7:02 am | March 10, 2019 | Go to Source | Author:
Jim Calhoun’s first season as coach of Division III University of St. Joseph was disrupted by another cancer battle — his fourth — but the Hall of Fame coach said he needed to believe “every single minute” that he could beat it.
In Sunday’s debut episode of E:60’s four-part series, “The Calhoun Project,” which chronicles the 76-year-old Calhoun’s comeback season at the West Hartford, Connecticut, school, the legendary former UConn coach discussed his two-year battle with Stage 4 stomach cancer that was previously thought to be inoperable.
“This was going to be what ended his life,” said Calhoun’s son, Jeff. “It was just a matter of when.”
But Calhoun said a four-hour procedure in October eradicated the cancer just prior to his regular-season return to the sideline.
“It’s beatable, like everything else in life, but you got to believe that every single minute, and you got to attack it,” Calhoun told E:60. “… Whenever God says it’s time, that’ll be, but I’ll be fighting Him then until the final, last breath.”
Calhoun said a window to remove the tumor — and about half his stomach — emerged a week before St. Joe’s first day of practice on Oct. 15. He was in the hospital for seven days, then missed a week of practice but returned before the first regular-season men’s basketball game in St. Joe’s history on Nov. 9.
Though he says he’s now cancer-free, the effects of the procedure were felt throughout the season. He missed the second half of multiple games, a combination of post-op treatment and adrenaline made him sick. As one example, Calhoun was ill during the second half of a road game at Anna Maria College but made it to the postgame locker room, where he implored his players to work harder. The implied message: If I can do this, you can do anything.
“For me to wallow around and say, ‘Why me?’ it would be the stupidest thing in the world,” Calhoun said. “I want to spend as much time with the people I love and the game I love. … I’m not going down without a fight.”
Calhoun hasn’t committed to returning for a second season at St. Joe’s, formerly an all-women’s college that welcomed men — and men’s basketball — for the first time in 2018-19. The school made the decision to go co-educational in June 2017, hired Calhoun as a consultant three months later and eventually named him coach in September 2018.
“I think retirement has its place,” Calhoun told E:60. “I just don’t think the place is 100 percent for me.”
With 17 freshmen on the roster in Calhoun’s first season, the Blue Jays made a late-season push to the championship game of the Great Northeast Athletic Conference (GNAC) tournament. They fell short of a miracle run to the Division III NCAA tournament with a four-point loss to Albertus Magnus.
Prior to his arrival at St. Joe’s, he was a college basketball game analyst for ESPN, where he’d balance covering the Big Ten with his cancer treatment.
“I would go to the shootaround on Wednesday, meet with the coaches, do the game on Thursday, get up at 4 in the morning — say, I was in Iowa — take a 5 a.m. flight to Chicago,” Calhoun said. “Then from Chicago to Boston, Boston then on to New York to do four or five hours of chemo.
“I did the best I could, psychologically, to make sure it wasn’t getting to me.”
Calhoun won three national championships in a 26-year career at UConn. When he retired in 2012, his 873 wins ranked sixth all time in Division I men’s basketball. His 16 wins at St. Joe’s this season pushed him past Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith on the all-division list.
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