze some feeling into it as Bob Sura zinged in a 21-footer and Florida State's lead swelled to 50-31. Perhaps Vee should tell all the viewers and listeners, even if it wasn't what they had tuned in to hear: "I'm being deprived of my senses. I can hardly taste food anymore. I can't hear. I can't feel. My wife will have to button my shirt soon because I won't be able to feel the buttons between my fingers. It's got my feet and my hands and my ears...but it doesn't have my mind and my heart and my soul. And it's not going to. I'm going to fight this as long as I can. I'm going to keep doing what I love.

"I'm going to have to miss some games because of chemotherapy. I don't think you're going to see John Saunders in the studio saying, 'Live! From room 401 at Duke University Hospital, it's Jimmy Valvano!' because I'm going to be at the sink throwing up. I don't want to be wheeled to the microphone to do games, but I will. I'll keep doing this until my mouth doesn't work, until my brain doesn't function."

Maybe he should tell them what he does some days at home in Cary, N.C., how he removes his shoes and walks barefoot in the grass. Just to feel. How he puts his hands around the trunks of the pine trees and closes his eyes. Just to feel.

Here was a story he could tell. Goddam it, the Seminoles were up by 21 at halftime, let him tell it. It was the one about a 23-year-old coach at Johns Hopkins University who was on a bus ride home from Gettysburg, Pa., with his players, exuberant over his squad's 3-0 start. A 23-year-old coach who had plotted his life on an index card: five years, high school head coach. Five years, small-college head coach. Five years, university assistant coach. Five years, small-university head coach. Ten years, big-time university head coach. A 23-year-old who didn't know he was going to compress the first 20 years of the plan into 13, who didn't realize he was going to have his dream, live his Pocono camp speech, cut the NCAA title nets at 37...who didn't know his life might already be half over. His players called him to the back of the bus. "Why is winning so important to you?" they asked. "We've never seen anything like it. You're irrational."

"Because the final score defines you," he said. "You lose; ergo, you're a loser. You win; ergo, you're a winner."

"No," the players insisted. "The participation is what matters, the constancy of effort. Trying your very best, regardless of whether you win or lose—that's what defines you."