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A story like Chris Lofton can mess a man up. Mess up a woman, too. Mess up any of us who like to watch sports and talk about sports and have strong opinions about the things we've seen.
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| People were wondering what was wrong with Chris Lofton. Makes sense now. (Getty Images) |
As a junior, he'd been one of the best players in college basketball. Lofton averaged 21 points per game, hit nearly half his shots and scared the fool out of opposing teams.
And then this past season he was bad. His scoring dropped to 15 ppg. He hit less than 40 percent of his shots. He scared the fool out of his own fans. Made a few of them angry, too. Message boards devoted entire threads to Chris Lofton, as in, What's wrong with Chris Lofton? I followed Lofton's story from afar, watched him play in person, and more than once considered writing my opinion, which was this:
All of a sudden, Chris Lofton isn't very good.
Never wrote it. Just didn't get around to it. And thank God for that.
Because Chris Lofton had testicular cancer.
He didn't tell us. He barely told anybody. About the only people who knew were his parents, his head coach and his roommate, Jordan Howell. Other than Howell, none of his teammates knew Lofton had undergone surgery less than a week after the Volunteers' Sweet 16 loss to Ohio State in 2007 to have a cancerous tumor removed from one of his testicles. None of them knew Lofton had prepared for the 2007-08 season by undergoing two months of radiation therapy. Or that he had spent days in bed because of the nausea and pain.
Lofton entered the 2007-08 season with a different body. He was smaller, less explosive. He seemed lethargic. He wasn't the same shooter, either. He had bombed during tryouts for the USA Basketball Pan-American Games team, failing to make it out of the first round, and nobody could understand why.
Now we get it.
Chris Lofton wasn't unimpressive. He wasn't bad. He was beating cancer, as he revealed recently.
That's one hell of a revelation, the kind of revelation that will stop you in your opinionated tracks. Let's say you're a sports writer, although you don't have to be one to play this game. Maybe you're a sports fan who calls radio shows, or posts messages on the Internet, or does anything to advance the public flaying of an underperforming athlete. A revelation like Chris Lofton's -- he was playing with testicular cancer -- should make you delay before you filet.
It's not just Chris Lofton. It would be easier if his were an isolated story, but it's not. On the same day that Lofton was revealing his struggles with cancer, Denver Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler was confirming his recent discovery that he has Type 1 diabetes, the most severe form of the irregular blood-sugar syndrome.
