Coping With Loss Amid Victory : Death of Goffredo’s Wife Colors Crescenta Valley’s Exploits

As John Goffredo prepared to coach the biggest basketball game of his life--the Southern Section boys’ Division I-AA championship game--dozens of letters and phone calls poured in, from friends and strangers alike.

“There are so many people who are so happy this is happening to me,” the Crescenta Valley High coach said. “They say it shows there is some justice.”

That is where the letters are wrong. To imply that justice has been done would suggest that any number of victories on the basketball court can erase Goffredo’s loss.

When the Falcons meet Long Beach Poly in the championship game at 6:45 tonight in the Anaheim Arena, it will be, for Goffredo, little more than two more hours in which he won’t have to think how much he misses his wife, Kathy, who died of cancer in August.

“When you share every happy thing that happens to you in your life with someone, and then they are not there to share it anymore, every happy moment becomes a sad one,” Goffredo said.

After the Falcons, an at-large team with no returning starters, upset Santa Ana Valley last Friday to advance to tonight’s game, Goffredo sat on the bench and cried.

Tears of joy for a victory.

Tears of sorrow because Kathy couldn’t be there to share it.

“I feel like I’m at the pinnacle of my career and the basement of my emotions,” Goffredo said. “That’s the paradox of this whole thing.”

*

It was almost as if John and Kathy Goffredo were put on earth for each other.

They were born one day apart. They first met in seventh grade, first dated in ninth. Goffredo was the captain of the basketball team at Burroughs High in Burbank. Kathy was a cheerleader. Goffredo knew early this was the woman of his dreams.

They dated for eight years, through high school and college, then married after graduation.

“She was incredibly intelligent,” he said. “Yet she loved to be with people and to have fun. She would do anything for anybody. You don’t find many people that are as giving and as caring as she was.”

Goffredo also was taken by her beauty. Even as she grew older, she took pride in her appearance. At 42, she and her 15-year-old daughter Kristen shared clothes.

The bond between John and Kathy strengthened during 20 years of marriage. They had three children: Kristen, Kimberly, 12, and Jimmy, 9.

“Kathy and I were so close, we always used to joke that we never saw any couple as in love with each other as we were,” Goffredo said.

Every evening, when Goffredo returned home from Crescenta Valley and Kathy from Hoover, where she was a math teacher, the two took a walk together. It was as much because they relished the time together as it was for fitness.

During one of their walks in November, 1992, Goffredo noticed Kathy limping.

Two years earlier, doctors had diagnosed a fibroid, a non-cancerous tumor on her uterus. The doctors told her it was five centimeters in diameter, but nothing to cause alarm. Many women have fibroids that come and go, doctors told her. A year later, it was 10 centimeters.

When Kathy experienced the hip pain, doctors first thought the fibroid was pushing on a nerve. A CAT scan in December showed a cancerous tumor. It was on an ovary, not the uterus, and spreading to her hip.

She underwent surgery Jan. 4 and the affected tissue was removed. Kathy began chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Goffredo became almost totally detached from his basketball team, which was 11-1 at the time of the surgery, coaching only in games and leaving the practices to his assistants.

“His concentration wasn’t on basketball,” Crescenta Valley Athletic Director Bob Canfield said. “He had other worries. John is very loyal to his family. He was going to do anything she required. Anything.”

He offered to quit coaching, but Kathy wouldn’t allow it. She never talked about anything but total recovery, and she seemed headed in that direction. Less than three weeks after the surgery, she wanted to see a basketball game.

“I tried to talk her out of it,” Goffredo said, “but she wanted to be there. She wanted everyone to know she was OK.”

Kathy sat just inside the entrance to the Crescenta Valley gym, smiling and greeting people as they arrived for a game against first-place Muir. A capacity crowd saw Crescenta Valley win a dramatic game, 74-72, handing the Mustangs their first Pacific League loss in three seasons.

As the Crescenta Valley players headed out the door and down to the locker room after the game, they hugged Kathy, one by one. They signed the game ball and presented it to her.

“That was the greatest basketball game I’ve ever coached,” Goffredo said. “Not just because we won, but how and why we won, and for whom.”

The Falcons dedicated the season to Kathy, and everything started looking up. Crescenta Valley continued to improve and advanced to the section semifinals for the first time in Goffredo’s 16-year career at Crescenta Valley. They posted 22 victories, the most by one of Goffredo’s teams.

Kathy also continued to improve.

“She started walking better,” he said. “They started taking blood tests and the cancer in her blood was down to zero. She was better and better. She went through the chemotherapy like no one had ever seen.

“We thought we had licked it.”

Then in May, watching one of her daughters in a dance performance, Kathy felt a pain in her back.

It was another tumor. There were also three in her brain and others throughout her body.

“It just got worse and worse,” Goffredo said. “She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t get off the couch. I had to carry her to the bathroom.”

Kathy went back into the hospital. She slipped into a coma temporarily, then came home for one last time. For two or three days, she was coherent, able to see visitors and talk to everyone. Then she went back to the hospital.

Her immune system weakened by the cancer treatments, she developed pneumonia and died Aug. 26.

*

Tragedies don’t bring families closer together. They merely reveal the families that already are.

The whole Goffredo family attends Crescenta Valley games, just as it always has--Jimmy as the ball boy, Kristen as a cheerleader and Kimberly as a fan.

Goffredo still coaches Jimmy’s youth basketball team. Even Jimmy’s sisters show up for his games.

“This is a great family,” Goffredo said. “All the kids are taking care of each other because they love each other. That’s the way Kathy raised them.”

Without Kathy, though, Goffredo let his children decide if he would continue to coach, or if he would stay home with them.

“I have to be their parent,” Goffredo said. “If they didn’t want me to coach, I wasn’t going to coach. It was going to be as hard on me as it was on them. They wanted me to coach. In their words, they wanted everything to be the same.

“That’s my goal right there, to try to make everything as close to the same as we possibly could. That’s why we don’t have a housekeeper.”

Goffredo cleans the house. He makes lunches, does laundry, shuttles kids back and forth to baseball practice and dance lessons. He cooks, sort of.

“I can only make grilled cheese and macaroni,” he said. “We eat out a lot.”

On the basketball court, Goffredo said he has tried to coach the same way he always has, with a few exceptions.

Goffredo annually holds a meeting Nov. 1 with all the players in the Crescenta Valley basketball program, from the freshman to the varsity. He gives what amounts to a pep talk. Goffredo couldn’t muster the emotion this season.

Most of the tasks Goffredo can no longer handle fall into the laps of assistants Gene Murphy, Jim Smiley, Jack Dunbar and John Pehar. They have done everything from producing and printing the program to organizing the alumni game to planning the Crescenta Valley tournament in December.

“Gene Murphy has been unbelievable,” Goffredo said. “He has done everything that no one knows about and not taken any credit, never once asked for a thank you. All I do is go out there and coach two hours a day.”

He coaches a team that had no returning starters, a team that lost its front line to injuries early in the season, a team that lost its gym to the Jan. 17 earthquake, a team that finished fourth in the Pacific League and slipped into the playoffs with an at-large berth.

He will coach that team in the championship game tonight.

“I think (Goffredo) has done a miraculous job,” said Canfield, the athletic director. “An absolutely miraculous job. There is a very sensitive balance between his responsibilities at school and his responsibilities and obligations as a single parent.

“It can be an overwhelming burden at times, and he has handled it masterfully. It’s just a testimony to his true character.”

When Goffredo speaks to the team before tonight’s game, the first section championship game for Crescenta Valley since 1971, there won’t be any reference to Kathy, just her initials on the chalkboard, as they have been for each playoff victory.

“I don’t use (Kathy’s death) as a motivational tool,” Goffredo said. “I think that would cheapen everything I believe. But I don’t think anything needs to be said. I think they know how I feel and I know how they feel.”

For two hours tonight, Goffredo will not be thinking how much he misses his wife.

In fact, he figures, in some way, she will be there.