Fighting Back -- For Walt Kyle, Competitiveness Is Simply A Matter Of Character

Laden with two shoulder bags, a suitcase, an equipment bag and a briefcase, Walt Kyle staggered through the doors of the Thunderbirds' hotel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, his 24-hour journey from Sweden finally over.

Team president Russ Williams, who had watched his team lose the edge off its Kyle-inspired work ethic during the coach's three-week absence, took one look at Kyle. "Meeting," he announced.

Kyle, who had left to coach the U.S. team to fourth place in the world junior championship, dropped his luggage in a pile, and smiled wanly. "Relax, Russ, it's only hockey," he said.

Williams was kidding - to a point. He knew Kyle was exhausted and needed time to gather himself. But like everyone in the organization, he needed a touch of the steadying optimism and reassurance Kyle brings to his job and his team.

Kyle's focused intensity has given the T-birds a grinding style of play. Yet he was serious about it being just a game, an attitude more personal than professional, an approach forged in two life-threatening battles with cancer.

"After what I've been through, I don't think pressure affects me the way it used to," said Kyle, 36. "I don't feel it much. I want to win games more than anyone, but personally, I'm happy just to wake up every morning."

He learned the best way to stay alive is to fight back.

"I think my background as a player and coach helped me beat cancer," he said. "A lot of what I learned about competing and giving total effort to winning helped me get through. I feel strongly the most important thing any of us take from competing in sports is character. Character of the participants is the critical element in winning or losing."

The specialist who treated Kyle in Marquette, Mich., remembered the way this particular patient dealt with it.

"He'd come in every night for chemotherapy as if he was ready for a game, complete with national-anthem jitters," said Dr. Aaron Scholnick. "Cancer was another opponent to outhustle, outfight."

When he was a player at Boston College in the late '70s - the first Iowan ever to win a hockey scholarship - doctors found a tumor on his hip. It was non-cancerous, but after surgery to remove it, Kyle was on crutches for nine months and missed his junior season.

In 1983 he felt a pain in his ribs and was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma. "It's a bone cancer that strikes children or young adults," he said. "They told me it was pretty serious."

"The mortality rate is still high," Scholnick said. "And back then, it was much higher."

Three years later, cancer showed in his left lung. After losing a rib and half of two others, Kyle now lost half his lung. Doctors also found cancer running along an artery but could not get to it. This time Kyle underwent a different kind of chemo. Scholnick said new drugs had been developed in the three years, and they made a difference.

"That's why I tell people to keep fighting," Kyle said. "If I had given up, I might have been dead before the new chemo was used."

One positive thing came from Kyle's illness. The nurse who drew his blood during frequent testing, Ann Quinn, later became his wife. "Four years later," she laughed. "He wasn't easy to talk into marriage."

Their first date was dinner. "I was in chemo and I had to leave the table every 20 minutes to go throw up," Kyle said. "I found out later, Ann knew what I was doing."

Despite job opportunities elsewhere, the cancer kept Kyle in Marquette, on two accounts. First, he had to pass up jobs because of he wouldn't be able get insurance with his existing condition. Then, since the chemo had left him sterile, he and Ann were on a list to adopt a child.

"If we left, we'd have lost our place," Kyle said. "It was important. After five years clean and clear, I was insurable and we adopted Quinn, our daughter who is now 7 months old."

According to Scholnick, the second battle took more from Kyle, who admitted the relapse scared him. "He'd take chemo five days straight, and he was the only person ever to insist on taking it at night," the doctor said. "That way he'd get over the nausea and vomiting and be ready for hockey practice the next morning."

Kyle downplays any suggestion he fought harder to live than anyone else would. "Anyone faced with a choice of fighting or dying would fight," he said. "I may be fortunate in one way. My mother never let me whine, `Why me?' She'd say, `Why not you? Maybe God gave it to you because you are strong enough to handle it.' "

Dorothy Kyle remembers her son's battle.

"I spent a lot of time in bed with tuberculosis myself, and remember seeing people sicker than me, but I don't remember anyone stronger than Walt," she said. "Not just because he's my son. . . . He not only refused to let the cancer beat him, he simply refused to let it limit him in any way."

His fighting spirit came from his mother, hearing stories of how she dealt with six years in a tuberculosis hospital before he was born. "It's where she met my dad," Kyle said of his father, who was also a TB patient. "She spent all those years flat on her back in bed with 40 pounds of sandbags on her chest if I remember the stories right. It was to keep the lungs deflated or something, and I guess that's how they treated TB in those days."

Walt, Sr., who died in 1985, and Dorothy settled in Waterloo, Iowa, an odd place for a hockey man. "My father was heavily involved with the Waterloo Black Hawks of the U.S. Hockey League," Kyle explained. "We had a rink right behind the house. I got to practice with the team, then when I was 16 I went to play for the Austin (Tex.) Monarchs."

Kyle was captain both years, led Austin to a national junior championship and won the scholarship to Boston College. While he was in Boston, brother John, 13 months younger, accepted a hockey scholarship to Northern Michigan. Kyle transferred to NMU, and again helped a team to the national finals.

"I wanted to stay in the game, but I knew I wasn't good enough for the NHL," Kyle said. "I was honest with myself. I knew I wasn't as big or strong as guys around me who were making it."

Rick Comley, hockey coach and athletic director at Northern Michigan, hired Kyle as assistant coach and a career was born.

Kyle wound up staying 11 years, but not because he wanted to. Not that it was bad. "Rick gave me a lot of responsibility," said Kyle, who wound up being the Wildcats' chief recruiter. "We had good teams, won the league three times and won the NCAA in 1990. I was getting a lot of positive experience, but I did have some job possibilities I'd have liked. I just couldn't pursue them."

As always, Kyle drew positive things from essentially being trapped by his health.

"He's a great communicator," said Blake Knox, T-birds team captain. "This year things have been a lot more positive. He's the third coach I've had in junior hockey and by far the most positive.

"We all know he's had cancer, and guys like me who visited the people at Fred Hutch (Cancer Institute) know what it must have been like for him. We respect him for what he's come through, and how he keeps the game in its place, yet stresses the importance of giving your best."

Kyle's coaching tenet is not to cheat in your effort.

"When I was sick, I had a lot of time to reflect on life and playing the game right," Kyle said. "The most important thing in playing is what you take from sport into life. When a game is over, the score doesn't count any more. All that counts is how you played, how much of yourself you gave to your team.

"Never cheat on that, and if you don't now, you won't later in life."