The Comeback Kid
Cancer Couldn't Stop Brandon King & Neither Can the Other Team!
By Daniel Townsend and Joe Maxwell
Brandon King’s 12-year-old neck was itching in his World History class last April. “I felt a big lump,” he recalls. “I could move it up and down. I didn’t think anything of it.”
As president of the Florence Junior High and a soccer star, he stays
busy. So last April, he didn’t think much of it.
Brandon is the good-looking kid; the smart one; the one picked first in
neighborhood ballgames. (As an incoming 9th grader this coming fall and
the youngest in his grade, he’s dressing out with the Florence High
School football team in summer practices as their field-goal kicker. He
recently won the “Punt, Pass and Kick” event at Belhaven College’s youth
football camp—against the high schoolers.)
“I just go off by myself and kick all practice,” he says, as if it’s no big deal.
His over-and-under moves with a soccer ball are wicked; his quickness
causes his body to bend when it cuts; and his right foot can fire a
strike at the upper-90 from 30 yards—numerous times … in a row.
He smiles after making another shot, as if expecting the result. But at
just under 5-feet-tall, he talks down his ability. “I just play for
fun,” he says.
A year ago the fun stopped when Brandon’s neck finally led him to a
doctor. Then came the diagnosis: Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“He was diagnosed on me and my husband’s anniversary,” says his mother,
B.J., whose faith in God is deeply instilled in her son. The two sit
beside each other, telling their story.
B.J. cried her eyes out at the news and become angry. “The things your
child goes through—broken hearts, bad grades—(as a parent you can)
relate to them,” she explains. “With this, however, I couldn’t say, ‘I
know how this feels.’ ”
Brandon admits he cried all day and night when he heard the news. “I
didn’t know what to do. I felt like, I don’t know how to explain it, it
was horrible.”
What was God wanting to teach them? B.J. wondered.
It wasn’t the family’s first painful struggle.
Brandon’s natural father abandoned the family when he was four; his sister, Kaylyn, was diagnosed with Catastrophic Thinking (causing repeated fainting and seizure-like symptoms) a year before Brandon’s diagnosis.“I had a serious talk with God,” B.J. recalls. “I just prayed we’d see the positive.”
Surgery to remove the lump was scheduled for a day prior to one of
Brandon’s biggest days. His beloved team, the Richland Taz—who has
played together for years—were to play in the Div. II State Championship
qualifiers at the Jackson Futbol Club in Jackson.
Brandon was his team’s leader and top scorer; but cancer and surgery
were going to kill his chances for leading his team to victory. “He’d never sat out a quarter (of play) in his life,” his mom explains;
now the doctors said there was no way he would play that tournament.
(Last year, the Taz tallied 105 wins, tied two and lost only five.
Brandon scored 720 goals, averaging eight goals per game.)
On a Wednesday at St. Dominic’s Hospital, Dr. Annond removed a 6 X 6-centimeter mass from his neck. Twenty-five years prior, it would have killed Brandon, the doctors said. But Brandon treated it like a simple cut. He proclaimed after surgery that he was going to play the soccer tournament—doctors’ and mom’s permission or not.
So the doctors bubble-taped and gauzed Brandon’s neck and Mom drove
Brandon 10 minutes over to the soccer fields.
From the second Brandon got out of the car, hundreds of people at
scores of fields began hearing of his arrival. Emails had circulated for
days regarding his condition. No one expected to see him there.
Suddenly, teams from Northwest Rankin and Laurel came and prayed with
Brandon and with his mom.
B.J. said, “When a complete stranger will come up and pray with you,
that’s a good thing.”
That day, Brandon showed out, playing at top form. “People would say their ankle hurt, and then they would look at Brandon
and get back on the field,” B.J. said.
Brandon scored four goals
in that soccer match and his team won.
Brandon’s coaches, Todd and Sandy Brown, “never chose to say your kid
can’t play,” B.J. says, appreciatively. They knew how much it mattered
to him. Brandon describes the Brown’s as his “other mom and dad.” The
couple was voted the Mississippi Youth Soccer Association coaches of the
year.
But big battles were still ahead. Brandon now faced three rounds of
chemotherapy, so B.J. shaved his head to avoid the depressing feeling of
slowly losing his hair.
The concrete room, a sad, small cubicle, is stuffed daily with patients.
One day, while Brandon took chemo, he looked around at other kids lying
on beds in the dismal room. “I saw a bunch of kids who looked like toothpicks,” Brandon says, his
head tilted downward, his lip trembling. “They were so skinny.”
(Brandon’s voice thickens and chokes when he recalls the children.) “When I saw them, it made me want to work harder and give them hope by
playing soccer again.”
Brandon looked at his mom: “There are people with cancer,” he said, “that need to know that they can have a life.”
Brandon went on with his Taz team to play in the Mississippi State Games
in Meridian last year, though he was only at 50 percent from his chemo
treatments. The impact he made there inspired State Game officials to
name him
2007 State Games Male Athlete of the Year.
Brandon wears a paint-splattered T-shirt bearing this quote: “Pain is
temporary, but pride and accomplishment
lasts forever.”
Brandon was named Male Athlete of the Year by the Mississippi Soccer
Association. Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant gave him a medal at the state capitol.
Groups have held massive fund-raisers for his family’s immense cancer
expenses; his Taz teammates and parents have encircled him with love.
And Brandon gives all the credit for his recovery to God.
“He put me on this earth to do what I have to do, to play soccer and
teach other people about God,” Brandon said. (When he first sat sick at
home, Brandon thought about a boy he knew at school that had drawn
disrespectful pictures of Jesus. Brandon told his mom that
he hoped his illness might
cause this boy to think more about God.)
Two Friday nights ago, Brandon ran over the 22nd Street Bridge into
Meridian’s downtown. Thousands turned and watched as he jogged by them
and up onto a stage, carrying the flame of the 2008 State Games of
Mississippi.
His face, golden in the flame’s light, seemed intent on getting his role
right—lighting the State Games flame. But it was BJ’s face that was
really shining.
There, in the crowd, she looked up along with thousands of other kids
and adults to the stage where her boy stood, his hand holding the flame
high. A port still is lodged beneath the skin in Brandon’s chest where
her son takes treatments and shots. Pride was lodged in BJ’s chest.
“How often,” she says, “does a mom get to look at her son and say, ‘you’re my hero’?” SS
—joe@thesportingspirit.com
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