Michael Jordan’s return to pro basketball arrived just in time for the Great Comebacks awards dinner this weekend in San Diego, with one problem.
This annual event honors real comebacks — not those of bored, rich athletes whose idea of adversity is getting cut from the high school varsity.
The ceremony, sponsored by the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America for 17 years, will honor individuals who battled prolonged illness and won.
“These people,” said CCFA event founder Rolf Benirschke, “really redefine the meaning of coming back.”
Comebacks? Benirschke himself knows about them. He had completed three seasons as a place-kicker for the San Diego Chargers in the National Football League when he was diagnosed in 1979 with ulcerative colitis. There was surgery, he dropped from 183 pounds to 123, and had been written off by fans and the team — before rehabbing himself into shape, returning to football, and kicking a game-winning field goal against the Miami Dolphins in the 1982 playoffs.
“But how important was football to me after that? Not very,” he said.
Comebacks are everywhere, if you look for them, and 99 percent don’t make screaming headlines or attract legions of TV cameras. Now, with announcers re-evaluating their warlike descriptions of sports, maybe this is a good time to put Jordan’s comeback in perspective — an announcement that sent the sports media into apoplexy.
First of all: He’s playing basketball, for Pete’s sake, not running the country.
Abe Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas in a U.S. Senate race in Illinois before he was elected president. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political career seemingly was ended by polio before he was elected to the White House. Harry S Truman went broke in the clothing business before he entered politics. And in perhaps the greatest political comeback ever, Richard Nixon, after losing to John F. Kennedy in his first presidential run, and then to Pat Brown in the race for California governor, finally got elected our chief executive in 1968.
Furthermore: Jordan is basically healthy, so all he is overcoming is lethargy and middle age; he is not coming back from a physical handicap.
Until a fall from a horse in a 1995 riding accident, Christopher Reeve, now 49, had a promising acting career on stage and screen, earning celebrity status for his role in cinema’s “Superman” (1978) and sequels. Since that accident left him paralyzed, Reeve, confined to a wheelchair and a ventilator, has continued to act, most notably in a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Rear Window” and directed the HBO film “In the Gloaming.”
Uphill battles
Or, how about Lance Armstrong, the three-time Tour de France champ who overcame testicular cancer? Or, Mario Lemieux, who overcame Hodgkin’s disease that had forced him to retire to come back and perform magnificently for his Pittsburgh hockey team. Or, closer to home, Rachel Barton, the Chicago classic violinist who lost a leg in a 1995 Metra train accident and has gone on to great success as a performer.
“The greatest heroes are people just walking the streets you never hear about,” said former Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Bleier. “It’s easy to put yourself through a lot of work when you’re being paid to do it, like a lot of athletes are.
“But real pressure is the truck driver who’s got a family and knows he has to come back in two months or he loses his disability insurance payments.”
Bleier’s career was interrupted when he was drafted in 1969 and shipped to Vietnam, where he was wounded and went through rigorous rehabbing before returning to football. He says Jordan’s return will be fun to watch, a nice diversion from the troubling times we’ve entered as a nation. But he has no trouble distinguishing comebacks that are real from those that are made out by the media to be bigger than life.
“I had to go back in last winter to have a shoulder replaced and I had to go in several times a week to the hospital for physical workouts,” he recalled. “I was surrounded by people, and a lot of them were pretty old, doing the same thing for knees and shoulders and elbows, whatever. I was amazed at their determination, though maybe I shouldn’t have been.”
Dr. Martin Mullen, in charge of a Loyola Medical Center heart transplant facility, the state’s oldest, has had more than 540 patients receive new hearts in 17 years. He says “people coming back” are daily fare at his institution. “You don’t hear much about them because these are everyday people even though they’re in extraordinary circumstances,” he said.
Mullen said he’s continually overwhelmed by the duress patients put themselves through, including, typically, at least 12 weeks of rigorous physical rehabilitation. But one case — that of Cheryl Tracey, who lives in the western suburbs — sticks with him. Tracey, a mother of four, was stricken by a rare heart disorder while giving birth to her last child.
A three-year journey
“Basically, she went into heart failure soon after giving birth, went into shock, and had such low blood pressure that we put her on a partial artificial heart,” Mullen said. “Then, she had a stroke. Six months later she was able to obtain a new heart, which we were able to successfully transplant. Today you’d never know all of this. It’s been three years, but she still works out six days a week.”
David Zemon, a physical therapist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, sees comebacks too, but they take place only after months or even years of intense physical and mental discipline — all of it accomplished without the cheering crowds that are in place to motivate pro athletes.
What it takes for spinal cord or stroke patients to fight their way back, Zemon points out, is intense daily training, with progress measured in inches. The therapy can be repetitive, boring and painful. The result is often something the rest of us take for granted: the ability to tie a shoe, shower without help, fix a sandwich, walk from the car to the house.
Many patients find family and friends supportive in the beginning, but then they must persevere with daily therapy long after the get-well cards and calls stop coming. “It’s almost a 24 hour-a-day job to be able to get some of these skills back,” he said. “Often, those who make the most remarkable comebacks continuously set short-term goals, meet them, then set the next round of goals — like, `I’m going to stand up with minimal assistance from the wheelchair to the parallel bars. I’m going to walk five feet in the pool.’ It’s being able to break things down into smaller goals.”
Even now, Zemon is surprised by the comebacks regular people stage after having their lives transformed by accidents. “Just the other day, I had one of my old patients, who had been in a horrible car accident and suffered a spinal cord injury and fractured leg, come in (to the institute). She walked over to me without any assisting device and gave me a big hug. Those are the moments you wait for.”
The annual Arete Awards, a tribute to courage by athletes, are presented every year in Chicago by Intersport and most of the recipients have made comebacks. But in the majority of cases, they are unknown to the general public. When this year’s awards are bestowed on Oct. 19 at Navy Pier, the recipients will include Erik Weihenmayer, 32, whose conquest of Mount Everest last May completed his quest to climb the highest peaks on five continents — despite having been blind since age 13.
Last year, Cliff Meidl was honored for becoming a U.S. Olympic kayaker after an accident on his summer job caused 30,000 volts of electricity to shoot through his body. His injuries necessitated 15 surgeries in 15 months. Despite competing in the 1996 Olympics, the former high school cross-country runner has never regained the complete use of his legs.
“Sometimes,” Meidl noted at the ceremonies, “you make a positive out of a negative when you come back. I probably never would’ve been in the Olympics as a runner, but the kind of movement I could do — paddling — was good therapy and I just worked as hard at it as I could.”
For Don Nelson’s comeback, the goal is not the Olympics or any other high-profile event.
Wants old job back
The former detective in the Lake County Sheriff’s Department broke his neck July 4, 2000, in a golf cart accident. The mishap left him paralyzed from the neck down.
But thus far he’s worked his way back to walking aided only by crutches. With a wife and 6-year-old son at home, he has a special incentive to perform his grueling regular workouts: the promise of his old job back per his boss.
“Michael Jordan’s coming back because he wants to,” says Nelson. “Me? I’m coming back because I have to. I don’t have an alternative.”
They rebounded
– Donald Rumsfeld: He is the Minnie Minoso of Defense Secretaries.
– Rudy Giuliani: Embattled mayor is suddenly King of New York.
– Deng Xiaoping: Former Mao favorite disgraced during Cultural Revolution, but returned as boss of China after Mao’s death.
– Nelson Mandela: Apartheid foe was a political prisoner for 28 years before being elected president of South Africa in 1992.
– John Travolta: Feverish popularity in the ’70s led to comatose ’80s career, but he is big again — in more ways than one.
– Cybill Shepherd: Promising movie career foundered, but two hit TV series reinstalled her as a star.
– Steven Jobs: Co-founder of Apple Computer was ousted in 1985, returned triumphantly in 1997 to revive foundering firm.
– Rachel Barton: Violin prodigy lost leg in train accident but has fought her way back to be concert headliner.
– George Foreman: Regained his heavyweight title in 1994, but his newest career is sizzling — literally.
– Jennifer Capriati: Tennis star fell from sight due to drugs, then powered her way back to the top.
They got stuffed
– Mary Tyler Moore: Could turn the world on with a smile, but later TV series never re-created success she had as Mary Richards.
– Leon Spinks: Tried vainly for years to regain the heavyweight crown he unexpectedly won from Muhammad Ali.
– Napoleon: Unable was he after he erred and left Elba.
– Jane Byrne: Though she made several later attempts to recapture high office, former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne was out of hurrahs after 1983.
– Bo Jackson: Valiant attempts to return from crippling sports injury were doomed.
– Judy Garland: Tried many comeback attempts but the arc of her life was inexorably headed down.
– Del Shannon: After “Runaway” success early, rocker hit skids; despite help of Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, comeback attempt failed to click and he committed suicide in 1990.
– Lech Walesa: Solidarity founder was Poland’s first freely elected president after fall of Communism, but later couldn’t get elected dogcatcher.
– Robert Downey Jr.: Enough said.
