This past Saturday, N.C. State women’s basketball coach Kay Yow died at the age of 66, ending a bout with cancer that began in 1987.
Yow was N.C. State’s first head coach and led them to the ACC’s first women’s basketball title in 1978. In her 34 years at the helm in Raleigh, she won more than 700 games, the third-winningest women’s head coach in NCAA history.
For more than 20 years, Yow fought as hard as anyone could against breast cancer. She took time out of the hectic life of being a college basketball coach to speak out and educate the public. She was a tireless fundraiser and advocate for cancer research, her on-court tenacity spilling over into what was, without hyperbole, the fight of her life.
Unfortunately, hers is a story seen all too often, both in sports and in our everyday lives. In 2008, more than 560,000 Americans died of cancer and more than 1.4 million were diagnosed with some form of it. In Virginia alone, the past year brought 35,000 new cases of cancer, and almost 14,000 deaths.
It’s a disease that has somehow cut through to virtually everyone. For me and my family, it was losing my grandmother when I was in middle school, then my grandfather beating it into remission only a few years later. The same day Coach Yow passed, more than 700 people showed up at Westminster Church on Rugby Road to honor the life of Jack Blackburn, the University’s longtime dean of admissions and an influential mentor of mine.
Our own women’s basketball coach, Debbie Ryan, has stared down this demon before, beating pancreatic cancer into remission after being diagnosed in 2000. Though Ryan and Yow were rivals and competitors for almost 30 years, Ryan credits Yow as being “the soul of our coaching group in the ACC.”
For N.C. State, this is a story athletes have seen and lived before: a beloved coach, a protracted fight against cancer and a life ended far too soon. Jim Valvano coached the Wolfpack men’s team for the entirety of the 1980s, winning multiple ACC titles and the 1983 NCAA championship. He died in 1993 — only 47 years old.
Between his retirement from coaching in 1990 and his death three years later, Valvano was a renowned motivational speaker. If you haven’t seen his acceptance speech at the 1993 ESPYs, when he received the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage, get on YouTube and find it now.
That night he had to be helped on and off the stage by Dick Vitale and Mike Krzyzewski, yet he stood and delivered one of the greatest orations of what it means to be involved in sports and what it means to lead a fulfilled life. His speech made the audience live his advice: Each day we should think, we should laugh and we should cry. If you do those things, he said, “that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”
But beyond just its rhetorical power and sage advice, his speech endures because it included the announcement of the founding of the V Foundation for Cancer Research. For the last 15 years, the V Foundation has been a star warrior in the fight to stop cancer. Each year it puts on numerous sports-related awareness and fundraising events, including two tournaments in Madison Square Garden.
The V Foundation is but one of hundreds of cancer-related organizations in this country. While they may have different names and different logos and slogans, they all have the same common endgame in mind: stop this beast of a disease dead in its tracks.
In a country with so many universities and hospitals and research facilities, there’s no reason we can’t beat this. But the scientists and doctors in labs can’t win the fight alone. They need energetic and focused people to speak up for the war they’re waging. In both the public and private spheres of life, the fight to beat cancer needs more advocates.
So find a way to get involved. For your birthday or Christmas or whenever your family gives gifts, pass on the things and the stuff, and ask your family to make charitable donations in your name. Send them to jimmyv.org. Have them watch the speech and read the stories.
Do it for Coach V and Coach Yow. Do it for the Jack Blackburns and Eva Mae Owens Wileys in your life. This is too important to sit on the sidelines. This is the time to get in the game.
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