A Second Chance at Life, Gold

This is Chris Klug’s life now. There is snowboarding most mornings, followed by a late lunch at places only the locals know about, like Johnny McGuire’s, where Klug is partial to the “trucker,” a concoction of turkey, bacon, cheddar, mayo and barbecue sauce stuffed in a helpless roll.

There also is time to hang out with his buddies and his longtime girlfriend, with his family and her family. There is time to quietly muse about the gift of a second chance.

Eighteen months ago, Klug was near death, suffering from the same disease that months earlier had killed Walter Payton, the great Chicago Bears running back. Without a transplant, the champion snowboard racer, who finished sixth in the 1998 Nagano Olympics, had just months to live.

Then a tragedy occurred outside Denver. A 13-year-old boy was accidentally shot in the head by a 14-year-old neighbor. His parents, in an act of courage and grace, agreed to donate his organs.

The liver went to Chris Klug. The liver took. Now Klug is strong again, 29, 6 feet, 3 inches, 215 pounds, full of life. He qualified this week for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, where he has as good a chance as anyone to win gold in the parallel giant slalom snowboard race.

He wants to win for himself, of course, because he is a competitive soul. He believes an American ought to win in what is essentially an American-born sport, particularly at a Games held in the U.S. And he wants to show the world that snowboarders are real athletes.

A gold medal would bring the cameras, and he would be in the spotlight long enough to ask everyone: “Do you have a donor card in your wallet?”

Klug spent three years on a transplant waiting list. The last three months, he knew his liver was in failure, starting the moment he felt like a “dagger had been jammed into my right side and turned.”

In all, the disease occupied seven years of his life. It left him with a scar that runs from his chest, down at an angle, almost to his right hip.

Called primary sclerosing cholangitis, or PSC, the disease affects about 3 in every 100,000 people, mostly young men. The liver’s bile ducts become scarred and then blocked. The cause is unknown. A transplant is the only cure.

Klug was in his early 20s when he was diagnosed after a routine physical exam after he and his family moved from Bend, Ore., where Klug grew up, to Aspen, where his mom is a schoolteacher and his dad runs a hotel a block from the lifts on famed Aspen Mountain. Abnormal blood test results raised suspicions.

“I was feeling great, I was winning World Cup races, I was doing great,” Klug said. “I was like, ‘You sure you got the right guy? This doesn’t make any sense.’ ”

Liver disease was for alcoholics or drug addicts, right? This was the all-American boy, the high school quarterback turned world-class snowboarder, good looking, well spoken, thoughtful--such a natural that he’s featured in a lengthy made-by-NBC movie trailer promoting the Olympics.

Devotion to Sport Began at Young Age

“He’s got the brains and the brawn and the fortitude and the dedication,” said Pat April, mother of Klug’s longtime girlfriend, Missy.

That dedication was evident as far back as high school. It wasn’t enough for Klug--at 15, already a snowboarding standout--to get to the slopes only on weekends and holidays. After school, he would drive 40 miles each way to a ski site near Sisters, Ore., with lighted slopes and barrel down the hill well into the night.

There is a picture of Klug at age 11, standing in front of the family Christmas tree with his first snowboard, a red one.

Even then, back in the 1980s, when snowboards still had holes near the nose--so riders could thread a rope and lug the thing up the hill--Klug knew he was onto something big: Snowboarding’s growth has far eclipsed traditional skiing in recent years.

Klug’s drive was fired by the Olympics. As a boy he watched Eric Heiden win five gold medals in speed skating at the Lake Placid Games in 1980, and Bill Johnson win the downhill in Sarajevo in 1984.

Then in 1998 he was there in Nagano, the first Games in which snowboarding was in the Olympic program.

“Everyone would always talk about that feeling of walking into the opening ceremony,” Klug said. “You can’t grasp it until you do it. It’s magical.”

At those Olympics, only family and close friends knew of Klug’s condition. He already had been on a transplant waiting list for a year, and he was regularly undergoing procedures to unclog some liver ducts, what he now refers to as “roto-rooter treatments.” But no one meeting him would have known he was suffering from a deadly disease. His skin, for instance, was not a telltale yellow.

The men’s giant slalom race in Nagano was the first snowboard event in Olympic history, featuring races running through a series of gates, just as in a traditional ski race, with one difference. Snowboarders are anchored to a single board.

Klug was tied for second after the first run; on the second, however, his hand hit a gate, throwing him off just slightly. Canadian Ross Rebagliati won the race.

“I was obviously frustrated,” he recalls, referring to his sixth-place finish. “But at the same time I was super-stoked to be at the Olympics.” Snowboarding, it seemed, had successfully made its mark. The snowboarders had proved wrong the naysayers who thought little of them as athletes and even less of the tricks they performed.

Then, three days after the race, the International Olympic Committee announced it intended to strip Rebagliati of the medal because he had tested positive for marijuana.

Rebagliati blamed secondhand smoke at a party a few weeks before. He was allowed to keep his medal when an arbitration panel ruled there were no legal grounds for punishment. But the grass-on-snow jokes had made the rounds.

“We had a great event, and then right after the event the focus switched from the focus of our first Olympics to this pot-smoking fiasco,” Klug said.

In many quarters, it all served to reinforce a perception that lingers, like wispy smoke, that snowboarders aren’t to be taken seriously.

Payton’s Death Hit Him Hard

Klug demurs, saying that snowboarders are athletes every bit the caliber of World Cup skiers.

“There are some amazing athletes on the snowboarding circuit,” he said. “They train hard. They work hard to prepare for their events, and work hard to try to win. That’s often misunderstood.”

In Klug’s case, that was evident after a freak accident in 1998 while doing gymnastics training. He tore three of the four major ligaments that support the right knee joint.

It took a full year of rehab, under the direction of Bill Fabrocini, director of the sports performance center at the Aspen Club, to get the knee back in shape.

“When he’s in the gym, he works hard,” said Fabrocini, who has since become one of Klug’s closest friends. “He wants to win. He always wants to get the edge on any competitor. He doesn’t want any variable.”

Just when the knee was back in shape, Klug suffered an emotional blow. In November 1999, he was alone in a rental car on a lonely road in Utah, en route to a U.S. snowboarding camp, when he heard on National Public Radio that Payton had died.

“I almost drove off the road when I heard the news,” Klug said. “Walter Payton was one of the strongest athletes ever. If he could die from it, I could die from it.”

That season, Klug won a number of races, including a World Cup event in Germany. But off the slopes, his condition worsened. His doctors, who were seeing him every six months, now wanted to see him every two.

‘You’re Going to Need a New Liver’

Klug did his best to live a normal active lifestyle but privately struggled with fear.

“Any time I’d get a cold, just something basic that was wrong with me that any normal person deals with, the flu or a cold or a stomachache, I’d think the world was coming to an end: ‘Oh my God, my liver’s failing,’ ”

In April 2000, Klug was in Southern California, surfing. One day it was Malibu, the next day Huntington Beach, six to eight hours a day in the water. It was then he felt the stabbing pain, the dagger turned in his side.

“I was up that entire night, just kind of thinking to myself, ‘OK, you’re going to get a new liver. You’re going to need a new liver,’ ” he said. “I knew, right then.”

The next day, he flew back to Colorado. Doctors gave him a beeper, told him not to go anywhere without it. A beep would alert him that a donor had been found and a transplant would begin almost immediately. Doctors told him to expect to wait about two months before surgery. But, they hastened to add, no guarantees.

Fewer than one-half of 1% of the people who die each year opt to donate their organs to help others. In 2000, transplanted organs--livers, kidneys, hearts, lungs--were harvested from only 5,985 cadavers.

Many transplant candidates do not survive the wait; 1,686 died while waiting for a liver that year, said Anne Paschke, a spokeswoman for United Network for Organ Sharing, which maintains the federal organ donation list.

In Aspen, two months passed without a beep. Then three months.

Klug recalled the waiting as “the hardest time of the whole transplant deal.”

“Each day and each week, you’re getting weaker and weaker. You couldn’t do the things that you were doing last week.”

As May slid into June, he said, “I was mountain-biking up Buttermilk or up Tiehack, doing my favorite rides, I’m smothering the mountain here, and the next week I couldn’t do it. Or I’d do it and have to stop.”

Then, as the calendar turned to July and his strength kept waning, “I didn’t give a damn about the snowboarding. I was just hoping I was going to live.”

On July 27, he was beeped.

Two nights earlier, the 13-year-old boy had been shot. After he was declared brain-dead, his grief-stricken parents were asked by doctors to donate his organs.

“You just have to wonder what goodness touches people’s hearts at the time that just allows them to say yes,” said Klug’s mother, Kathy. “You can’t even think through that kind of pain while your child is lying there, and you say yes to this. I’m so impressed by that kind of courage.”

The transplant was performed a day later at University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. The surgery took more than six hours.

“I came into the room for the first time after surgery, and he just leans over and puts his hands in the air and says, ‘I rule!’ ” Klug’s girlfriend, Missy April, recalled.

The average hospital stay for a liver transplant patient is 12 days. Klug was out in four. Back in Aspen, Fabrocini put Klug through two “slow months” of rehab. The next two, however, were “full force,” and by fall he was pronounced ready for snowboarding. “I was amazed at how easy [the recovery] was,” Fabrocini says, easier than reconditioning the knee.

About six months after the surgery, Klug wrote the donor family expressing his gratitude. The day after writing the note, he won a World Cup event in Italy. Later, he finished second in another World Cup event in Japan.

“I certainly don’t take a single day or a single thing for granted anymore,” said Klug, who takes medication to prevent his body from rejecting the transplant but whose prognosis is excellent.

Klug has never met the donor family. But they will be among those watching the Olympics on TV, rooting for him.

When Klug’s letter arrived, “It made all of us cry,” said the boy’s mother, Leisa Flood, 35, who now lives in Idaho. Referring to the decision to donate her son Billy’s organs, she said, “The hardest thing I ever did is when I walked out of that room knowing they were taking him down to surgery.”

The boy’s father, Rob Flood, 41, who lives in Northern California, said the experience was agonizing. But Flood said he has “no doubts” the right thing was done: “I thought if we could save some other family from going through what we were going through, it was worth it.”

A few days ago, he dug up Klug’s note, which had been sitting in a box for most of the last year, and reread it, slowly, out loud.

Dear Donor Family,

I am over in Europe doing my favorite thing in the world, snowboarding. I thank God every day I’m back on the mountain and I thank you every day for your gift of life. You have given me a second chance to pursue my dreams and to enjoy life to its fullest. None of this would have been possible without you.

I love my family and I love my girlfriend very much. They are as thankful and as grateful for your gift as I. Your choice has enabled me to continue the life I love. I am forever grateful and humbled by your decision. I am truly sorry for your loss.

It is impossible to express with words my gratitude to you. I hope through my efforts I can spread the good news on my successful transplant and someday save someone else’s life. I am forever indebted to you.

Sincerely, Chris

Rob Flood folded the paper, sighed and said, “You know, Billy always wanted to go snowboarding and never had the opportunity.”