Goal meant more than victory
ATTACKING MIDFIELDER: Caps’ Kianz Froese dedicated first pro tally to his ailing dad
When Kianz Froese scored his first professional goal for the Whitecaps on Saturday night at Red Bull Arena, the proudest man in Canada was sitting at the Shark Club in downtown Winnipeg.
Joe Froese, Kianz’s dad, had to ask a server to turn one of the dozen or so screens to the MLS game. Baseball was off. His son was on. And in that 77th-minute moment, Joe was a wild man.
“I was the only one yelling in the bar,” Joe said by phone Monday.
“I had the intuition the minute he touched the ball that this was it. I saw him breaking. I’ve seen him do this since he was five. And I thought: ‘It’s his turn now.’ ”
If some patrons around Joe knew it was his son, they’d have only grasped a sliver of this story.
In February, Joe was in a Havana hospital.
A colonoscopy gone wrong. A perforation. Emergency surgery.
Kianz left Caps training camp and flew to Havana to be by his side.
Kianz’s mom, Esperanza Gonzalez, and sister, Jarmony, were there, too. For the sake of Jarmony’s schooling, they are living in Havana, where Kianz was born before the family moved to Winnipeg.
“For a father to have a child …” Joe said, pausing every few words. “He was 18 when he visited me in hospital. … I was on my death bed in Havana. … The last person I spoke with when they said, ‘You’re going in for emergency surgery,’ was Kianz. … I didn’t know if I was saying goodbye or not.”
He was in a coma for five days. When he woke up, Kianz was there.
The doctors told Joe he was a fighter, told him he had an amazing family.
He’s not out of the woods. During the procedure, they discovered he had colon cancer. He had surgery to remove the tumours and lost almost 60 pounds during his hospital stay.
He’s gained most of the weight back, but he’ll await a clean bill of health in Vancouver, where he’s been living with Kianz the last few months and getting looked after at Lions Gate Hospital — the Whitecaps doing their part to help out the family every step of the way, which Joe can’t say enough about.
So you can begin to understand what must have been going through Kianz’s head after the New York game, when he dedicated the goal to his dad — “because he’s been struggling,” he said — and he could barely contain his emotions on camera.
In a few hours, it would be Father’s Day.
“I remember when I was in Cuba with him, I said, ‘I want to start doing things so you can watch me score,’ ” said Kianz, a powerful attacking midfielder on the cusp of cracking Canada’s national team at 19.
“You never know when people aren’t going to be by your side. I’m just happy to have the opportunity to have him around longer and to spend time with him.”
Joe, who grew up on a dairy farm in Saskatoon and makes his living off solar and PVC piping patents, figures he’s got “another 30 years” yet. He’s 54. That’s a whole bunch of Kianz clips, judging from what we’ve seen so far.
His finish on Saturday — the winning goal, it turned out — was calm and confident and everything the front-running Caps have not been on the counter-attack this season.
It was Kianz’s seventh MLS appearance for the club and his first shot on target after years of lighting it up for the residency teams.
He did well to steal the ball to start the play, too, before Octavio Rivero laid it perfectly back into his path.
“This week’s been good,” said Kianz, who is rooming on the road with Pedro Morales and was set to take in a New York Yankees game Monday. (They bus to Boston Thursday for Saturday’s game against New England.)
“I had a good week of training. I was watching the game (from the bench) and thought it would be a nice place to score, a nice day to score. And it happened.”
Joe — a former provincial team striker — loved the goal. The first of many, he figures. But it’s not what he’s most proud of.
He’s most proud of the way his son has carried such an emotional burden this year while pursuing his professional dream. “Cancer loves stress,” Joe said. “What he’s done is stay with me and look after me so I don’t have stress. For a 19-year-old to do that for a 54-year-old father is very profound.”