Azusa Pacific Receiver Goes One-on-One With Cancer, and He’s Alive to Tell About It : Campbell Runs Life’s Ultimate Comeback Route

On a quiet night at his campus apartment last semester, Azusa Pacific University football wide receiver Ted Campbell was struck by an urge to do something he had never done before.

So Campbell and a roommate climbed to the top of the nearby San Gabriel Mountains to watch the sun rise. They returned just in time for a 7:30 a.m. class.

It’s not the type of thing Campbell would have done three years ago. But that was before his life changed, before he went from trying to beat defensive backs to trying to beat cancer.

Campbell, 23, is playing football again, and playing it well for Azusa Pacific after undergoing major cancer surgery twice and extensive chemotherapy treatments during the last two years.

It has been a long and difficult fight for the 6-foot, 180-pound senior, whose weight dropped to 139 pounds during his ordeal.

But at no time did Campbell doubt he would play football again. “Every opponent I’ve ever gone up against, I thought I could beat,” Campbell said. “I thought I could overcome (cancer). It was like I was preparing for a football game and this was the toughest opponent I’d ever face.”

Campbell has not experienced a recurrence of the disease since he stopped his chemotherapy treatments last December. He is starting at wide receiver for the undefeated Cougars (4-0) and has caught a team high 16 passes for 345 yards and 3 touchdowns.

A year ago, probably no one but Campbell thought it would be possible.

Campbell’s mother, Betty, remembered her reaction two years ago when she learned that her son had cancer.

“I think we were all just surprised more than anything because he was a kid who was never sick,” she said. “He was an athlete and he was always in good shape and we just couldn’t believe it. It’s something that happens to somebody else’s kid, not yours.”

It was just before the start of the football season in September, 1983 that Campbell said he started feeling unusually sluggish and noticed a growth in his prostate area.

“He came up to me one day and said, ‘Hey coach, look at this,’ ” track coach Terry Franson said. “I told him he better get that checked out.”

Doctors told Campbell he had cancer. He underwent an operation, which included removal of his lymph nodes from just below his throat to his abdomen.

“The first time I had surgery wasn’t so bad because they just opened me up, cleaned out the cancer and I was out of the hospital in a pretty short time,” Campbell said.

With his hopes of playing football gone for that season, Campbell set his sights on 1984

By the time fall practice arrived, he was ready. “I was in the best shape I had ever been in,” Campbell said. “I ran a 4.4 40-yard dash my first day out for football.”

But again it was not to be. A blood test, part of an ongoing testing process, determined that the cancer had returned.

“I knew the first day of (practice) that I had it,” Campbell said. “During the first few games, I was going through tests once a week.”

After the diagnosis, Campbell and his football coach, Jim Milhon, agreed that he would play until he had to enter the hospital for treatment.

Campbell played considerably in the first two games of the season, catching seven passes for 110 yards. He played his last game in late September against La Verne, catching a career-high five passes. He checked into the hospital the following Monday.

“It was an emotional time for us last season when Ted left us, especially knowing what he was going to have to go through,” Milhon said. “This is a religious school, and we pray a lot here and we spent a lot of time praying last season.”

Campbell said his recovery was much slower and more difficult the second time. This time the cancer engulfed much of the same area and had spread to his liver. After a second operation, lengthy chemotherapy treatments began.

“This time I was in and out of the hospital for about three months and I went down from about 180 pounds to 139,” Campbell said. “I’d go in (the hospital) one week, go home the next and then go back again.

Campbell attempted to attend classes while undergoing the chemotherapy treatment, but after a while it became impossible. He took as many as 12 shots of various medicines a day during his eight-day stretches in the hospital and went without eating for two weeks.

There were side effects from the treatment, including loss of weight and hair, sluggishness and depression.

“It bothered Ted a lot to drop to 139 pounds but it bothered him more to lose his hair,” Milhon said. “The whole ordeal was hard on everyone. It would hurt me to see him deteriorating physically. There was sympathy, of course, but I wasn’t going to be morose or anything.”

Campbell was dangerously close to death at one point during the chemotherapy. One day his heart stopped beating for a few seconds. His father, Ted Sr., a minister, stood by the bedside as a nurse revived his son.

Campbell, though, never lost his will to live.

“There are only two ways you can look at it,” he said. “You can get mad at God and say, ‘Why did you do this to me?’ or you can say you’re going to fight it.”

Once the chemotherapy treatments stopped last December, Campbell started to train again.

Milhon was not surprised. “He has great internal drive,” he said. “He wants to do things and he wants to be successful.”

When he first started running again, Campbell said, he could barely go 200 yards.

“When you lose as much weight as quickly as I did you have to start from a base again,” he said. “The drugs they gave me killed a lot of the muscle cells. I gained weight again but it wasn’t the same.”

Campbell, who also was an outstanding track runner, added, “I’ll never run the 400 (meter dash) in 47 seconds again because the effects of the drugs and treatment are still in my body.”

As fall football practice approached, Campbell’s strength and stamina improved. He was ready to play football again.

“We worked out this summer and I felt good,” he said. “I wasn’t worried about getting hurt but if I couldn’t have been at least 80% or 90% of what I was before, I wouldn’t have played.”

Although Campbell doesn’t think he is as fast as he once was, he is still burning pass defenders.

“He is catching passes as well as I’ve ever seen him,” Milhon said. “I think he’s probably the biggest (physically) he has ever been, too.”

It was an ecstatic moment when Campbell scored his first touchdown on a 66-yard pass play in the first quarter of a game against Claremont-Mudd Sept. 21.

“When I scored that touchdown, I held the ball up and said, ‘God this is for you,’ ” he said.

After football season, Campbell will be bidding to make a comeback in track and field. An outstanding all-around performer, he is considered one of the top returning decathletes in the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics.

Campbell was a member of the Azusa Pacific team that won the 1983 NAIA track and field championship, earning All-American status in both the 1,600-meter relay and the decathlon, where he finished fourth with a score of 7,136 points.

“I’m better in track than I am in football,” he said. “I’ve been in track since I was 7 years old. I didn’t play football until I was a senior in high school.”

A physical education major, Campbell is hoping to go overseas and do missionary work after he graduates. “A lot of my friends are businessmen and they wonder why I would want to do that,” he said. “I just say wherever God wants me to go, I’ll go.”

As for cancer, there have been no signs of the disease since Campbell stopped chemotherapy treatment last December. As a precaution, Campbell is tested once a month at the Riverside Medical Clinic.

“The first two years it’s once a month,” he said. “If I get through that it’s once every three months and then twice a year.”

Campbell said he probably will have to undergo check-ups the rest of his life. But that doesn’t bother him much. He is just happy to be healthy again and playing sports.

“When you’ve been in the hospital that much, you would be glad to play anything,” he said. “If all we had was a badminton team, I’d be happy to play that. But it’s nice to be playing football again.”

For the Azusa Pacific football team, the feeling is mutual.