He began another game in a life of games with an emotion he never showed.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here,’’ Dick Vitale said Tuesday night.
He was crying, the tears falling, his face a mudslide of emotion.
“I’m sorry,’’ he said.
The ESPN voice of college basketball choked up then, before the start of another big game, No. 1 Gonzaga versus No. 2 UCLA, in a manner that didn’t need apologizing.
“Let’s get this game going and talk some basketball,’’ he said.
Dickie V has cancer. He turned to sports for what the doctors, the chemotherapy, the regimen of pills and tests and medical charts can’t provide. Happiness. Diversion.
“The medicine of basketball,’’ he said at one point on the telecast.
Isn’t that it? Doesn’t what surrounds our games often tell more of their impact than what’s in them?
A Dolphins fan from Illinois was buried with a Dan Marino jersey this year for the happiness the former quarterback brought to his life. A 9-year-old in Utah suffering himself from brain cancer asked to put NFL quarterback Tom Brady’s highlight video on for inspiration at the hospital.
The Utah fan then visited a Tampa Bay game, healthy and waving the sign, “Tom Brady Helped Me Beat Cancer.” Brady came over, shook his hand, the boy crying.
“He was the one inspiring me,” Brady later said.
That’s the tonic of sports even amid the at-times toxic reactions to scores. Just look at this week. Here are everyday moments, like the annual turkeys passed out by teams. Coach Brian Flores wears a T-shirt of Ladder 118, the Brooklyn firefighters his uncle worked with who lost eight first responders in the 9-11 tragedy.
Dolphins receiver Albert Wilson will host several low-income youth at Sunday’s game as part of his ongoing link to his life. His parents were imprisoned. He lived in foster homes. He moved in with the family of a high-school teammate and navigated small-school Georgia State to the NFL.
“I did it and want to show others they can succeed, too,’’ he once said.
