Miracle on Ice : Mario Lemieux Hasn’t Missed a Beat in Comeback From Hodgkin’s Disease

One skates on the rink of dreams in front of thousands, the other waters down his driveway in winter and only wonders.

They are bound by the NHL playoff schedule, ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and a boy’s bedroom, meticulously decorated with Wheaties box panels, hockey sticks, pucks and pictures.

Now, they are also united by disease.

They are hockey players in Pittsburgh making comebacks from cancer.

One is named Mario, the other Jeffrey. Mario, 27, is worth about $47 million. Jeffrey, 15, has some loose change scattered on his dresser.

Mario Lemieux, probably the best hockey player in the world, skates for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Jeffrey Plummer, probably the best hockey player on his block, used to lace up for the Shaler Area School Hockey Club.

Thanks to a grant from the Make-A-Wish-Foundation in 1991, Jeffrey visited the Penguins’ locker room.

The boy nearly tripped on his tongue when Lemieux appeared before him.

“It’s not easy talking to him like a normal person,” Plummer remembers.

“I didn’t know what to say.”

He said little. Mario put his arm around the boy and Uncle Dick snapped a Polaroid.

They have more in common than hockey and cancer. Both skaters are tough as pucks.

Lemieux’s illness was diagnosed as Hodgkin’s disease Jan. 11 and, almost miraculously, he returned to the Penguins after being sidelined only 23 games.

Lemieux played as though he had been out with a hangnail, not cancer.

Plummer, in 1989, underwent 25 hours of surgery to remove a softball-sized tumor with a hundred tentacles that had a stranglehold on his right leg.

After 30 days in the hospital, Plummer came home, jumped out of the car on crutches and put on his roller-blades.

“I almost had a heart attack,” Marge Kaib, his great aunt and guardian, said.

Doctors told Jeffrey he would lose the leg if he broke it.

“I might lose it someday anyway,” Jeffrey reasoned. “I might as well do it doing something I like to do.”

Jeffrey was not always so brave.

Nor was Lemieux, who first noticed a small bump under his chin while shaving a year and a half ago but dismissed it, even though cancer had been about as much a part of the Lemieux heritage as hockey.

Lemieux’s cousin died of Hodgkin’s disease 20 years ago. She was 22. Two other relatives died of other forms of cancer.

Lemieux, a private man, has devoted most of his charity work to the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. While his bump went undiagnosed, Lemieux filmed a public-service television commercial recounting his personal losses to cancer.

“It was annoying,” Lemieux recalls of the bump. “And it was growing week to week. I started to get worried about it.”

Already out of the lineup because of a back injury he had suffered Jan. 5 against the Boston Bruins, Lemieux had the lump checked and doctors did a biopsy.

It was Hodgkin’s, cancer of the lymph nodes.

Charles Burke, the Penguins’ team physician, tried to break it to Lemieux gently, explaining that there is now more than a 90% cure rate for Hodgkin’s.

Cancer doesn’t break gently.

“People say cancer and you think of death,” said Penguin goalie Tom Barrasso, who nearly lost his baby daughter to cancer a few years ago.

The night Burke dropped the bombshell, Lemieux broke down in tears in his car as he drove home. There waited Nathalie Asselin, his fiancee, six months pregnant, unaware that anything was wrong.

“The toughest time I had to go through in my life,” Lemieux said, “finding out I had cancer, driving back in my car, thinking about all the bad things that can happen, knowing Nathalie and the baby were on their way, thinking about missing out on things in life.”

But Lemieux quickly pulled himself together and drew inspiration from the hundreds of cancer patients who wrote him.

Later, they would draw from him.

On March 2, Lemieux was back on the ice against the Flyers in Philadelphia, weeks earlier than most had predicted.

“I get tons of letters from people with cancer,” he said. “People diagnosed with Hodgkin’s. There’s a lot of encouragement in the letters. They feel confident in their outcomes because I did it.

“That’s why I was so determined in my comeback. I could have taken another month off, to regain my strength. But that’s why I came back.”

Miles away, in a modest suburban home outside Pittsburgh, a 15-year-old boy looked on as cancer took one in the teeth.

“If he made it through, you can too,” Plummer said. “If he made it back, I can try too. A lot of people don’t fight. They let it take over. They want things done for them.”

*

Where does Lemieux’s return rank in the annals?

Do you dare compare a cancer comeback to Willis Reed’s limping back on the court against the Lakers? Kirk Gibson’s hobbling around the bases? Bo Jackson’s going deep with an artificial hip?

Yet, others have made dramatic athletic returns, even from Hodgkin’s.

Jeff Blatnick, a Greco-Roman wrestler, overcame the disease and went on to win a gold medal in the 1984 Olympic Games.

Yet, those in Pittsburgh would have you believe that Mario Lemieux has walked on water.

Granted, it was frozen.

“What he has achieved cannot be minimized,” Barrasso said. “It’s a tremendous human triumph. It’s unheralded.”

As the Penguins go for their third consecutive Stanley Cup title, facing the New York Islanders in Game 7 of the Patrick Division final tonight at Pittsburgh, winger Rick Tocchet awaits a call from Central Casting.

“No question, this is a movie script,” he said. “The adversity of a superstar. It would be a great TV movie, because it has a happy ending.”

Burke, the Penguins’ physician, says Lemieux has defied logical medical explanation.

“I have never seen or heard anything like this,” he said. “People have come back from injuries, or at least returned to the sport, but he not only returned, he returned at a higher level.”

Blatnick, not surprisingly, has charted Lemieux’s case closely.

“I was a little in awe (that) he was able to do it so quickly,” Blatnick said. “I’m very impressed.”

Not everyone was.

Mike Brophy, a senior writer for the Hockey News, ignited a firestorm in Pittsburgh recently when, in a column, he chose not to name Lemieux as his most valuable player in the Patrick Division, opting instead for Islander center Pierre Turgeon.

It wasn’t so much that decision as his explanation that set off a city.

“In retrospect, he came back from something that was no more serious than any other injury,” Brophy wrote of Lemieux.

Cancer? Any other injury?

According to statistics, about 1,500 people still die of Hodgkin’s disease in the United States each year.

Howard Baldwin, the Penguins’ owner, was so enraged that he fired off a scathing response to Brophy.

“Have you been living in a cave?” Baldwin wrote in a letter, printed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Hockey News. “This is not just another knee injury. This is not just a groin pull. This is CANCER.”

Tossing bedside manner aside, Burke said he bets Brophy will never get brain cancer because it would require the writer to have a brain.

“I was just shocked that some jerk can write something like that about Mario Lemieux,” Burke said.

Brophy recently issued a written rebuttal that ran next to Baldwin’s letter in the Hockey News. He did not back off his statement, but he tried to clarify it.

And when contacted, Brophy said he was sticking to his argument.

“He came back as strong as ever,” Brophy contends. “The ending could have been much scarier. Through no fault of his own, he did exactly what anyone with Hodgkin’s disease would have done. He got his treatment. I didn’t mean to be callous, cavalier, but in this one instance, Mario did the only thing he could do.”

Lemieux’s response was brief.

“Maybe he never had any person close to him that has gone through it,” he said.

If Brophy’s comments were in poor taste, some independent experts do say that Lemieux’s return was not that big a surprise.

Dr. John Lister, a former collegiate hockey player who treats Hodgkin’s patients at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, figured it was only a matter of time before Lemieux came back.

When he learned of Lemieux’s plight, Lister asked, “How many games will he miss?”

Another doctor, Witlod Rybka, clinical director of marrow transplant at the PCI, said Hodgkin’s disease is one of medicine’s few success stories against cancer.

Hodgkin’s is diagnosed in four stages, Stage 1 being the most curable, Stage 4 the least.

Lemieux was in Stage 1, during which the cure rate is 90% or better.

Physically, Rybka said, there was no reason to believe Lemieux would be at risk.

“Forced rest is pretty much disappearing from medicine,” he said. “When I was a kid, and you had a cold, you went to bed. What is (Lemieux’s) reasonable limit? Does he damage himself physically? No, I don’t think so. Not a bit.”

Well, maybe a little.

Lemieux underwent 22 radiation sessions in 30 days. The treatments weakened his legs and killed hair follicles. He lost his sense of taste.

“Everything tasted like cotton balls,” he said.

Five times a week, for a month, Lemieux reported for 9 a.m. appointments at Beaver County Medical Center in Pittsburgh. As he lay on his back, most of his body protected by a customized lead shield, Lemieux’s face was marked with tattoos to geometrically align jolts of radiation to an area extending from his jaw line to his upper chest.

Doctors pinpointed a spot just to the right of his Adam’s apple. The sessions lasted only a few minutes.

In Hodgkin’s disease, white blood cells, necessary to fight off the body’s infections, inexplicably become abnormal and multiply, at the expense of other vital blood elements. If unchecked, Hodgkin’s can cause a variety of infections, anemia and, in advanced stages, tumors in the lymph system.

Most of the estimated 7,000 persons afflicted with Hodgkin’s each year are in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Doctors do not know why.

Early detection and radiation treatments have led to a high remission rate.

But radiation is no picnic. By the fourth week, Lemieux was sleeping much of the day.

Yet, on March 2, about 12 hours after his final treatment, Lemieux flew to Philadelphia on a chartered jet and scored a goal in a 5-4 loss to the Flyers.

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane . . . no, it’s Super Mario!

Lemieux closed the season with an incredible run. He had 56 points in the Penguins’ last 20 games.

During Lemieux’s treatment, Pat LaFontaine of the Buffalo Sabres overtook him for the lead in the NHL scoring race. Lemieux trailed LaFontaine by as many as 18 points on March 10, but by season’s end he had dusted LaFontaine to win the scoring title, his fourth, by 12 points.

*

Has Liz Taylor made as many dramatic medical comebacks?

Lemieux has been plagued throughout his nine-year career with chronic back problems. In 1990, he underwent surgery for a herniated disk. An infection developed and forced him to miss the first 50 games of the regular season.

But then, Lemieux rode in on a white Zamboni to save the Penguins and help them claim their first Stanley Cup.

Last year, in a divisional playoff game against the Islanders, he broke his hand and was sidelined for five games. Again, he returned to dominate another Stanley Cup final series.

Lemieux, a player with Wayne Gretzky-type skills on a much larger frame--he’s 6 feet 4 and 210 pounds--takes a licking and keeps on checking.

More than once, Burke claims, a stiff-backed Lemieux has had to be literally lifted off the trainer’s table and carried to the ice before games.

You don’t hear much about these stories because when it comes to drawing attention to himself, Lemieux leans more to Garbo than Gretzky.

Lemieux is a reluctant superstar, a pleasant but mostly uncompelling interview.

Language used to be a barrier for the French-speaking Lemieux, who grew up in Montreal, but years of practice and soap-opera watching have left Lemieux speaking English as if he had stepped off the set of “General Hospital.”

So, a media-savvy Lemieux, sitting on the feel-good sports story of the year, might do wonders for a league craving national attention while it grovels for its next cable-television package.

It is the NHL’s wildest dream that Lemieux will check into Introverts Anonymous.

The Penguins are not much help on this front, though, keeping Lemieux on a tight leash as they fight off the national press corps with a stick.

Lemieux does not wish to wallow in his own remarkable story, they say. Next faceoff, please.

But this was cancer he has so far defeated, not some ligament strain.

In truth, his return to the ice was so swift it may have undermined the seriousness of the story.

“The amazing thing is that people look back at it like he had the flu,” says Tom McMillan, a Pittsburgh-based free-lance writer.

Questions regarding Lemieux’s health have always drawn skepticism.

Great as he is, he has missed 103 games in the last 3 1/2 years, mostly because of back problems that continue to plague him.

How valuable is he? In the last three regular seasons, the Penguins are 74-40-14 in games with Lemieux, 34-37-5 without him.

Lemieux’s inspiration to others is real, but inspiration must also know its context.

Cancer remains mostly a cold, random killer that manifests itself in degrees of hope.

“It’s as different as anything you can think of,” Lister said.

For those with Hodgkin’s, though, Lemieux can serve as a model for hope.

Wrestler Blatnick said: “What Mario stands for is that not only is there life after cancer, there is life during cancer. That’s a huge step forward.”

Though Lemieux did not need cancer, Hodgkin’s disease needed Mario Lemieux.

“I’ve had a hard time telling patients that they were well again,” Rybka said.

Conversely, no amount of inspiration was going to save Jim Valvano, the former North Carolina State basketball coach who died recently of bone cancer.

Making the distinction is important.

In a recent article, author Robert Brody hypothesized that athletes stood a better chance of returning from cancer because of their superior physical and mental makeup.

Lister disagreed: “Does a positive mental attitude influence the survival of cancer patients? No. Never. Of coping with it, yes. But unfortunately, cancer does not have ears.”

Even Jeffrey Plummer, at 15, understands that his cancer is different, that nothing Lemieux does on the ice will determine whether he gets to keep his right leg.

Actually, the dynamics of Lemieux’s mental comeback may be more impressive than the physical.

Barrasso understands that, perhaps better than anyone else.

He nearly lost his daughter, Ashley, to a rare form of cancer called neuroblastoma. She underwent a life-saving blood marrow transplant at L.A. Children’s Hospital in 1990 and has since been cancer-free. She will turn 6 in September.

“Every child she was sick with in the ward in Pittsburgh is dead,” Barrasso said.

Barrasso said there is no explaining to someone who has not been through the ordeal.

“Even when you talk about cure rates, there are no guarantees,” Barrasso said. “You cannot minimize someone’s anxiety.”

Although Lemieux’s prognosis is good, no one knows what the future holds.

Blatnick had a recurrence of Hodgkin’s that ended a comeback attempt for the 1988 Olympics.

“I pray to God he doesn’t have to get it back to prove it’s a tough disease,” said Blatnick, who is back in remission.

But there is no crystal ball where cancer is concerned. Lemieux doesn’t know if his will return, any more than Plummer knows if doctors can save his leg.

“I’m not like I was before the cancer,” Lemieux admitted. “I’m not to the point where I’m playing like before. But I feel a lot stronger than a month ago.”

Plummer, who walks with an agonizing limp, says he’s much smoother on his skates. Like the pros, he says, he wears a skate many sizes smaller than his regular shoe size, “so I can feel the ice.”

For the moment, his Aunt Marge, who has been caring for Jeffrey since his mother, Carol, died three years ago of breast cancer, will not allow the boy to join an organized hockey league. It’s too risky, she says.

Plummer begs to differ.

“If I was good enough, they’d take me.”