‘C’ Battle

She came to this sun-drenched paradise looking for a different kind of battle, one waged from a fighting chair, not a hospital bed.

And on her first full day in Mexico, atop the beautiful blue ocean beyond Baja California’s tip, Briten Douglas got her hooks into a spirited striped marlin that gave her the thrill of a lifetime.

“It was so much fun!” she said of the struggle, her arms weary and face flushed with excitement. “It was by far the biggest fish of my life.”

Fishing for marlin was only one of the reasons the eighth-grader from Rincon Middle School in Escondido had come to Cabo. The other, far more important reason, was to “fish for a cure” as a guest of the 13th Pete Lopiccola Memorial Marlin Tournament.

Indeed, Douglas, strikingly beautiful despite all that she has been through, came to Cabo to carry on the battle against a deadly disease called leukemia.

It was this form of cancer that killed Pete Lopiccola, a popular skipper who succumbed two days before his 30th birthday.

Douglas, 14, has been trying to shake free of leukemia’s grasp since learning, when she was 4, that 69% of her blood was cancerous. She has fared better than most. Her remission is in its ninth year and her future, it seems, looks as bright as a Cabo San Lucas sunrise.

And after her second full day in Mexico, in a banquet room with a breathtaking view of the same beautiful blue ocean in which she caught her first marlin, the intrepid young angler got her hooks into a large crowd that was just waiting to be reeled in.

By night’s end, nearly $150,000 had been raised for the Pete Lopiccola Memorial Cancer Research Foundation at UC San Diego. An additional $50,000 went into a local fund for children requiring medical treatment their families cannot afford.

Wearing a bright red dress and sporting a smile that illuminated the auditorium at the Hacienda Beach Resort, Douglas stepped to the microphone and cast her story into a sea of people, stirring up their emotions and, in some cases, making them cry.

She told of the 10 1/2-hour surgery she endured the day she was born, to correct a birth defect called bladder extrophy. Her parents were told she might not survive the operation and that if she did she might have trouble walking and probably would live “a compromised life.”

She lived through the surgery, spent several weeks in intensive care and eventually went home in a body cast. Her first steps, long after the cast was removed, were indeed shaky ones and they got shakier as she went.

Douglas suffered through one complication after another before finally being scheduled for major reconstructive surgery--which included bladder augmentation--to hopefully repair her insides once and for all.

But that had to be delayed when it was learned, the night before, that she had cancer in her blood: acute lymphocytic leukemia, a killer of tens of thousands annually.

Her father, John, acknowledged the devastating effect this had on the family, and on Briten’s older sister Kirsten, in particular, but said the family never gave up hope that Briten would someday enjoy a normal childhood.

The reconstructive surgery was put off while Douglas spent the next few years enduring spinal taps, blood draws and chemotherapy treatments, losing her beautiful blond locks and bright smile.

“I got to meet and make a lot of new friends,” she said of her fellow patients. “Some of those friends didn’t make it through their fight with cancer . . . so I got to go to their funerals. Those sad days are something I will never forget.”

Douglas eventually regained enough strength to undergo the reconstructive surgery, which because of unforeseen complications kept her in the hospital nine months instead of the predicted two weeks.

“I finally went home,” she told an increasingly tearful audience. “The fight was as hard as my battle with leukemia . . . but . . . we won!

“By ‘We’ I mean all the teams of doctors associated with [San Diego Children’s Hospital] and UCSD. All that time . . . you were doing your part. If you were down here in Mexico, fishing, you were doing your part.

“For Pete’s Sake. That’s why I can be here with you today.”

*

Lopiccola was a widely known San Diego skipper who, like many who’d come to Cabo San Lucas before it became such a bustling resort city, fell in love with what during the mid-1970s and early ‘80s was a much wilder fishing frontier than it is today.

“We all loved Cabo dearly,” said Cami Garnier, a close friend of Lopiccola’s who eventually moved here and became one of the top local skippers.

Lopiccola’s easygoing personality, his soft smile and dark eyes helped him gain the friendship of almost everyone he met.

These friends became deeply concerned after a day of fishing in 1987. The shout “Hook-up!” after a marlin strike brought Lopiccola scrambling down a ladder to clear some gear for his client. While doing this he cut his finger on a fishing line, and by the time he got back to the dock the finger had turned black with infection.

The infection worsened to the point where Lopiccola’s friends insisted he fly to San Diego and seek medical treatment. It was there that he learned that leukemia was why his finger became infected so quickly, why it wouldn’t heal.

His cancer was in an advanced stage. Doctors recommended massive blood transfusions and a bone marrow transplant and said that even with all this, Lopiccola might only extend his life for a short time.

The fisherman declined, walked out of the hospital and went about his daily business, not telling anyone about his disease.

Forty-five days later, two days before his 30th birthday, he was dead.

“It was like somebody having a heart attack--all of a sudden he was gone,” Garnier recalled.

More than 400 attended Lopiccola’s funeral at sea in San Diego and, not long thereafter, it was determined on a sunny beach in Cabo, “after a few beers,” that a tournament be held in Lopiccola’s honor. The “For Pete’s Sake” tournament was born, and 13 years later boasts an average participation of about 70 boats and 180 anglers.

“Most of the people in this tournament didn’t even know Pete Lopiccola, but they have their own Pete,” said Chuck Faith, tournament foundation chairman, whose father died of cancer when Faith was 21. “Some of them, it’s themselves--they survived cancer. For others, it’s loved ones.”

The “Petey,” as it is commonly called, is the antithesis of Cabo’s big-money tournaments, where the lure is huge cash prizes. The Petey offers mostly donated fishing gear and small vacation packages to those who catch the biggest marlin--this year’s winner was a 387-pound blue--and all cash proceeds go to either the UC San Diego Cancer Center or into a local foundation for the children of Cabo.

Anglers are supposed to release marlin under 300 pounds, and those that are killed are donated to the local orphanage. Three marlin went that route this year, but 19, among them the 150-pound striper Douglas caught, were set free.

To date, more than $1 million has been raised--mostly through post-tournament auctions--for the Cancer Center, which matches a portion of donations.

The Cabo Foundation, with local restaurant owner Mike Grzanich as president, has received significant funding as well, and has been instrumental in helping hundreds of children get treatment for everything from cancer to reconstructive oral surgery.

Grzanich has worked tirelessly to keep the foundation going, soliciting donations of services from doctors both locally and abroad. The Los Angeles Shriners Hospital has climbed aboard, performing leg operations and fitting prostheses for several young children.

“We’re like the baby Shriners,” said Grzanich, sitting amid the clutter of sportfishing memorabilia decorating the walls and hanging from the ceiling of Latitude 22+, his funky restaurant on Cabo’s main drag. “We don’t turn anyone away.”

The list of children the foundation has helped is a long and touching one. In 1996, for example, a 10-year-old girl received a $27,000 operation to remove an eye tumor doctors said would have killed her in two months if left unchecked.

“She’s cured now,” Grzanich said, smiling proudly.

Grzanich didn’t stop there. Not long after the operation, the makeshift home the girl and her mother lived in was torn down by “the bad people” who learned that the lot would be reclaimed and resold by the city if there wasn’t a livable structure on it by a certain date.

Two days before the deadline, Grzanich and some friends used some of the fund money to buy the necessary supplies, went to the lot and in 16 hours erected what Grzanich calls a “house in a box,” complete with a concrete foundation.

“We went out there and built a 16-by-16 house with a roof, windows and doors,” Grzanich said. “The next day the bad guys came to take control of her property. They didn’t even see the house sitting there, and they told her she had to leave the property. She asked why and they said, ‘Because you don’t have a house.’ And she [pointed to the house] and they looked at each other and said, ‘Where’d that come from?’ ”

This year’s “poster child” is Juliza Aldeth Gomez Rivadeney, or Julie, a 4-year-old who has been almost totally deaf since birth. Hers is a unique condition that can be corrected with the help of an implant surgically placed behind the ear.

Grzanich and an influential group of volunteers had already convinced Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, to donate its facility. Neil Giddings, a surgeon in Spokane, Wash., has offered to perform the operation. An audiologist and anesthesiologist have also committed their services.

So, before Douglas gave her emotional speech as dusk gave way to darkness amid a drenching downpour last Saturday, Grzanich took the floor, with Julie on his shoulder, and asked those in attendance to open their hearts as well as their wallets.

Within 30 minutes he had the necessary $21,000 and whisked Julie back to her family, which will be traveling to Idaho this month to see snow for the first time and, hopefully, return home with a daughter who, during next year’s tournament, will be able to hear as well as see what the Pete Lopiccola Memorial tournament is all about.

For more information about the Pete Lopiccola Memorial Marlin Tournament call (619) 475-4636, or visit the Internet site at https://www.petesake.com.