“You’re talking about a deadly disease that has to be cleaned out of your body. You just hope that you catch everything in time.”DARRYL STRAWBERRY TAMPA – The riveted Yankee players sat at their lockers yesterday, silent, eyes and ears locked on the manager. They liked what they heard from Joe Torre. They took comfort in how confident he sounded about his decision to have surgery. They noted how upbeat he sounded, how strong and healthy he appeared.
While they all looked Torre in the eye, Darryl Strawberry stared deeper and didn’t stop until he found the cloud hovering over the man’s thoughts. He knew what was hiding back there because it lived in his mind too, still lives there.
“You have a great attitude about it but at the same time, in the back of your mind, you know that now that you’ve been diagnosed with cancer you’re part of what society is trying to discover a cure for, which it hasn’t done,” Strawberry said. “It’s a different type of battle. It’s not one where you just go in and have surgery like it’s an injury type of thing. You’re talking about a deadly disease that has to be cleaned out of your body. You just hope that you catch everything in time.”
What Strawberry was saying was that cancer changes you and you never quite change all the way back.
“We’ve all faced different battles in our life,” Strawberry said. “I’ve found out in my life there is no battle bigger than facing cancer. You only realize that when you are a cancer patient. You have to go through so many different things.”
Torre is scheduled for surgery Thursday in St. Louis. He sounded eager to bring it on. Strawberry could relate.
“First thing you have to do is get it out of you. Get in there as soon as possible and try to get it done. The longer you wait, the bigger chance you take.”
It says something about the disease when patients can’t wait to undergo a complicated procedure that will leave them weakened and staring at rehabilitation.
“Cancer patients don’t go through easy surgery,” Strawberry said. “We go through some difficult surgeries to have cancer removed from our bodies.”
Strawberry’s tumor was in his colon. Torre’s cancer is in his prostate. For both men, fear resides in the same place, in the back of the mind.
Joe Torre is a tough man who has a way of spinning everything in such a positive way. His optimism never has been challenged as it’s being challenged now.
“It’s frightening,” Torre said. “I’m a lot better now than I was a week ago.”
So are the players, thanks to the manager’s visit.
“It was great to see him because the last time I saw him was when he dropped the bomb on us, Roger [Clemens] and I, in his office,” David Cone said. “He just dropped a bomb on us and that was it. We didn’t know what to say. We were just kind of shocked. We just told him to let us know if there was anything we could do for him.”
Torre let the whole world know yesterday there is something we all can do for him. We can use the money we were going to spend on flowers sent to the hospital in his name for a donation to the Starlight Children’s Foundation, C/O Joe Torre, 1560 Broadway, Suite 600, New York, N.Y. 10036.
“He’s a classy guy,” Cone said. “One of the classiest I’ve ever met.”
A classy guy facing tough times.
“The main part is the emotional part that you have to go thorugh, recognizing that you have a serious problem,” Strawberry said. “It’s not a small problem when it comes to cancer.”
The red flag for Torre came in the results of a blood test taken during the annual spring training physicals. Last year’s test was fine, this year’s wasn’t. That’s one of the signs the disease was detected in its early stages. That’s reassuring to Torre, but only to a point.
“I don’t think anybody knows until you do the surgery,” Torre said.
Even after the cancer is removed from the body, the fear doesn’t vanish from the mind. Not entirely.