“I spent time with Jerry Barca, talking in-depth about that terrific 1988 season and my time as a coach at Notre Dame.  He captures all the hard work and excitement of that thrilling championship season in Unbeatable.  This book also does a terrific job detailing the characters and the occasions that made our run to a national championship possible.”

            -Coach Lou Holtz

“For all of us on the team that season, 1988 was a special year.  Jerry Barca does a terrific job recreating the excitement and emotions that were part of that experience.  The run to the national championship – and all the work we put into it – is truly brought to life in this book.”

-Tony Rice, Notre Dame quarterback

“In 1988, Notre Dame had one of the greatest seasons in college football history and Unbeatable captures all of it.  Jerry Barca has crafted a story that takes you from a downtrodden Fighting Irish program to its rebirth and crowning achievement.  You can’t help but come away inspired by the masterful coaching and motivational style of Lou Holtz and entertained by the insider details of how a disparate group of characters came together to win a championship.”

-Verne Lundquist, CBS Sports

“An enduring team deserves a timeless story, and that’s what’s delivered in Unbeatable.  Jerry Barca takes you inside the locker room, the dorm room, and the mind of Lou Holtz for a rich portrayal of one of college football’s most memorable champions.”

-Peter Thamel, Sports Illustrated

- By Jerry Barca -

Elias rests under the gentle touch of his aunt.

Elias Stevens sat on his couch, mouth open, Mountain Dew can in hand and cartoons on the TV.

Wearing blue latex gloves, his mother pressed an oversized plastic syringe that sent drops of chemotherapy into the 11-year-old Port Reading boy’s mouth.

“This tastes disgusting,” he said after making a bitter face and gulping some soda.

Two weeks earlier, doctors told Elias the cancer in his body had spread and the disease was going to kill him.

But Elias refused to give in. He fought the disease. He went back to school. He avoided the hospital. He prayed.

“He had the courage to keep trying and trying. He was a person who tried and didn’t give up,” said his mother Teresa Stevens-Hamilton.

Elias was diagnosed with osteosarcoma — bone cancer — 2 1/2 years ago. Doctors said the aggressive tumor above his right knee resisted treatment. Initial chemotherapy led to a monthlong medically induced coma from which doctors said he should never have awakened. He did.

Cancer took his right hip, thigh bone and knee. But for four months last year, Elias was disease-free. Last July, five cancerous nodules appeared on his lungs.

His primary oncologist, April Sorrell, said six months is the normal life span of a child with a similar remission and relapse. Elias lived for 11 months.

“His will to live, his faith, his spirit, increased his life span and quality of life. There’s no doubt in my mind about that,” the doctor said last week.

Elias continued to fight his battle during his final days. Even though a tube fed oxygen into his nostrils, he still wanted to go to physical therapy — where he had cried, sweated and worked to walk again.

Up until his last day, he refused to have morphine through IV tubes because, he told medical staff, he did not want to sleep his life away.

The fight ended at 4:40 a.m. on June 9; about a half-hour after Teresa spoke her final words to her firstborn.

**********

Elias Stevens wanted to avoid surgery, but he trusted the medical staff at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick.

When hospital staff told him it would be a good idea to insert a port under the skin in his chest Elias allowed it.

With the port he could avoid needles when blood had to be drawn. Chemotherapy and pain medication could be fed into the port and head straight into a main artery of his heart.

Elias went home on the day of the surgery, which took place during the first week in May.

“I guess, I’m feeling pretty good,” he said. “No better, no worse. I’ll feel better eventually.”

Elias’ little brother and sister, 8-year-old Al Hamilton and 5-year-old Destyni Hamilton, did not know the cancer had come back.

Elias told Al one night before the brothers went to sleep in their adjoining beds in the room they shared.

Al blamed himself. He said the cancer came back because he kicked Elias in the leg years ago. Al started to cry. Elias called his mother into the room. She read the Bible and they all prayed.

Al decided to go back to school two days after Elias’ funeral.

He said he thinks about Elias all the time. He thinks about how they used to play with Robotech action figures.

“I’m mad at God because He killed my brother,” Al said. “It’s bad because I need a big brother.”

Before Elias was diagnosed with cancer he would read to Destyni and Al before bed. Elias always fixed Al an after-school snack. When Elias was first admitted to the hospital he would wait for Al’s phone call every day to make sure his little brother got home from school.

When his mother dropped Al off at Port Reading School 9 last week, she told him he could call her and she would come pick him up.

“I know I’m not alone,” Al said.

“Yes, because God is with you,” his mother said.

“Because Elias is with me,” he said.

Teresa Stevens-Hamilton, Elias’ mother, had been taking night classes to become a clinical medical assistant. But that stopped on the second day in May — the day Elias found out the tumor in his right lung had caused an air leak and the cancer had spread to his liver and buttocks.

The next week, she stopped answering her cell and home phones for two days.

Her Baptist faith was being tested and she needed to listen to God.

With the latest news on Elias’ health, family, friends and strangers came forward with their thoughts on how to approach the disease.

A family member gave her information on St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

A stranger offered her a healing juice made from a sea plant.

Friends gave her Catholic-blessed Holy Water.

She had to decide if Elias should have radiation treatment on his arm, because doctors thought a stiffness he felt there was more cancer.

“What does God want?” she asked.

She spoke to her pastor at the First Baptist Church in Carteret. He told her their faith in God brought the family this far. He said she shouldn’t question it now. He told her to follow her heart.

“I just feel like a change is going to occur. I trust God,” Teresa said. “His (Elias’) spirit is healed. I know the Lord will make it manifest in his body . . . Trust God, that’s all I need to do. I’m just praising Him and waiting.”

Two days after Elias’ funeral, Fords Middle School Principal Cindy Lagunovich sat behind her desk fighting back tears.

Lagunovich would slap high-five with Elias in the halls of the school where he was in the sixth grade.

She said he never complained. Even with cancer tormenting his body he wore a smile.

Whenever Lagunovich asked how he was doing his typical response was “good” or “great.”

“I’m finding it hard to refocus. It really has consumed me,” she said. “We’ll never get used to him not being here.”

She said she never dreamed an 11-year-old could teach her some of life’s most important lessons.

“His courage, his strength, his faith, if I could have an ounce of it, I’d be a better person,” she said.

The Fords Middle School student-faculty basketball game in mid-May had to be moved to the Woodbridge High School gym in order to house the crowd attending the benefit for Elias.

At the start of the night, Elias sat at center court in a wheelchair as the crowd stood and chanted his name.

At halftime, representatives from a handful of Red Robin restaurants in eastern Pennsylvania gave $3,800 to the family. A 23-year-old waiter from Allentown, Pa., read Elias’ story in a newspaper article and decided to donate two weeks’ salary and tips.

The crowd roared when Elias sank a few shots in the game. At the end, he took the microphone for less than a minute.

“I would just like to thank everyone who participated,” he said and paused. “I’m very happy. Thank you to everybody.”

Six days after Elias passed away, Anh Nguyen still pictured him sitting next to her, laughing in social studies class.

“He’s probably in a better place now,” said the 12-year-old Hopelawn girl. “(But) it’s been kind of boring.”

She used to sketch Dragon Ball Z cartoon characters and Elias would color them.

“You don’t see him anymore in the wheelchair or in the hall,” she said. “There’s no one to wake up in social studies.”

Allie Henriques was one of the girls Elias had a crush on. The day he died, Allie had a soccer game.

“I got pretty mad when he passed. I pretended the ball was a tumor,” she said. “I kicked it really hard.”

The 11-year-old Fords girl prayed for Elias every day. She said seeing him in the three classes they had together brightened her day.

“I hope I find another person to hang out with like Elias,” she said.

Elias stopped going to school at the end of May.

Shamila Seepersad, Miss S., Elias’ school aide started going to his house. She would stay with him, which enabled Teresa to leave Elias to take Destyni and Al to school.

As cancer began to fill Elias’ lungs it became hard for him to breathe. He would vomit a combination of blood, mucus and fluid and Miss S. would hold the basin and rub his back.

“It wasn’t a matter of my job. It being a job went out the window a long time ago,” Miss S. said. “I didn’t think about it as doing anything. It was like your own child. You did what you had to do.”

His health declined, but his spirit remained. During his visits with Miss S. they would bicker about what cartoons to watch on TV. And when Miss S. left for the day, Elias would tell her to say hello to some of the girls he had crushes on.

In the week since Elias died, Miss S. has not had a complete night of sleep.

She closes her eyes and sees him.

She walks around the school and sees reminders of him. It’s hard for her to be in a classroom where he was.

They talked about going to the end-of-the-year picnic. They talked about the seventh grade and the eighth-grade dance. Her eyes became teary when she saw the cafeteria decorated for the dance Elias will never get to attend.

Elias told her things he never told anyone else.

” Between you, me and God.’ That’s what he would say,” Miss S. said. “Sometimes I still think he’s not gone . . . I want to be able to remember and not let it hurt.”

A week before he died, Elias panicked when he could not catch his breath while turning over in his sleep.

Teresa was watching him and he screamed, “I can’t breathe,” she said.

His chest heaved as he took one short, quick breath after another. Elias started to cry and the more he worried the harder it was to breathe.

Teresa remembers looking at the clock, which read 8:17 a.m. She read Psalm 34 about praising the Lord and being delivered from fear. Elias began to praise God and his breathing calmed.

“It breaks my heart to see him suffer,” Teresa said.

Elias was taking two types of oral morphine; one acted fast and the other had a longer-lasting effect.

The breathing episode had no impact on Destyni.

“Play with me,” she said, holding the tail of a stuffed animal and swinging it to hit Elias’ bed.

She swiped Elias’ harmonica, held it behind her back and told him she didn’t have it. Then she grabbed his oxygen mask, which was on the bed.

Sitting up in bed, Elias smiled at her.

“Play with me,” she said.

When Destyni was told Elias died, she did not understand. “Why does my mother want to bury Elias?” she asked.

After the funeral director took Elias’ body out of the home, she asked Teresa another question: “Elias is not going to live here anymore?”

Teresa tried to explain that Elias’ body would not be in the house, but his spirit would. She told Destyni that Elias was in heaven and he didn’t need crutches or a wheelchair anymore.

Destyni said she preferred him using crutches and still living in the house.

The day after her brother died, Destyni treated the family’s back deck like a wishing well. She dropped coins between slats of wood, wishing Elias would come back.

A week after he passed away, Teresa and Destyni were walking in their neighborhood when Destyni picked up a dandelion which had gone to seed. She blew on it and made another wish.

“Dear Lord, let Elias come back forever,” she said.

Even as the cancer abused his lungs during his final week, Elias continued a daily routine. He was reading “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” He played PlayStation2. He never missed the afternoon cartoon “MegaMan: NT Warrior.”

And he had to make choices about his medical treatment.

“It’s hard, difficult and there is a lot of pressure,” he said. “God gives signs and some signs say to “take help’ and some signs say “no.’ ”

Elias did take help by using the oxygen tank. He declined having a medical bed put in the house.

He had a medical bed in his living room before. He spent months there before he was declared cancer-free in March 2004.

“I don’t want to be stuck down there for a long time. I don’t like being stuck in one place. It’s so boring. It’s just like watching life go by and you’re not a part of it,” he said.

He also had to deal with his best friend, Julian Garcia, moving away to live with his mother in Cherry Hill.

Elias met Julian on the 100th day of second grade, when Elias had moved from East Orange to Port Reading. They celebrated the 100th day of each school year as the anniversary of their friendship.

“I’m upset. I guess, I don’t want him to move,” Elias said.

Julian wept uncontrollably when he saw Elias laid out in a casket.

His mother walked him out of the funeral home, where he cried on her shoulder for 20 minutes.

“He’s not even 12 yet. We were going to have this barbecue and he was going to be the guest of honor,” Julian said.

They played video games together and talked about girls. They would sleep at each other’s houses on school nights. Julian even asked if he could call Elias’ parents “mom” and “dad.”

“It’s hard not having Eli around. He’s a lovable guy. I loved him like a brother,” Julian said.

Elias had started to experience what doctors call “air hunger.” It is the struggle for breath as cancer takes over the lungs and leaves little room for oxygen.

“It feels like you can’t control your inhaling or exhaling,” Elias said. “It’s harder to do it while you’re so weak.”

Teresa said her heart was shattered. But she was unwavering in her faith that God would create a miracle.

“I know God would not give him more than he can bear. He’s still here for a reason,” she said.

Elias wanted to be strong for his family. He could feel what the disease was doing to him and he could see what it was doing to them. He said he wanted to take their pain away and bring it on himself.

“I can see in their faces when they’re sad or not happy. I feel it is my job to cheer them up. I’ll just have to make the best of it and don’t give up,” he said.

Six days before Elias passed away, he had trouble getting up the stairs to his bedroom.

Before he went to bed, he told his mother, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

The medical bed was brought to the living room the next day.

The morning after Elias died, the family hugged as a group of four and not five.

“I just miss him. I know he’s fine. But I just miss him,” Teresa said, breaking into tears.

As life settled after the wake and funeral, Teresa saw reminders of Elias everywhere.

She washed laundry and folded his clothes. She walked by his room. She cooked chicken and she didn’t need a fifth piece anymore.

She doesn’t think the pain will ever go away.

“I just think we learn to live with it. Hopefully we use it to strengthen us and not allow it to tear us down,” she said.

By his final night, the disease had taken over his left lung. Elias only had the upper part of his right lung to breathe.

His head and chest jerked as he moaned with each breath. He took 49 breaths in one minute.

He tried to shift his body to find a comfortable position in the medical bed, but he couldn’t.

He even tried to get out of bed.

“Rest for a little while. You can’t get up right now,” Teresa said.

With only a window air-conditioning unit and a fan, the room was hot, but Elias’ nurses said he was sweating from the effort it took to get air.

“He’s not ready to die. I just think he’s not ready,” Teresa said as she dabbed his head with a washcloth that had been dipped in a basin of ice water.

She sat on the edge of the bed, cradling Elias to her bosom as he received oxygen from a mask covering his nose and mouth, his eyes barely open.

By the time he gave the OK for IV morphine a pharmacist had to be called. It was hours before the courier arrived with that drug and the anti-anxiety medication Ativan.

With a muffled voice, Elias called out for his mom and dad. He called for something to drink. He called for prayers and the Bible was read out loud at his bedside. At one point, he said he was “sorry” over and over again.

Meanwhile, Curt Hamilton, Teresa’s husband and the only man Elias ever called dad, knelt in the backyard praying, with his face and palms to the ground, his arms extended.

“I can’t watch him like that,” he said.

But he did, for awhile. Curt laid on the couch, which made an L-shape with the medical bed. He eventually fell asleep, waking and going upstairs when Elias’ two aunts, uncle and 17-year-old cousin arrived shortly before 1 a.m.

Curt wrote Elias a letter two days after he died. Before Teresa placed the note in Elias’ casket, she read it to the crowd gathered at the wake.

“Elias, I’m a victim of your love and kindness as so many people are.

“That spark of love you had started many friendships. I will carry that spark of friendship always in my mind and heart.

“Elias was always himself. He told you the truth whether you liked it or not.

“You took a piece of me with you. I hate to see you go, but I know you are in a better place.

“How do we deal with the pain of losing you? I guess we are going to just have to deal with it. No matter what I tell myself, I just can’t get over you.

“I always think about us. I think about how I fell in love with you first. How we stood together at the wedding of your mother and me — and you being my best man.

“I think about how I got on you about school work.

“I’m waiting for the doctor to say it’s a sprained knee and you have asthma.

“Give time, time and we all will be OK.

“Just remember the times when Elias was being a friend or kind and the conversations you had.

“Remember the time when you first met Elias? I do. It was on a date with his mother and he was special then.

“Elias changed me for the better. He made me his dad and he didn’t have to.

“Elias was and is and always will be my hero.

“Elias I love you.

“Thank you, God, for allowing me to know him.”

With tears in her eyes, Teresa and her two sisters, Dorothy McKay and Denise Stevens, helped the nurse practitioner Paulette Forbes give Elias a sponge bath.

They changed his sheets and dressed him in clean boxer shorts and the silver cross he always wore around his neck, the one Dorothy gave him for Christmas.

Elias’ breathing slowed after he received the drugs, which arrived around 1:20 a.m. The oxygen mask was gone. He had a tube running below his nostrils feeding him air. His body was calm, but he took big gasps for air, chest heaving and mouth gulping.

Teresa had already seen Elias on the brink of death. He had been in a coma in the intensive care unit and he survived. She still envisioned him getting up out of the medical bed.

“It’s not supposed to end this way, is it?” Teresa asked.

Everyone in the room except for Forbes gathered in a circle on the side of Elias’ bed to read get-well cards his classmates had sent him.

“It’s so hard seeing him in pain,” Teresa said, tears trickling out of her eyes as she sat on the couch next to the bed. “It’s like a part of me died.”

She thought about the morphine taking so long to get to the house. She was mad, but then she thought maybe it gave her more time with her son.

“I thought it would hurt, but you can’t imagine . . . I feel like I did this to him,” she said looking at him.

Elias made a gurgling sound and Teresa stopped speaking.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. “I thought I heard him saying “Mommy.’ ”

Forbes walked over to Teresa and, whatever she whispered, Teresa knew the end was near.

Tears streamed out of Teresa’s eyes. She knelt on a foot rest next to the bed, leaning into Elias.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t stop it,” she said and then sobbed. “I love you with every fiber in my being. Please forgive me Elias. I tried. I tried. I tried. I prayed. I prayed. I prayed.”

Dorothy wrapped her arms around Teresa as she spoke her final words to her son.

Teresa stopped crying. She sat on the foot rest and held Elias’ right hand. Dorothy sat on the other side holding his left.

His breath slowed to a point where his body would stop and then his torso would lunge for air. Forbes checked his heart.

No one spoke, but the family in the room began to cry.

Forbes checked his heart again. A calm smile came over Teresa’s face. Forbes shook her head, signaling that Elias had passed away.

The family in the room sobbed, but Teresa didn’t. She kept Elias’ hand in hers as she stood up.

“It’s OK. He’s in heaven now. He’s not in pain anymore,” she said.

Elias could feel what the disease was doing to him and he could see what it was doing to his family. He said he wanted to take their pain away and bring it on himself.

Meet Elias: A Boy’s Battle with Cancer - an occasional series by Jerry Barca that originally appeared in the Home News Tribune in 2005.

Part 1
Following Faith’s Footsteps

SIDEBARS:
Cancer Attacks the Wallet, Too
Managing Chemo Cocktails
Bone Cancer in Children

Part 2
He Fights With Body and Soul

Kevin Durant

The NBA Finals are about to tip off and here are some of the stories you won’t hear about and some of the stories you’ll hear too much about. Here is my contribution to The Interrobang, the website for Sirius/XM’s Ron and Fez Show.

Scott Raab

Scott Raab hates Lebron James. He even wrote a book about it. Well, sort of, but not really… He did write the book, but The Whore of Akron really isn’t just a hateful rant about the Ohio-bred hoopster who infamously took his “talents to South Beach.” While it is a linguistic evisceration of James, it also humanizes the despised superstar while serving as both an ode to the Cleveland sports fan and a partial memoir for Raab.

Raab came to journalism via the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an esteemed program known for churning out award-winning fiction writers. For the last 20 years Raab has written for magazines, first GQ and now Esquire. He has written Esquire’s series on the rebuilding of Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is also known for his celebrity profiles and interviews. Along the way and while on the job, Raab smoked weed with Tupac, got a Chief Wahoo tattoo with Dennis Rodman and wore an Iron Man t-shirt on the streets of Venice, Calif. while interviewing Robert Downey Jr. the on-screen version of the comic book character.

In the following interview Raab talks about his mom, Lebron, Cleveland and boxing a woman.

Jerry Barca: You are kind of an open book.

Scott Raab: Yeah, I’ve always been that way. I’m a pretty happy guy actually. But I came up so miserable and I was like that from an early age. Before my parents split up, which you can look at legitimately as a watershed moment, I was just moody. My father used to say, “We’re going for a ride and you’re not bringing a book.” I was always inward looking, but after a certain point I kind of had a fuck-it attitude. When I started writing seriously I was pretty young and my classmates laughed at me so I just stopped turning in my work.

JB: When was the first time that happened?

SR: It was sixth grade and they made fun of the poetry I was writing and I was really hurt by that. I still have my report card: “Stopped turning in work.” I was very unhappy and I started getting fat at the same time because I was living at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother would feed us all day and then my mother would come from work and say, “We’re going to eat dinner like a family.” So I would have two dinners. At some point along the way, by the time I started thinking of writing as not just something I thought I had to do, but as the only thing I was actually good for, I was in my 20s. I think about being an open book, I was going to write about whatever I felt like writing about. If the family didn’t like it or anyone else didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves, I didn’t care.

JB: Do you remember the poem from sixth grade?

SR: Yeah. We had spent a week at a camp, a sleep away thing. I was away from the family and a really nasty house. It was kind of a transcendent experience even though I’m not a nature guy. So I wrote a poem and it had a refrain that went “God is nigh.” At one point – and I can’t remember if I made this up or if it happened – there was a wounded bird and one of the counselors, who I’m sure I adored, helped nurse the bird back to health and that was what the poem was building toward – the nearness of God. I’m sure it wasn’t a really good poem. Part of it was that I entered the class in the sixth grade as this broken-home kid. This class had been together all through elementary school and they were what would now be called gifted and talented. I started gaining weight; it was not like I was going bowling with prettiest girl or anything like that. But the poem was more of a sensitive-boy poem.

JB: Who encouraged you? Who said, “you might have something here?”

SR: The people who really encouraged me were the people who were doing the writing that I was reading. My mother threw out Portnoy’s Complaint because it was hugely controversial when it was published in 1969 and I was 17 that summer. It’s a seminal novel about a Jewish guy who grows up obsessed with masturbating, obsessed with sex. It’s Philip Roth’s turn from being a serious, although somewhat plodding novelist, to becoming the guy I consider the greatest American novelist ever. That and Charles Bukowksi a little later after I started getting loaded all the time. Reading writers encouraged me, but no one in my life.

The New York Post said Raab's book "succeeds with what could have been a downer."

JB: Did your mother have any reaction to The Whore of Akron?

SR: She didn’t talk to me for months.

JB: She read the book?

SR: I wouldn’t call it reading. She went through the book looking for passages about her and then she would call my brothers and read them the passages. Of course, she’d leave out the parts that weren’t entirely nasty. So, there was kind of a scorched earth campaign because she really felt that I had waited all these years and to her the book was entirely about her.

Then I saw her and she said, “I thought we were closer,” which is kind of funny because she hasn’t been at my house since Gore and Bush were debating Florida. This is a very difficult relationship.

JB: This was a shock to her?

SR: No. Nor was it so different from a piece of fiction I published 20 years ago in terms of some of the dirty laundry. But when she said that to me, it was a chance for me to say, “We are closer. This is just a book. This is just a version.”

“Now, my friends are going to read it,” she said.

“First of all your friends aren’t going to get through it. Secondly, if they think less of you rather than the schtunk who wrote it, were they really your friends?”

“Well, ah, ah, I’m seeing a counselor thanks to you and I had to double my anti-depressants.”

She did the best she could given her resources and the circumstances. As frontloaded as I like to think my misery is there is worse misery all over. You don’t have to go to Darfur to find the monstrous abuse of children that I never suffered and I’ve milked mine for dramatic narrative purposes. The truth of the matter is I’ve had a long, very nice life, creatively and personally. I have to own up to using her and using that material in a way. I don’t think it was meant to engender sympathy, but certainly drama. It’s narrative. It’s real, but it doesn’t mean it’s not simply employed for the purpose of narrative.

JB: A lot of times from a journalistic perspective I feel we’re takers.

SR: Absolutely. It’s true. Parasites. I have been doing a series of stories since 2005 about the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the World Trade Center. The last time I wrote a feature and the through line character was a fella whose wife went to work that day and died in the North Tower when the first plane hit. So here’s a guy, who is somewhat media savvy, who is vetting me to make sure I’m not totally going to fuck up what happened to him. Even though he is a little media savvy he’s still a civilian. He’s not an actor or an athlete. He’s not a public figure. He lost his wife on 9-11 and without him I don’t have a story worth writing or reading. In that sense, you know how much you owe someone and what a parasite you really are in a lot of ways. There have been a lot of stories over the years – nothing to do with profiling celebrities – that I’ve felt strongly that way and that was the most recent one.

Now, I’m trying to generate another chapter about the rebuilding and I’m trying to find iron workers who work at the top of the rebuilt Tower One. This is a much happier circumstance, to say the least, than someone whose wife was killed, but it is still the same kind of thing. “I need you as a character man. I’m going to engage with you as if this is a very meaningful relationship to me. It’s meaningful to me because I need you for a character in the next story I’m writing.”

So, I’m hyper-aware of that.

JB: How do you reconcile this? You have a tremendous amount of self-awareness—

SR: Tremendous. I’ve read a lot of Janet Malcolm. She is someone who has written extensively about this. I’ve thought about it for many years. The morality of it depends on what you do, what you write and how you relate to that person. It all depends on what words you want to put on it, in terms of “taker” or “parasite.” I’m not an ethical relativist, but I don’t think there is anything inherently immoral or wrong about the relationship between writer and subject or writer and source. I don’t think, in and of itself, that it is an immoral relationship. I think it depends on what you’re writing and what you’re doing.

Ann Wolfe

JB: You boxed Ann Wolfe; she is no joke. What were you thinking?

SR: I was thinking I was going to be boxing Vonda Ward. Then Ann Wolfe concussed Vonda Ward. If you could have heard the conversations between me and my editors when Vonda Ward was concussed and could not participate. We tried to find other people to avoid a confrontation with Ann Wolfe — the magazine asked me to sign a waiver. I said, “Why so you can leave my wife and son bereft in case this woman kills me?”

JB: She is no bullshit.

SR: No. Have you seen her fight?

JB: Yeah.

SR: We both arrived in Cleveland on Saturday the day of the fight. We met in the gym and sparred a little. She was so strong and so quick and not just her feet, but her hands. At no point in my life have I been quick that didn’t involve my brain. Physically, it never has been, never will be. I was so terrified because I knew a lot about Vonda Ward, including that she was basically a big stiff. Not that I was going to win against Ward, but at least I wasn’t terrified. Ann Wolfe? I knew little about. She had been incarcerated. She had been homeless and she was clearly letting me know in the sparring session, physically letting me know, who was the Alpha male. I really contemplated driving home rather than going through with it. I think I’m the only person who has seen a tape of the fight, and I look like a drugged bear. There is a point at which she landed three of four body shots and when my hands went down she kissed me on the cheek. She wasn’t trying to be mean or cruel, but she was toying with me. If I threw four real punches in three rounds I’d be surprised. I was almost paralyzed by fear.

JB: The same outcome, but that was a little different than George Plimpton fighting Archie Moore.

SR: That was heavily Plimpton influenced. I first came across Plimpton in a sports and literature class in a short-lived return to Cleveland State. I think that was where I first read Paper Lion. I still have almost all The Paris Reviews. I was always jealous of him in the exactly the same way I was jealous of people who had cars. I used to wait for the bus and watch people drive by in their cars and wonder how they got their cars. I would read Plimpton and wonder how he got to training camp. I used to attribute all kinds of magical things based on whatever little stuff I knew. “Oh, well he’s some patrician, Harvard motherfucker.” It never occurred to me – anymore than it occurred to me that people who had cars earned money to have those cars – that Plimpton worked his ass off as both a writer and someone who could participate at some level that wasn’t entirely laughable. Then I read him.

JB: Do you think people miss the point of The Whore of Akron and do you care?

SR: I do. I really do care a lot. I’ve avoided a lot of the reviews. I know the first time it was written about in Sports Illustrated it was great. The guy who writes by the name of Bethlehem Shoals, who writes for the Free Darko website, wrote a review for the Wall Street Journal that I thought missed the point. The guy who wrote it for the (New York) Times, Henry Abbott, is a huge Lebron fan and an ESPN employee. A lot of people – Parade magazine and Slate – got the book. It’s about an obsessed guy. Lebron is a real guy and he is a real guy in the book and I reported it to the best of my abilities and he is a vehicle in a lot of ways.

JB: What don’t’ people get about Cleveland?

Cleveland

SR: It’s unique among American cities. While it had a lot in common with its Rust Belt brothers Pittsburgh, Buffalo and especially Detroit, I don’t think there is a city that literally became a punch line and remained a punch line for decades like Cleveland. Everything that followed in the wake of its metamorphosis into a punch line has tended to reinforce the punch line. But that’s not what they don’t get. What they don’t get is that Cleveland not only became a symbol of urban decay and water pollution and to some degree air pollution and Rust Belt decay, but that the sports teams became reinforcing symbols of ineptitude and an ineptitude of a particularly laughable kind. You’ve got the mayor whose wife didn’t go to a White House event because it was her bowling night. Dennis Kucinich, who was a very positive national figure at first, became kind of a laughing stock. You have a town that has some real pride and some real reasons to be proud eventually noticing everyone – Johnny Carson on down -laughing at it all the time. You have a very angry, sullen city.

JB: Do you really hate Lebron?

SR: Yeah.

JB: Really? You’re a loving guy.

SR: Those aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s a thin line. The passion that’s there means that the love and the hate don’t contradict each other. Were I indifferent to Lebron that would really be the contradiction. Do I hate Lebron is the most global way to ask it. And yeah, I try and say yes or else you get into this, “well I loathe him. I despise him.” So then people go, “Do you really wish a career-ending injury upon him?” There have been those moments and I have written such. I’m not abandoning those. I’m owning those. I often have said – because people come back at me when they don’t like me or haven’t read the book or hate the book – they go, “You’re a piece of shit. That’s so wrong.” And, I honestly feel if I had superpowers and I could inflict that injury on him, then you can call me a monster. But I don’t. This is as impotent as impotent could be. I recognize that and so should they. I’m not consumed with the wish that he destroy one or both knees. If you call yourself a sports fan and tell me you’re a passionate sports fan and have never quietly wished for an injury, I’m not sure I agree you’re a passionate sports fan. In the U.S. and around the world it’s not so uncommon to cheer even when a home team player gets hurt if they’re sick of that player. I don’t think I’m such an outlier in this regard.

JB: You came to journalism through the unorthodox route of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

SR: When I was at Iowa there were a lot of people who had only been to school and I had done a lot of other things and I was really loaded everyday. It wasn’t like I was a binge drinker. I was fucked up everyday, all the time, 365 days a year. But I was also a guy who had read more than they had. I remember when William Kennedy visited one of the literature classes and he talked about rewriting Ironweed seven or eight times, rewriting the whole thing as it got rejected by publisher after publisher. I don’t know what Kennedy’s lifestyles issues were, but he was very somber, very, very, serious and humble. This example made sure I couldn’t take my writing that seriously. I mean seriously in a way that I would consider myself an artist and that I would be inspired and that what I would create was beauty. I’m not built that way anyway. What they exemplified to me was that you work really hard on trying to perfect your craft and if art should happen in any given sentence or paragraph or section that is for someone else to decide. You have to do the best you can and move the fuck on.

JB: Well, you said you’re not an artist. What are you?

SR: A writer. I like to come to terms with almost everything with words. I’m a great lover. A somewhat loyal friend. It’s up to my son to say what kind of father I am. I don’t know what my wife would say about what kind of husband I am. But pretty much I’m a guy who likes to write and I like to try and figure out how to entertain and delight myself and anyone who is reading. I don’t really have a good answer to that question. I’m a dork who can write.

Teresa pauses while reading Psalm 103 to look at Elias

He Fights With Body and Soul

- By Jerry Barca -

Elias Stevens sat with his parents and hospital staff in a room at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey two weeks ago. He listened to his doctor tell him the cancer had spread and the disease will eventually kill him.

“I know whatever happens God is watching over me,” he said later.

The 11-year-old Port Reading boy said the worst part of hearing the prognosis was seeing how sad it made his father, Curt Hamilton.

Curt left the room, and, doubled over in the hallway, he sobbed. “I just don’t want to hear this again.”

Elias played with his little brother and sister after he left the Cancer Institute that night. He went to school the next day.

“If you just crawl under your covers, it won’t make you feel better. You just have to live with it, no matter what circumstances,” he said.

When Elias was diagnosed with bone cancer 2 1/2 years ago doctors gave him a 25 percent chance to live. Chemotherapy led to a month-long medically induced coma that doctors thought would kill him. Elias survived.

The disease took his thigh bone, knee and hip. But a year ago, the cancer was gone. Then in July 2004 the disease resurfaced; it had spread to his lungs.

The cancer has continued to grow inside him despite the treatments he has received, said his primary oncologist, April Sorrell.

The current prognosis belies Elias’ spirit. It doesn’t match his smile or the body people see.

Elias has been walking without crutches lately. He has a new-found enthusiasm for school. He has been reading Harry Potter books.

He said he is not ready to die. And when he is, he said he will know ahead of time. He calls his approach to the disease his epic battle with cancer.

“I’m not going to quit. I’m going to go fight,” he said.

**********

Elias and his mother, Teresa Stevens-Hamilton, walked down the lead-walled halls of the radiology department at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.

They have navigated the path of blue-gray walls countless times since Elias was diagnosed with osteosarcoma — bone cancer. They used to daydream about running away from the battery of exams, and today was no different.

“What if we did? What if, we just ran away?” Teresa asked Elias, smiling as her eyes shot back toward the exit.

Elias kept pressing his crutches to the floor, moving forward. He had been feeling a stiffness in his left forearm for about a week, but he had no worries about this hospital visit.

“I just want to get it over with,” he said.

He and Teresa sat in chairs lined against a back hallway wall, waiting to be called.

An x-ray of Elias' right femur and knee

In the X-ray room two technicians took pictures of Elias’ right leg — the side with the titanium rod for a femur, an artificial hinge for a knee, and a plastic hip.

Elias laid on his back on the X-ray table, staring at the ceiling. When the machine made the popping picture-taking sound, Teresa and the two technicians stood behind a wall, leaving Elias alone in the room.

Digital images of the prosthetic showed up on computer monitors in seconds. It looked like a screw drilling down into a wing nut and then a saucer.

Elias lay silent on the table. He didn’t see the doctor and a half-dozen techs staring at the metal that had become his femur. He didn’t hear them talk about it; they had “never seen a complete replacement,” one said.

But for Elias, this was routine.

“It’s nothing I haven’t done before,” he said.

“You smell that? You’ve been in a hospital enough, you know that smell. It’s a bad smell,” Elias said. “It smells like rotten baby powder.”

Elias was in University Hospital in Newark two months ago for surgery to lengthen the rod in his right leg. His left leg had grown two inches longer than his right. The procedure would let him stand on even footing.

Elias cried himself to sleep the night before. During the drive to the hospital, he read the 23rd Psalm, the one about walking through the valley of darkness and not fearing evil because God is with you.

His smile flinched to a frown as he changed into a hospital gown. He sat in a wheelchair outside the operating room. Forehead-to-forehead, Elias and his mother prayed before he received anesthesia.

“I don’t regret having cancer,” he told his mother in the midst of prayers and nervousness.

The limb lengthening was without an incision. In lay terms, the surgeon, Joseph Benevenia, described it as a magnet pulling the metallic rod toward Elias’ ankle.

Elias woke to a cacophony of beeping monitors in a 16-bed recovery room. Tears streamed out of his eyes.

“I don’t want to be in pain,” he said grabbing the bed rail.

He rated his pain as an 11 on a scale of 10. Morphine shot through an IV tube and into his body. He had two Percocet pills, and his mother spoon-fed him mashed potatoes with black pepper and brown gravy.

He left the hospital later that day. At home, Elias said grace over the lasagna his father made. He thanked God for being surrounded by people who care and support him.

Teresa had her eyes in her leather-bound Bible as she and Elias waited in the radiology hallway.

She read part of Isaiah 53 and Psalm 103:3 about how God heals all diseases.

She glanced to her left and saw a mother, a father and their daughter, no older than 3, dressed in pink with an IV needle connected to her arm.

“They’ve been where we were,” Teresa whispered. “I can just tell.”

Elias and Teresa waited and waited.

“Being here is sort of like being in prison,” Elias said. “I have to go through all the tests to see if I’m OK, and I know I’m OK. And, I really don’t want to be here.”

The wait ended when Elias was called to the bone-scan room.

He sat in a chair, his silver cross and “I (heart) Jesus” lanyard draped around his neck. He looked to his left and offered his right arm for an injection, a drop of radioactive liquid.

Elias talks with his mother before hist CAT scan

Back in their hallway chairs, Elias and Teresa waited to be called for a CAT scan of his lungs.

Teresa didn’t mind waiting. To her, it was a good thing.

“We’re not urgent. We came a long way not to be urgent,” she said.

Elias went to physical therapy the day after the surgery to lengthen his right leg.

Pretty soon his walking improved. He stopped grunting with each step. His back was straight, instead of hunched over. The tears and fears disappeared.

He walked around the fitness center at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital twice in less time than it used to take him to finish one lap.

“It floored me,” said his physical therapist Laura Glick.

Glick said there was no single reason Elias improved so much. She thinks it is a combination of him becoming stronger and more confident, his father pushing him through exercises at home, and him receiving attention after a newspaper article was published about his battle with cancer.

Benevenia said the surgery helped Elias balance. The doctor said he is progressing better than most patients.

“They’re a God-centered family, and that keeps them focused,” Benevenia said. “Their attitude and courage is an inspiration.”

Just being able to walk at physical therapy felt great to Elias.

“I knew I was going to do it. I just didn’t know when,” he said. “If I believe, I can just keep going.”

He gave credit to his father for the improved gait.

“All I want is for him to walk again. I push him, but I know he can do it,” Curt said.

Brad Pitt would not have received the welcome Elias got when the automatic doors opened to the oncology unit at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital.

Nurses and doctors applauded and lined up to hug the boy who beat death and had become a young man.

“Holy moly,” said one nurse.

“I missed you,” said another.

“Oh, you’ve grown so much,” added one more.

In between exams, Elias and Teresa walked over to the children’s hospital, which is connected to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. They wanted to say hello to the people who took care of Elias for four months when he underwent chemotherapy and was put in a coma.

Elias and Teresa took the elevator to the second floor to visit their friends. When they got off, the little girl in pink and her parents from the radiology waiting area were getting on.

“That’s how we used to look,” Teresa said.

In the unit, the nurses asked how Elias’ little brother and sister — Al and Destyni Hamilton — were doing. They remember how Destyni used to stand on a chair and scream “What are you doing to my brother? Don’t hurt my brother,” when they came into Elias’ room.

The staffers used to fill syringes with water and squirt Elias to keep his spirits up. They visited him while he lay in a coma.

Jen Savarese, the unit secretary, used to tease Elias about sneaking a kiss on him. She did eventually. She kissed his cheek when he was in a coma, and his blood pressure jumped.

“He’s just doing so well,” she said as she started to cry. “He has an old soul. He’s just really strong.”

Elias smiled throughout the reunion. “They helped me any way they could, and they still care about me,” he said.

Teresa wore a smile when she left the unit.

“It’s weird. I know it shouldn’t, but it feels like coming home,” she said.

Elias put his bag and crutches down in the nurse’s office at Fords Middle School about a month ago.

He took four steps toward his school aide, Shamila Seepersad, who was open-mouthed at the sight before her.

“This is for you Miss S.,” he said, giving her a thumbs up.

Elias and Miss S between classes at Fords Middle School

“It was like watching your own child take their first steps,” said Miss S. as her eyes filled with tears.

Elias had been apathetic toward school. He slept through parts of the day and routinely missed math class.

But his attitude changed. Math has become one of his favorite subjects now. He left his wheelchair and walked the halls on one crutch. He began using the boys’ bathroom rather than the one in the nurse’s office.

The week before standardized tests, he spent an hour a night on the telephone with Miss. S. studying.

Elias said his parents told him if he did not know math, he would miss out on things in life. “I don’t want to miss out on anything,” he said.

His reading, writing and math teacher Stacy Forster had intercepted notes he had been passing with girls.

“He’s more lively,” she said. “Now, he’s got spunk. He gets annoyed if he doesn’t do as well as he wants. And that’s good to be annoyed. It’s an emotion.”

Elias lay on yet another table for his bone scan.

This was his eighth bone scan in about two years. He slept most of the time while the body-sized vicelike set of cameras scanned him from head to toe, coming within a half-inch of his skin.

Teresa sat in a chair studying her notebook a couple feet away.

She was taking classes at night to become a clinical medical assistant. With grants, the course cost $1,300.

She has not worked since Elias was diagnosed. The family of five has gotten by on Curt’s salary with the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 25 in Carlstadt. He could make anywhere from $35,000 to $65,000 in a year. But he spent more than two months unemployed between January and April.

Teresa did not like leaving the house three evenings a week.

“I miss my babies,” she said. “It’s for their future as well as mine. Hopefully they’ll get the message. They’ll have more things, and I’ll have a better job because I’ll be more marketable. I hope I’m not being selfish. Sometimes I think I am.”

The bone scan usually took 45 minutes, but this lasted about two hours.

With the scan finished, Elias and Teresa battled each other in a series of rock-paper-scissor matches as they waited to be dismissed.

The children at Fords Middle School found out Elias’ cancer had returned when they read about it in the newspaper article about him.

“Elias is a good friend,” said classmate J. Siman. “He doesn’t make fun of anyone . . . and (the cancer) I don’t see it.”

The 12-year-old Fords boy prays for Elias every day, and he made him a cross in metal shop.

“I wouldn’t give it to just anybody,” J. said.

Even though Elias already wears a silver cross, he put on J.’s, too.

“I like it. It’s awesome,” Elias said. “He’s really my friend.”

The cross beam is slanted, and it hangs on a string, but J. appreciated seeing it on Elias.

“It’s nice he would wear it. I gave my mom a bracelet, and she never wore it,” he said.

Elias knew something was wrong when the doctor wanted to see both of his parents.

The appointment with Dr. Sorrell had been made before they started the day of exams.

Curt picked up Destyni and Al from school and brought them to the Cancer Institute. He arrived thinking he would relieve Teresa so she could head to her class. But that wasn’t to be.

Teresa and Curt went in a private room with Sorrell and a counselor.

Destyni and Al played board games in the waiting area with a girl who had just received chemotherapy.

Elias removed himself from the game-playing table and sat alone playing a Superdog computer video game.

“Instead of crying my eyes out, I went and played with Krypto,” he said.

Elias was called into the room with his parents. He heard the news.

The cancer had spread to his liver, his buttocks and it had grown in his lungs. The tumor in his right lung is causing an air leak, and part of his lung is collapsed. Doctors would not set a timetable for his life.

Teresa and Curt cried. Elias got teary-eyed, but didn’t weep.

“I’m OK with it,” he said.

Julian Garcia and Elias wrote out rules to their friendship. The top three are no lying, no rumor spreading, and tell each other everything.

Elias and Julian joking at lunch

Julian thought the children in school talking about Elias’ cancer were lying. But then Julian read it in the newspaper, too.

He asked Elias why he never said anything.

“I wanted him to look at me like his best friend who is going to be with him forever,” Elias said.

“He fought off the leg cancer, so the lung cancer shouldn’t be that bad,” Julian said. “Now, I have to wait even longer to play with him.”

Julian told Elias the world would not be at peace if he died.

“We need people like you to stay in the world,” Julian said.

Elias looked out the window on the drive home from the Cancer Institute. Curt asked him what he was thinking about.

“That house,” Elias said.

“OK, now, deep, deep, deep down what are you thinking about?” Curt asked.

“I’m thinking about what heaven is like.” Elias said.

Meet Elias: A Boy’s Battle with Cancer – an occasional series by Jerry Barca that originally appeared in the Home News Tribune in 2005.

Part 1
Following Faith’s Footsteps

SIDEBARS:
Cancer Attacks the Wallet, Too
Managing Chemo Cocktails
Bone Cancer in Children

Part 2
He Fights With Body and Soul

Part 3

Elias’ Courageous Fight Ends

Ryan Leaf

Using a non-scientific formula that looked at: only first-round picks; weighted the pick number; considered who was taken after said pick; and measured the drama of the bust’s failure, here is a look at the top individuals and selection themes that comprise the greatest NFL Draft day flops. This piece was contributed to TheiBang.com, the website attached to Sirius/XM Ron and Fez Show.

Pete Carril after Princeton upset UCLA.

Part of the reason we love March Madness is because of the upsets – and outside Final Four runs by LSU, George Mason, Butler and VCU, these huge underdogs wins mostly happen in the early rounds. Here is the list I contributed to TheInterrobang.com for Sirius/XM radio’s Ron and Fez Show.