When sports really matter

The story of a family that took the fight of sport into a series of battles against cancer, and came out stronger and closer

By BRENDAN BURNETT-KURIE

bburnett-kurie@faribault.com

The coach beckoned from the sideline, and as Kyle approached, he handed him a card signed by the entire varsity team.

Logan skated off the ice at regionals and looked into the stands, staring at the empty space where his dad should be sitting.

Noah, just 5 years old, cried.

On a refrigerated, snowy February day nearly five years ago, everything changed, never to be the same. Kyle made sure Noah did his homework. Made sure dinner was served every night. Made sure Logan got to practice. Slowly, it got better. Briefly, normalcy returned.

Now, four years later, it begins again. Noah takes the dog out for a walk; feeds it. He sets the table. Logan brings him to practice; takes him to games.

In between they play. They run and throw and shoot and hit and crash and jump and fling and smile and swear and yell and laugh and do everything else that all the other boys, the ones without this weight on their shoulders, do. There, in a world protected from what they know all too well — the worry and the crummy hospital food and the anguish — wrapped up tight in a cocoon, that’s where they go to be away.

In life, they live. In sports, they escape.

*****

The Murphy’s are, frankly, sports nuts. They play sports and talk sports and live sports. Noah can quickly spurt off his favorites: Football, baseball and hockey, in no particular order. Kyle piled up four letters in baseball and basketball. Logan will soon have six.

As kids, Troy coached them. In cub football and community center basketball he showed them the basics. Tackling form, boxing out, how to throw a spiral.

One day, Troy went on a business trip and had trouble catching his breath. He’d never smoked, but after three more weeks of aggravation, he had a doctor check it out. From there, he was transported to the hospital by ambulance.

On Feb. 14, 2008, the diagnosis came back: Lung carcinoma. A malignant tumor in the third lobe of his right lung.

“We were devastated,” Murphy said.

“I was really shocked,” said Logan, who was in seventh grade at the time and is now a senior at Faribault High School. “You go there and you see him hooked up to machines and it’s different. It’s not normally how you see your dad.”

Not a dad like Troy Murphy. Not the dad who coached Logan’s sixth-grade cub football team to a perfect 7-0 record. Not the dad who held the clipboard for Kyle’s youth basketball teams and took Noah into the William’s arena locker rooms to visit his idol Seth Helgeson, who grew up just five houses down from the Murphys.

“I didn’t really know anything about it,” said Noah, now 10 and playing three sports. “But I thought since he was in the hospital it must have been bad.”

Eleven days after his diagnosis, Troy had surgery to remove the lower lobe of his right lung.

“The surgery was textbook,” Troy said. “Went perfect.”

But suddenly, three days after the surgery, Troy developed an infection that spread into Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

“(I) wasn’t supposed to survive through the night,” Troy said. “Many don’t.”

Troy fell into a coma.

*****

For 30 days, Troy’s body fought to stay alive. On the 31st day he awoke.

His wife, Renae, spent her days at the hospital, watching over her husband as he clung to life. In her place was Kyle -- using a work ethic he said was honed through sports -- quickly transformed from high school freshman to man of the house.

“Kyle didn’t complain when he had to take care of his brothers, he just did what he had to do,” Troy said. “Kyle and Logan had to grow up really fast.”

While friends, family and neighbors brought over meals and checked in on the boys, near the top of Kyle’s priority list as patriarch was making sure his brothers got to their practices and games.

“It helped them get their mind off of things,” Kyle said. “They were staying active and I tried to help them get through their day with a normal routine.”

“It was probably a tough job keeping us in line,” Logan will admit. “He really took on the big brother’s role.”

*****

In between those practices and games, the Murphy boys spent endless hours sitting at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. They would come and tell their dad about the games they’d won, the goals they’d scored or the new move they learned.

For many of those trips, he couldn’t hear them; but the words came easily and quieted away the beeps and whirs of the medical equipment. They would read to dad as he was “sleeping.”

“You walk into ICU and he’s hooked up to all these cords and you just want to talk to him,” Logan said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s really hard.”

Talking was important. So was continuing to play. For the boys, it was a time to escape.

“It helped a lot, especially the guys I was surrounded with,” Logan said. “They made it easy to take your mind off things. My teammates have always been there for me.”

Those were the stories they would tell their dad. Like the time Kyle was practicing with the B-squad basketball team and varsity coach Steve Lansing pulled him off to the side to give him a card signed by the entire varsity squad.

“That helped a lot,” Kyle said. “That was pretty cool that some of the older guys knew and cared.”

When Troy was awake, he would revel in the stories his boys told him; joy at their successes winning the battle over the regret that he couldn’t be there to watch.

“It probably killed him inside,” Logan said. “But what can you do?”

“It always made him happy if we came and visited and we had a good game,” Kyle said. “I think it helped him realize that we’d tried our hardest while he tried his hardest.”

Three boys and hours spent roaming the halls brought about a few lasting memories. In one, they invented a basketball game in the lobby involving a trash can. In another, Noah still talks disdainfully of the “Abbott McDonald’s” their not-so-ironic labeling of the cafeteria.

“The food there is kind of gross,” Noah critiqued.

*****

As winter turned to spring, winter sports transitioned into baseball season. Troy was finally home after a 36-day hospital stay. He wasn’t as spry as he once was, still going through rehab, moving slowly and learning, in his words, “how to walk, breath and be on the move again.”

Soon he was back at their games, easily noticeable from the field with his camera alternately covering his face or slung over his shoulder.

“It makes me really happy because he takes pictures and videos of me and he’s not in the hospital anymore,” Noah said.

Baseball was the only sport all three boys played – Kyle didn’t play football for long and Logan and Noah chose hockey over basketball – and all that time spent in lawn chairs alongside diamonds across town quickly emboldened Troy’s spirit.

“That was probably the best physical therapy in the world,” Troy said. Often he would bring Noah, who while not understanding the gravity of what was happening with his dad, knew he was a little less confused and a lot happier when watching his older brothers at play.

“It was fun to watch (Kyle)’s basketball and baseball games and, Logan, his hockey games are really fun to watch and so are his baseball games,” Noah said.

The calm wouldn’t last long. More bad news awaited the Murphys as spring turned to summer.

*****

This time it wasn’t Troy. It was Kyle.

During a routine checkup between his freshman and sophomore years, doctors found a swollen lymph node and sent Kyle to Children’s Hospital in St. Paul to see a specialist. Half his thyroid was removed and tests came back showing it was cancerous.

“I would have traded my life for his in a second,” Troy said. “Just months after my ordeal how could this be happening again?”

They kept Kyle’s condition close to the chest. He continued playing VFW baseball as the original specimen was sent from the Children’s Hospital to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

“It was hard because I knew what my dad went through and I worried about him so I knew my family members were worrying about me too,” Kyle said. “I stayed positive because I knew my dad was always positive and my mom was positive. That helped me get through things.”

For three years, Kyle went through batteries of tests, scans and checks before doctors gave him a clean bill of health. Now a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Kyle has been cancer-free ever since.

*****

It’s a story of a family that looked tragedy in the eye, stood tall, didn’t back down and lived to stare it down again. Finally, after getting dreaded news twice in just eight months and fighting through a pair of lengthy recoveries, the Murphys felt they had emerged victorious. Family life returned to normal. Boys were boys again.

Then the cancer came back.

It was June 2012, time for another routine check. Troy headed to the doctor as his first-born got ready to head off to college. He told his doctor he hadn’t felt so good in more than four years. The doctor read his most recent scans. Staring at him were two growing spots in Troy’s lung. This time, doctors had to remove the middle lobe of his right lung.

“I don’t know if there is ever a good time to tell your kids that you have been diagnosed with cancer, especially for a second time,” Troy said. “But we did.”

Noah took to praying for his dad every night. Logan assumed Kyle’s position as big brother, making sure his little brother got to practices. Noah is always on the lookout for things he can do to help: taking out the trash, walking the dog, setting the table, or, most recently, wrapping presents.

“They’re little things, but he’s just trying to help out,” Kyle said.

There was no coma this time, no quick-spreading infection. But there was something that brought its own mix of malaise: chemotherapy. In typical fashion, Troy refused to let the cancer win, even if it was just a small battle. Before he lost his hair, he took control and shaved his own head. If you don’t know him, you’ve seen him at hockey events, the ball of energy with the tan fedora on, likely a camera and tripod in one hand and Blue Line Club info, of which he is the only two-term president, in the other.

When Kyle came home for Thanksgiving, he brought a surprise wrapped in a woolen hat: He had shaved his head for his dad.

“Never a prouder moment as a dad,” Troy said of seeing Kyle and his glistening globe. A month later, Kyle was back for Christmas and the family was reunited again for the holidays.

“It was good to have everyone home for the holidays and the brothers are happy to be home and reminiscing about the good times we’ve had in the past,” Troy said. “It may not be a perfect world, but it’s our world.”

But what is a perfect world? Logan is in the midst of his senior year at FHS, starting for a hockey team just finding its footing. Noah is happily playing youth hockey. Kyle is enjoying school and they all bring home good grades. Most importantly, dad’s on the sidelines watching, not relying on hastily recounted stories to re-live his children’s exploits.

“I know he always loved coming to watch us,” Kyle said. “When he’s there, it’s nice because you know he’s OK.”

So as long as they hear that faint click of the shutter and see that hat bobbing through the crowd, they’ll always know they can still be boys playing a game.