#Dick Vitale won’t let cancer win this fight

Dick Vitale invites you to sit ringside for this heavyweight bout, on his dime, because he knows it is going to be a doozy. He posts pictures with the men and women working his corner — the doctors, nurses, and priests charged to help him — because he wants people to see that nobody beats cancer alone, not even one of the most indomitable forces in American sports.

No matter what you saw and heard on TV all these years, Vitale was never merely your eccentric uncle who clowned and carnival barked his way to fortune and fame. Richie from Jersey might not have had Hollywood looks or Harvard brains, but he could impose his will on almost anything, including cancer, which he has battled for decades on behalf of so many sick and defenseless kids.

Vitale picked a fight with the disease, raising millions upon millions for pediatric centers, and it was inevitable the disease would punch back. Now he is an 82-year-old lymphoma patient, in the middle of a six-month cycle of chemotherapy and steroid treatments. He’s scheduled to spend Christmas with his family in the Bahamas before returning to his Lakewood Ranch, Fla., home and his Sarasota hospital for his next chemo appointment. His goals are to live at least another seven years to see all of his five grandchildren graduate from college, and then to live another 11 years on top of that so he can broadcast an ESPN game at age 100.

Bet against him at your own peril.

‘Biggest Hurt of My Life’

The grandson of Italian immigrants, Richie from Jersey is one of the toughest guys from one of the toughest states. His parents had fifth-grade educations, but Richie said they had doctorates in love and a deep devotion to an honest day’s work. His father, John, pressed coats in a factory and worked security in a mall, and after his mother, Mae, a seamstress, suffered a stroke, John brought home garments that his wife sewed in their cellar.

Mae set an example for her three kids by dragging her stroke-diminished leg on daily walks to church. She told Richie to ignore those in town who made fun of his blind left eye, which had drifted all over the place since he accidentally pierced it with a pencil as a boy. Richie was ashamed of how that eye made him look, but his mother assured him he had the heart to be whatever he wanted to be.

He attended Seton Hall and taught middle school in blue-collar Garfield and took over whatever local team needed a coach. Vitale and friend Bob Stolarz assembled a group of eighth-grade football players, practiced for eight days and then beat the Garfield High freshmen when one of Richie’s boys returned an interception 75 yards for a score. “We became heroes in town,” Stolarz recalled. Richie coached a state-title team of teenage baseball players sponsored by a Garfield tire company, Benignos, the same extended family that produced WFAN host Joe. Vitale once ran out of pitchers at a tournament in Pennsylvania and had Stolarz give a kid from Nutley $10 in gas money to drive west and throw a two-hitter.

Richie hustled his way into a high school head-coaching job at East Rutherford and put that town on the map five years before Giants Stadium opened and made it an international dateline. He won a second straight state championship in 1971, when his 6-foot-10 center, Les Cason, the nation’s top-ranked player, blocked a shot in the final seconds at Princeton, down one to Gloucester City, and started a fast break finished by a winning Dwight Hall layup that gave the Wildcats a 28-0 season for the ages. “The locker room was a madhouse,” recalled Hall. “Coach Vitale was jumping up and down.” Richie ended up on a fire truck in the day-after parade.

His superstar, Cason, was a Kevin Durant-type player before his time, a big man with a handle and a jump shot. Jerry Tarkanian signed him to play for Long Beach State, but the kid was an academic mess and already adrift with a partying crowd. Vitale had his own demons — bleeding ulcers that reportedly required him to keep a carton of milk next to him on the bench, and an all-consuming pursuit of success that cost him his first marriage — but his teams responded to his approach. “Coach Vitale was the same persona in high school that he is now,” Hall said. “Great motivator. He was going 100 miles per hour.”

Cason would say many years later that his coach sat him down one day in the bleachers and told him, “Leslie, I’m going to make it with or without you. You’re not going to make it if you don’t change.” Even Tark couldn’t get his recruit eligible at Long Beach. Cason played juco ball at San Jacinto in Texas before Vitale, then a Rutgers assistant, helped land him a spot at the state university. Cason averaged 4.9 points per game in 27 appearances, then dropped out of school and — after flunking an ABA tryout set up by Vitale — dropped out of sight.

He would live a New York City life of homelessness, drug addiction and jail time for dealing cocaine in Washington Square Park. Vitale would try to intervene, try to meet with his former center, try to send him money through an intermediary, all to no avail. Before he died of complications from AIDS in 1997, at age 43, Cason said his high school coach “did everything he could for me.” Cason’s best friend, Hall, confirmed that nobody could have done more than Coach Vitale did to try to help someone who wouldn’t be helped.

Long after Richie became Dick, and then a wildly successful University of Detroit coach, he remained haunted by his failure to reach his greatest player. “What happened to Leslie,” Vitale would say, “is the biggest hurt in my life.”

But just as he’d promised Cason, Vitale made it to the big time — the NBA and Madison Square Garden — in the late 1970s. He coached the Detroit Pistons against the Knicks, and at the time Vitale was making a hundred grand a year, driving a team-issued blue Cadillac and wearing thick glasses and bright and ugly plaid slacks. His family was in the Garden crowd that night in 1979 when his Pistons gave back 17 points of their 18-point lead. The Knicks’ Toby Knight stole the inbounds pass and dunked the winner home with two seconds left. Outside the Detroit locker room, Vitale twice slammed his hand against the wall. “This is the 17th game we’ve lost in the last three minutes,” he told The New York Times. “I’ve earned the salary of my three-year contract already.”

He was fired a dozen games into his second season by Pistons owner Bill Davidson, who pulled up to his home in a limo and blitzed him with the news. Vitale cried. Like in high school and college ball, he had been a manic sideline presence who couldn’t sleep after defeats. “Nobody knows the pain and suffering that losing brings me,” he said then.

A TV executive who had been impressed with Vitale’s personality would call and ask him to be a color man for a new cable operation called ESPN. His dear second wife, Lorraine, talked him into it, and on Dec. 5, 1979, Vitale made a few hundred bucks broadcasting DePaul-Wisconsin. He had no idea what the hell he was doing, and it didn’t matter. The same personality that covered for his shortcomings became his weapon of mass-media destruction.

A Familiar Fight

When I was a teenager, Vin Scully did not make me fall in love with major league baseball. Howard Cosell did not make me fall in love with pro football.

Dick Vitale made me fall in love with college basketball. No sport has ever needed an over-caffeinated advocate more than college hoops needed him.

He called my home one bygone day to complain about something I wrote, and when my wife answered and he excitedly started to identify himself, Tracey cut him off. “Yeah, I know who you are,” she said. Everyone knew Dick Vitale’s voice. He hated being criticized, and loved to be loved. That’s why his high school yearbook described him as “everybody’s buddy.” He would spend his adult life sending friends and relative strangers signed books and basketballs, inviting them to games and leaving them phone messages for their birthdays and bar mitzvahs.

You know how things played out for him over four decades-plus in TV. Though many older people like to hang around college students to feel young, college students like to hang around Vitale to feel younger. They clamor for his autograph, chant his name, shout his most popular Dickie V-isms and bodysurf him through their crowds. They believe he is Awesome, baby, and never with a lower-case ‘a’. He became a world-famous commercial pitchman for products from A to Z, and he’s even more synonymous with the game than Coach K.

“But he never forgot us,” said Stolarz, his old Garfield and East Rutherford assistant. “He kept us with him all these years,” confirmed Hall, his point guard on those state title teams. The Wildcats still message with him and occasionally visit with him. Basketball brotherhoods die hard.

But Vitale’s legacy is not defined by the game, or even by his Hall-of-Fame run at ESPN. It’s defined by the war he’s waged against cancer since the 1993 death of his former colleague, Jim Valvano, as a board member of The V Foundation hoping to raise $7 million at his annual Sarasota gala for children in May to put his event total at more than $50 million raised for pediatric cancer research.

Vitale has prayed at the bedsides of these children, and danced at celebrations for their recoveries, and wept at their memorial services. He was there for a boy who endured 1,200 doses of chemo, and for another who survived four bouts with brain cancer, and now those children are redirecting the love back to Vitale, sending him messages of hope. “They inspire me big time,” he said.

Vitale truly understands their struggle now. Two months after being treated for melanoma, he was originally told he had bile duct cancer before he got a lucky bounce with a less ominous diagnosis of lymphoma. Vitale posted a video saying he was overwhelmed by the tidal wave of support. “I’m going to win this battle,” he pledged. “Take that to the bank.”

He made it back in November to call UCLA-Gonzaga in Vegas, where he broke down after partner Dave O’Brien introduced the man who needs no introduction. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here,” Vitale said. “This is a really big thrill for me.”

Working the Villanova-Baylor game on Dec. 12, Vitale sobbed after the Baylor crowd gave him a standing O. Doctors had cleared him to work Louisville-Kentucky on Wednesday before that game was wiped out by positive COVID-19 tests at Louisville, giving Vitale an extended break until Auburn-Alabama on Jan. 11. That might be a good thing. Vitale was treated recently for heavy inflammation and hemorrhaging in his vocal cords, and doctors wanted him to rest his one-of-a-kind voice. But one way or another, he will be in Durham, N.C., on Jan. 14 to watch his twin grandsons Connor and Jake Krug play tennis for Duke, and then to call the Blue Devils’ basketball game against N.C. State the following day.

Life is still so, so good. His daughters, Terri and Sherri, and their families live five minutes away, and everyone made it to Maui last July to celebrate Dick and Lorraine’s 50th wedding anniversary. Vitale lives in a Florida mansion and has a playground in East Rutherford and a college court in Detroit named in his honor. “Not bad for a one-eyed, bald-headed guy from North Jersey,” he said.

Now doctors are trying to make Vitale cancer-free before his next gala in the spring. He will pray to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, because that was the prayer card his mother gave him as a boy, the card he forever kept in his back pocket. Never mind that Richie Vitale has been everything but a lost cause.

He’s been the long-reigning people’s champ, and it’s a beautiful thing to see all those he rallied around now rallying around him, lifting him, making him stronger, letting him know they won’t let him fight this fight alone.

So Richie from Jersey, tough guy from a tough state, will not be beaten. In fact, it’s going to be a blowout. Cancer is completely overmatched this Christmas.

Time to warm up the bus, baby.