An appreciation of sports, the cranberry of life, at the Thanksgiving – Boston Herald

He started another game in a life of games with a feeling he never showed.

“I can not believe I’m sitting here,” Dick Vitale said Tuesday night.

He cried, tears fell, his face was a mudslide of emotions.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The ESPN voice from college basketball choked at the time before the start of another big game, no. 1 Gonzaga versus No. 2 UCLA, in a way that did not have to apologize.

“Let’s start the game and talk a little basketball,” he said.

Dickie V has cancer. He turned to sports for what the doctors, the chemotherapy, the cure with pills and tests and medical charts can not provide. Happiness. Derivation.

“The medicine of basketball,” he said at one point in the television broadcast.

Is not it? Does not what surrounds our games often tell us more about their influence than what is 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 Utah, who suffers 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, waving the sign, “Tom Brady helped me beat the cancer.” Brady came over, shook his hand, and the boy cried.

“It was him who inspired me,” Brady said later.

It’s the tonic of sports, even in the midst of the sometimes toxic reactions to scoring. Just watch this week. Here are the everyday moments, like the annual turkeys that have gone out of teams. Coach Brian Flores wears a T-shirt of Ladder 118, the Brooklyn firefighters his uncle worked with, who lost eight first aiders in the 9-11 tragedy.

Dolphins receiver Albert Wilson will host several low-income teens at Sunday’s game as part of his ongoing connection to his life. His parents were imprisoned. He lived in a nursing home. He moved in with the family of a teammate in high school and navigated from the small school Georgia State to the NFL.

“I did it and want to show others that they too can succeed,” he once said.

We can continue. At every game in every city, teams like the Heat and Panthers in South Florida thank members of the military who probably thought thanks had passed them by.

There’s a retired Sun Sentinel sports writer, Craig Barnes, now in the hospital after breaking his hip last weekend. It’s been a tough race. His wife of 55 years died last month after a long illness. He cared for her, day after day, for five years, quoting the phrase, “By sickness and health.”

His story got better than any game story he covered.

Every day, sports bring us something fresh and inspiring if you want to see it. Tuesday it was Dickie V. He was diagnosed with biliary tract cancer last month. He went home and Googled it and saw that the typical case had months left. He was a wreck, he said.

“I thought as an 82-year-old it was over,” he said.

The diagnosis then changed to lymphoma. Still bad. But healed. “No one was happier having lymphoma,” he said.

He raised more than $ 40 million to fight pediatric cancer at an annual event. He does even more in the context of the foundation of Jimmy Valvano, the former basketball coach who lost the battle against cancer after an inspiring match.

Earlier this month in Sarasota, near his home in Bradenton, Vitale cut the ribbon for an oncology wing at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. He was then treated for chemotherapy there. He was allowed to work last week.

Now he was back for a fight.

“It’s great to be here,” he said on television. “I did not want to cry …”

He cried. Who did not, with him, while they watched? In a former sports world when ESPN had just begun, Vitale was the biggest voice in basketball and perhaps the defining voice for that network. Now big or small, defining or not, is not the point.

“It’s a thrill just to be here,” he said.

Fantastic as his slogan sounds.

It’s Thanksgiving, a time of family and appreciation. Here is an appreciation of sports. They are not life. They are fillings or cranberries, whichever accessories you prefer. Sometimes, as Dickie V showed, they’re just good medicine for what you get handed out.