Super Bowl No Match for Ill Boy’s Party

For about 200 Tarzana residents who attended a Super Bowl party Sunday, a 10-year-old boy’s health was more important than the final score.

The San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos were skirmishing on television, but the party-goers saved their heartiest cheers for Adam Brock, a local boy who is battling leukemia.

The Brock family’s friends organized the party to help find a bone marrow donor who could help Adam recover from the deadly blood disease.

“I had to bring a radio out here--I don’t know what’s going on with the game,” said Mark Sterling, a Tarzana tennis teacher who was selling Super Bowl caps and personalized T-shirts outside the home to raise money. “But if any little thing here can help find a donor, it’s worth it. This is bigger than the Super Bowl.”

Each adult attending the party was asked to contribute $75, which covers the cost of testing a blood sample from a potential donor.

Candice Slobin, a friend of the Brocks, was host of Sunday’s fund-raiser at her Monarca Drive home.

“I was going to have a few couples here for the Super Bowl,” she said. “Then, when Adam fell out of remission about Christmastime, I thought, ‘Wow, what an easy way to raise money for him!’ ”

Adam is a patient at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills, but was allowed to leave to attend the party for a short time.

“I have a feeling I’m going to get a donor,” he said.

His father, furniture company executive Larry Brock, proudly displayed a plaque the party-goers ordered for Adam, hailing him as “The Bravest Boy of the Year.”

Brock said he was concerned that his son might not be tough enough to endure the rigors of chemotherapy. But, he said, Adam drew on “some kind of inner strength. He had his tough moments. But he hung in there.”

Adam was an all-star in his youth baseball league at Tarzana Park when he was diagnosed as having acute myelogenous leukemia last summer after a routine physical.

“Adam has the type of leukemia that is more difficult to treat with conventional chemotherapy,” said his physician, Dr. Susan Storch. “There are other options. But in terms of a long-term cure, his best chance would be a bone marrow transplant.”

Adam’s family members were tested, but none was a compatible donor. The family now hopes to find an unrelated person who has the same type of marrow. The odds of two unrelated people having a match are about one in 15,000, according to the Covina-based Life-Savings Foundation, which registers potential donors.

The foundation estimates that more than 9,000 people die each year in the United States of serious blood diseases that could be cured by a bone marrow transplant.

The Brocks are friends of Tarzana attorney Marc Smith, 38, who has the same ailment as Adam and has made cross-country appeals for bone marrow donors for himself, prompting thousands of people to take the blood test.

“We haven’t been able to locate a donor for me, but we have found some donors for other people,” said Smith, who came to the party Sunday to lend moral support.

Adam, who attended Serrania Avenue Elementary School before his illness forced him to turn to private tutoring, said he wanted to pursue a career in medicine even before he developed leukemia.

“I want to become a pediatric doctor with my own office and help kids,” he said.

“We’re overwhelmed,” his mother, Laurie, said about the community’s support. “I feel like all of our friends are now like family.”

She became teary-eyed when the friends gave Adam the plaque for courage.

“Don’t cry, Mom,” he told her. “It’s a party.”