By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Andy Talley is like any other football coach in that he wants a team with heart.
But Talley doesn’t stop there.
He wants a team with a heart, too.
The veteran Villanova coach, who at 64 opens his 29th season as a collegiate head coach Saturday afternoon against West Virginia’s No. 8 Mountaineers, figured out a few years back that there’s more to life than how your Saturday afternoon turns out.
It’s a lesson he’s passed on to his team.
See, Talley knows that while he and his team face long odds against West Virginia, he knows the odds are longer against finding a blood marrow donor for people with leukemia, lymphoma and other life-threatening diseases.
It all started for Talley not as you would think it would, with someone close to him coming down with such a disease and being unable to find a donor who could possibly save his life.
Instead, he was listening to an onocologist on a radio show in 1992. The oncololgist was explaining that only 30 percent of the people stricken with leukemia or lymphoma ever find a match for life-saving bone marrow within their family and that the chances of finding a match outside the family are ridiculously small because the pool of donors is so thin.
“It seemed like a lot of people dying needlessly to me,” he said to SI.com last year. “Then I thought, I have this great resource — 90 healthy football players.”
Coaches do like to involve their players in the community, but not at the expense of their football team. West Virginia athletes often visit children’s hospital, read to young children in school or find something else that can build a bind between the community and the school.
“Athletes have been truly given great gifts, and this is one small way to give back to someone in great need,” Talley said. “Because coaches and athletes are in the public eye, we want to raise awareness that bone marrow donors are needed. This is a great opportunity to give someone a second chance in life.”
And so it was that Talley approached his team and sold them on becoming being tested to see if they qualified for National Blood Marrow Donor Registry.
Not that they had any choice. It was mandatory.
Talley stands before his team these days and asks if they know anyone stricken with cancer. About three-quarters of the team admit they do. Then he asks if they had family members with cancer. About two-thirds of them raise their hands. Then they ask if they know someone who has died from cancer and half the group acknowledges they have.
“And then I look at the African-American kids and say, ‘If it's your mother, father, brother or sister who gets cancer, well, it's probably not going to happen for them,’” Talley said, explaining that there are very few African-American blood marrow donors.
Every year now the team is tested and rounds up other volunteers, mostly in the Villanova community, to be tested. Since 1992 Talley has been responsible for about 3,500 potential donors being entered into the registry.
But even then, the odds are ridiculously small that any will show up as a match. There are about 20 million people worldwide registered as potential donors and approximately only about 250 matches a year, a 1-in-80,000 chance.
Villanova may not beat West Virginia on Saturday, but it has already beat the odds. Two players have shown themselves to be potential matches, place kicker Joe Marcoux and linebacker Mike Holland.
Marcoux signed up as a potential donor in April 2006, and shortly thereafter learned he was a potential match, which he said excited him. More testing would show if the match was identical.
“However, they told me there was only a 1-in-15 chance that I would actually be a perfect match and I thought I wouldn’t end up being able to go further in the process,” he said.
Marcoux beat those odds. Blood samples proved to be a perfect match.
It wasn’t easy on Marcoux from that point on. Leading up to the procedure he received two injections a day to increase the number of blood-forming cells in his body.
“The injections I got had side effects such as nausea, insomnia and bone pain,” Marcoux said. “I had some of those but I think about the fact that this was one week out of my life where I might feel sick but I have a chance to save someone who has no chance of surviving if they don’t receive this donation.
“Going through with this procedure gives the patient at least a 50 percent chance of living. I can only hope that I would be lucky enough to have someone do that for me if I was in that situation.”
Holland failed to beat those odds. Found to be a potential match, he had another test but was found not to be a perfect match. Considering that he had waited two years to play, and was coming off an 11-tackle game against Maryland in the opener, the last thing he wanted was to miss any football games.
As it turned out, he failed to qualify as a donor and then suffered a concussion in the Lehigh game, causing him to miss the rest of the season.
He wasn’t happy about the turn in events.
“Missing games because of my own health is ridiculous,” he said at the time. “Missing games to save someone’s life … that’s cool. I feel like I won an award.”
Coach Talley has used worked diligently to expand his program, and has involved a seven other schools — Umass, Northeastern, New Hampshire, Maine, Temple, Harvard, Wagner and Penn — in similar programs.
And if a player comes up with a situation where he may have to miss a week during the season in order to donate, Talley says that will present no obstacle.
“What are we going to say? ‘Sorry, we have a football game to win?’” the 28-year coaching veteran asked. “We're talking about saving a life. That's greater than any win we could have on our schedule.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
