Wife’s Recovery From Cancer Is Biggest Win for Jazz Coach Sloan

The scare with grave consequences subsided in 50 weeks into a we-can-deal-with-it threat, even if it will loom ominously for at least several more years. It has changed Jerry Sloan for the better, but none of his Utah Jazz players are about to joke with their coach about his transformation, because he hasn’t changed that much.

“They’re afraid to,” said Karl Malone, one of those players.

That’s because this is an alteration, not a personality transplant, and Sloan remains the last coach in the NBA Latrell Sprewell would dare to choke. A mistake like that would have, shall we say, greatly reduced the number of arbitration hearings and lawsuits, probably down to one--to decide who pays for Sprewell’s hospital bills.

Jerry Sloan, 56, has not changed around the game, not much since all the way back to when he was a two-time all-star and six-time selection to the all-defensive team with the Chicago Bulls. In those days he would arrive at Chicago Stadium so early and be in uniform so far ahead of the others and be sitting at his locker, seemingly ready to pounce, that Coach Dick Motta one day walked up and told him to get a hobby. He is tenacious, at least on the days tenacious can stand up to him.

His wife, Bobbye, knows this better than anyone. They met as 13-year-olds in the farm country of southern Illinois, dated off and on through high school. He nominated her for basketball queen when they were sophomores (she won), and they got together for good as seniors. They graduated in 1960, then he went on to star at Division II Evansville, and they got married April 12, 1963. He didn’t change.

Then she got breast cancer.

There was no family history. Bobbye was a registered nurse and physical fitness nut. She had smoked, but quit about 25 years earlier, and she passed a manual breast exam just four months earlier and a mammogram 16 months earlier without a hint of trouble. She even ran a mini-marathon with son Brian not long before the lump was detected.

That was June 13, 1997--the same night the Bulls beat the Jazz in Chicago to win the championship. Bobbye had stayed in Salt Lake City, watched that Game 6 on television, and afterward lay down. The stabbing pain in the left breast was immediate.

“I reached down and I felt it,” she said, “and I knew immediately.”

She didn’t tell anybody right away, especially not Jerry--”He’s like a doomsayer.” She had been planning to have minor surgery anyway, so that was the guise by which Bobbye stayed in Utah while her husband drove to their permanent home in McLeansboro, Ill., a couple of days after the Jazz had its season-ending meeting. He didn’t think anything of it.

She had a mammogram the day after Jerry left. It showed something about the size of a marble. Two days later, she had a biopsy. Bobbye reached out to Brian, but only Brian, because he was a doctor, now sworn to secrecy. Two daughters, a sister in Nashville, a husband--no one knew. The results finally came back in early July.

It was malignant.

Only then was Brian given the go-ahead to tell the family members. She opted for a mastectomy in mid-July in Salt Lake City. A few days after that, the lab results on the lymph nodes had come back with very encouraging results, indicating the cancer had not spread beyond the left breast, but Bobbye still underwent chemotherapy in case one cell had escaped.

She started in August, and the dark hair that was once soft and fine and fell down to the middle of her back had turned coarse like hay. The second dose came about a month later, and she woke one morning to find a mass of hair on the bed.

“I thought, ‘You know what? I don’t need this,’ ” she said.

So she walked across the street to the salon and told them she wanted to go G.I. Jane. Just like that. The lady at the shop gave her a buzz cut, and Bobbye left, crossed the same road, went inside, took a razor blade, and then shaved off the remnants. She bought a wig with shoulder-length hair and everyone assumed she changed styles.

Chemotherapy continued until November, the start of this season. She had the breast reconstructed in January. Come May, she was running about three miles a day and outrunning cancer. There is no sign of a return, but doctors will wait five years before being able to say for sure she is cured.

In the meantime, she has gone public with a battle that once remained private even from those closest to her in hopes it will encourage other women to give themselves self-examinations and to see their doctors as scheduled. And he guides the Jazz into the NBA finals against the Bulls for the second year in a row. He’s the same coach, but a different man.

“More laid back,” Malone said. “More than anything, when the horn blows, he just walks away from the game and it’s just a game. And that’s neat to see.”

Laid back?

“I can’t even think of words to describe it,” Bobbye Sloan said. “He’s so much more relaxed. He’s not all tense and uptight. When he’s around the house now, he’s with us. He’s not standing outside on the porch smoking.

“It’s kind of like maybe through me he had to face his own mortality. Even though I’m planning on being around for another 20 or 30 years, all at once you’re faced with it--it could be, it could happen. Whereas before, it was, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ That invincible attitude.

“I think it’s changed him a whole lot. When it comes to his job, he’s still intense and he’s still terribly, terribly competitive and there’s nothing he wants more than to win and there’s nothing he wants more than whatever the best of what his team has to offer, and he’ll still rant and rave. But it’s like he said. The perspective on life is different now.”

Relaxed?

“I don’t know that it’s changed him all that much on the floor with the players,” said Phil Johnson, his top assistant coach and close friend. “I think he’s still very aggressive. I think that he seems to be able to let it go a little more off the floor, away from it. I don’t think it’s changed his coaching much. I think there’s still an intense desire there.”

Let it go?

Jerry Sloan?

Jerry Sloan.

The three-pack-a-day guy who would get in a quick smoke at halftime as a player and coach has quit. The guy of whom Bobbye once joked, “He doesn’t drink one or two, he drinks all of them,” now has an occasional beer or margarita, but no longer comes home smelling like a brewery, especially since that time in February when Bobbye tore into him for trashing his body while she was fighting to save hers. And now she’ll stick around after games and go out for a postgame snack with him instead of heading home and waiting for him there.

“You hate to say that something so awful could have anything good come out of it,” said 27-year-old Holly Sloan, the youngest of their three kids. “But it has been amazing.”

All the way around.

“I’ve been able to handle situations maybe a little bit better,” Jerry said. “In my own mind. I don’t know if I have. Other people would have to tell you whether I’ve been able to or not. But I feel like I have and I feel like I haven’t let it [basketball] totally consume me.

“I just feel better. I think I’m able to give more to people that I have to than what I did before. I probably thought a little too much about myself.”

Said Holly: “It’s always been basketball, basketball, basketball. That’s what our family has been about. I think every family has to experience something to make them take a step back.

“He’s more calm. Much more calm. He’s not quite as taken over by the game itself. He was never one to come out and rant and rave when he came home. That was on the court. But it was in his eyes.”

His eyes now see better.

“More interested in what’s going on in front of him instead of just what went on on the court,” Holly said.

He is still one of the genuine good guys in the NBA, despite the gruff exterior that might mask that, and he now has grandchildren, which has also helped in the perspective department. Oh, and he has a wife he is closer to than ever, a wife who is in the early stages but well on her way to becoming a success story and not a sad statistic while he’s in the championship series again. Speaking of huge Jazz wins this season.

“She’s a great lady too,” Malone said. “I love my coach to death, but any lady that puts up with him is a great lady. He can be difficult at times.”

Malone smiles, knowing that some things will never change, and how that can be a good thing.