Brave boy’s spirit lifts Stanford team
Just before the Stanford men’s basketball team played Oregon a few weeks ago, the players were given a pep talk by the day’s honorary captain.
“I’ve fought for the last year. Now you need to fight in your season!’’ he told them. “I want you to beat the quack out of the Ducks!”
They did just that, by 35 points, Stanford’s most lopsided Pac-12 win in 16 years.
The inspirational and effective speech was delivered by 11-year-old Ty Whisler of Tahoe City (Placer County), who has been battling brain cancer for nearly a year and a half.
He was back on the Stanford bench Thursday night and again the Cardinal won big, beating Washington 94-78.
“He’ll have to bomb a plane ticket when we go to Arizo-
na” next week, forward Reid Travis said.
On Sept. 4, 2016, three days after being diagnosed, Ty had part of a pingpong-ball-size tumor removed in an operation at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Doctors couldn’t get all of it because it was wrapped around his brain stem. A biopsy revealed that the tumor was malignant.
At Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, he underwent six weeks of radiation and then seven months of chemotherapy, missing all of fourth grade.
During that time, Tom Orlich, assistant to head coach Jerod Haase, contacted the hospital to see if any patient wanted to hang with the players. A social worker said the staff had just the kid, a sports nut who was going through a very painful treatment.
In January 2017, Stanford players Dorian Pickens, Robert Cartwright and Christian Sanders visited Ty for the first time at the hospital. “It was literally love at first sight,” said his mother, Jill, a dietitian at a Tahoe hospital.
Center Grant Verhoeven, who graduated in June, took him miniature golfing. Michael Humphrey and Pickens played catch with him at Stanford’s Quad. Sanders, who now works on Wall Street as a financial adviser, still stays in touch with him.
“These players and coaches took him in as if he was their own child or their own brother,” Jill said. “It helped so much with his healing process. As a parent, you can never say thank you enough.”
She said the players even adopted Ty’s brother Nathan, 15, and sister Sydney, 3, “realizing they’re having a hard time leaving their little brother to this disease.”
Ty attended practices, took part in pregame meals and dribbled with the players in pregame warm-ups. Besides giving the pep talk at the Oregon game, he sat on the bench during the game and joined the players in huddles during timeouts.
They dubbed him their good-luck charm.
“Our guys have taken a genuine interest in him, and Ty’s taken a genuine interest in our team, so it’s been fun,” Haase said. “Hopefully, we’re a good-luck charm to him as well.”
As young Ty sees it, yes, they have. Their support “has been huge,” he said. “They’ve helped me not think about all the medical stuff. It takes away some pain.”
The players marvel at his outgoing personality, undiminished by his ordeal.
“His charisma, his energy, his toughness, his overall happiness regarding life is great,” Pickens said. “As much as we make him happy, he makes us even happier.”
Ty was 9 when he was diagnosed with what’s known as medulloblastoma. According to the St. Jude Children’s Hospital website, the tumor starts in the base of the skull and tends to spread quickly to other parts of the brain and the spinal cord.
From 250 to 500 children are diagnosed with it each year in the U.S., according to the website, which said the survival rate is 70 to 80 percent if the disease has not spread. The Stanford doctors have him in a clinical trial with the St. Jude Research Center. He has his spinal fluid checked every three months.
“The chance of it recurring and spreading are (greatest) in the first two years,” Jill Whisler said. “After two years, they’ll potentially let us make it every six months, if it doesn’t spread.”
If the youngster hadn’t gotten accidentally kicked in the head as the goalkeeper in a soccer game following the first day of school in 2016, the tumor probably wouldn’t have been detected until it was too late.
He was immediately groggy, according to his father, Alan, a firefighter. “He kicked the ball back into our goal,” he said. “He wasn’t sure which way to go.” His head was extremely sensitive, Jill said.
“For the grace of God, he went into concussion-like symptoms,” his mother said. “The doctor in Oakland said he had been growing this tumor for about six months. It’s a very aggressive tumor. The doctor said that in two weeks it would have caused stroke-like symptoms. We would have never caught it. We got lucky — very, very lucky.”
But he’s not home free. “St. Jude said if it comes back, there’s no other treatment we can do,” she said. “It would be a quality-of-life issue at that point. Does he want to live the rest of his life in a hospital, or do we just let him live it out?”
Just before the Oregon game, Haase and some of the players were reviewing game tapes when the youngster rushed into the room to tell them that, for the first time, the tumor was shrinking.
“They started clapping,” Ty said. “They were really happy. Coach Haase almost started crying.”