Jones Strikes Out His Toughest Foe--Hodgkin’s Disease : College baseball: Azusa Pacific freshman faced cancer at 16, recovered to bat .454 and pitch to a 7-3 record as high school senior.

You wouldn’t call the season just past a noteworthy first year of college baseball for freshman Dal Jones of Azusa Pacific University.

He played little, being used primarily as a relief pitcher. He struggled to find a hitting stroke, batting only .118.

To some, that might be disappointing. But nothing that happens on a baseball field can be seriously disappointing to Jones.

He has battled Hodgkin’s disease the last three years.

“Probably his biggest strength is that he’s already faced the greatest fear he’ll ever face in his life,” Azusa Pacific Coach Tony Barbone said. “He’s stared death in the face and he’s won.”

Jones, 18, is more than two years into remission, usually a good sign for long-term recovery from Hodgkin’s disease, a cancerous affliction that attacks the lymph nodes.

For Jones, warning signs of the disease surfaced early in his junior year at Temple City High in September of 1987.

“The first time I started to notice was the third week of my junior year,” he recalled. “I started to itch a lot on my arm. There wasn’t anything I could see, like a rash. It was just itching a lot. It was pretty much constant itching, so I went to see a doctor.”

What disturbed the doctor more than the itching, though, was a growth.

“By coincidence, I also had a really big growth on my neck and he asked me to see a specialist,” Jones said. “So I went to see a specialist the next day, and he thought it might be Hodgkin’s disease.”

Jones’ father, Dal Sr., said he will never forget the day his son received the test results.

“It was Oct. 1, 1987, when they told him, and I remember that because that was the day they had the big (Whittier) earthquake,” he said. “They told him he had what looked like a malignant tumor on his neck.”

Jones said he was frightened when he learned he had the disease, a form of cancer that usually strikes males from ages 16 to 30.

“When I first heard the word cancer, it shocked me,” he says. “But my mom and dad did a lot of reading on it and the doctors pretty much assured me that it was completely treatable.”

Initially, several doctors recommended chemotherapy. But the Joneses resisted because they had heard that treatment puts excessive strain on patients.

“So we went and got several opinions at the City of Hope (in Duarte),” the elder Jones said. “Fortunately, they were sure enough that the cancer hadn’t spread, and they told him not to do the chemotherapy.”

Instead, they chose a laparotomy--an exploratory surgery that sought to determine how much the disease had spread and what treatment to pursue.

“That was really the best thing that we could’ve done because we were able to get down to doing the laparotomy,” Jones’ father said. “It’s better than chemotherapy, but they had to remove his spleen (as part of the procedure).”

From the laparotomy in October of 1987, doctors determined that the disease was in the second of four stages of severity.

“If you’re in Stage 1 or 2, it’s limited to one side of the diaphragm,” Jones said. “When they found it was limited to his neck and one side of the diaphragm, it was classified as Stage 2.”

After the surgery, Jones was turned over to a radiation specialist and received treatment for about four months, from late November of 1987 through late February of 1988.

Since then, his trips to doctors’ offices have grown less frequent. He still visits three doctors once every six months, but now it’s only for checkups.

“I just go back for checkups to see that there hasn’t been any more of it develop,” Jones said. “Once you get through two years, you just have to be sure to get your checkups.”

Jones passed the critical two-year remission period with flying colors and has had no recurrence.

“With most cancer, they feel if you go through a five-year remission period and nothing else occurs, then you’re pretty much cured,” his father said. “With Hodgkin’s, it’s more like two years, and we’re (past) two years and he’s had nothing recur.”

All along, Jones says, his son has handled the illness positively.

“That’s the one thing about him,” he said. “He’s just a very positive person, and the doctors said they’d never seen a more positive attitude in a young patient than Dal.”

He added that the disease might have unnerved him even more than it did his son, especially right after it was diagnosed. Jones remembers a conversation he had with his son while they were walking together in a hallway at Arcadia Methodist Hospital.

“It just got to me and I finally said to him, ‘Why aren’t you screaming or kicking a wall because of this?’ ” he said. “But he said he remembered watching the Jerry Lewis telethon with kids in wheelchairs and also how his grandmother died (of cancer), and he said, ‘I’ve got nothing to complain about. If I’m 16 and it’s my time, then it’s my time.’ I hugged him and cried like a baby, and I said, ‘You’re going to beat this thing.’ ”

Jones said he always tries to maintain a positive approach to life.

“I figured that at least I had a chance with this, and I knew other people with cancer didn’t have a chance,” he said. “So I just wanted to keep positive and get this thing cured as fast as I could. I knew there were a lot of people worse off than I was, that’s for sure.”

Dennis Marquardt, who coached Jones on the baseball team at Temple City, credits Jones’ recovery to an intensely competitive nature.

The coach said he was visiting Jones in the hospital after the surgery when Jones told him he was going to be the starting shortstop the next season. Never mind that he had never played on the varsity before.

“I think his competitiveness has a lot to do with it,” Marquardt said. “From the beginning he said to me, ‘I’m going to play this year’ and he played.”

While he was still undergoing radiation treatment in February of 1988, Jones was back on the baseball field, practicing.

“The thing that made it tough was I couldn’t really work out that much because of the treatments,” Jones said. “I had mostly light workouts. Near the end of the treatments, I’d go to my treatments at noon and then go out for light workouts on the field.”

Once his junior season started, it was obvious to Jones that the disease had affected his performance. Playing shortstop most of the season, he wound up batting a disappointing .240.

“It was difficult coming back,” he says. “I wasn’t really limited (by the affects of the disease), but I didn’t feel I was playing at 100%. . . . I just felt a step slower. I was about 170 (pounds) going into my junior year, and I went down to 150 or so.”

But the disappointment of his junior season only inspired him to improve as a senior.

“That made me more determined than anything,” Jones said. “Before my senior year, I spent every night at the batting cage (in Temple City). Going into the season, I really wanted to prove that this (disease) didn’t get the best of me. Coming off my junior year, when I had a below-average year, I just wanted to do so much better.”

Jones accomplished that goal--and then some. He improved his batting average to .454, had a 7-3 pitching record, made the All-Southern Section 2-A Division team and was named San Gabriel Valley player of the year.

His success even took Marquardt by surprise.

“I was surprised only because the year he had as a junior wasn’t even an average year for him,” he said. “To just turn it around and do what he did was just incredible.”

Even with his exceptional season, Jones was lightly recruited by colleges and unclear about what school he would attend until his summer coach--Len Strelitz--stepped into the picture. Strelitz, a scout for the Texas Rangers, recommended Jones to Barbone of Azusa Pacific.

“He said, ‘I think Dal Jones can really help you,’ ” Barbone remembers. “Lenny had told Dal to talk to the Azusa coach, and that’s how we got together.”

From the first, Jones said, he was convinced that Azusa Pacific was the right school for him.

“Coach Barbone just sold me on Azusa,” he said. “I had a meeting with him and I was just very impressed with his whole attitude. He wasn’t just concerned with me as a ballplayer. He was concerned with me as a person, and that just sold me right away.”

All along, Barbone says, he was probably more interested in Jones because of what he had been through rather than for his ability as a player.

“I took the attitude that he’s a kid who knew a friend of mind,” Barbone said. “So I didn’t want him simply because he was a baseball player. I just wanted to help him. It was kind of a natural match. We all felt very comfortable about it. When you talk to someone as much as we did (with Jones) you feel pretty good about it.”

Not that Barbone doesn’t think Jones has the potential to develop into an outstanding college player.

“I think there’s no question that he has the ability and he’s resilient,” the coach said. “But I don’t think that what he went through is the reason he’s at Azusa Pacific. He’s here because he fit well for us and we fit well for him.”

Although Jones had difficulty offensively, with only two hits in 17 at-bats, he made steady progress as a pitcher. In 15 2/3 innings, all in relief, he had a 2-0 record and a 3.46 earned-run average.

Although he is eager to improve, Jones does not want to get too far ahead of himself. He admits that since he learned that he had Hodgkin’s disease, he has been living for the moment.

“I’ve learned that you can’t take life for granted, that’s for sure,” he says. “You just have to take life one day at a time and appreciate everything you have. No matter what happens, I’m always pretty optimistic. I look forward to the future, but I really just look more to what’s here and now.”

Jones realizes that succeeding in college baseball will not be easy. But he has already fought his toughest battle.