Lucas: A Success Story

By Adam Lucas

Tonight, Roy Williams and Carolina Basketball will leave Tar Heel fans laughing and cheering after Late Night with Roy Williams. But the day started with the head coach's annual Fast Break Against Cancer breakfast generating a few tears.

The event is consistently the first opportunity to hear Williams' early take on his upcoming team. Carolina practiced yesterday, and as usual, the Hall of Famer isn't as enamored with his club in late September as he might be in a couple of months. "We had more guys on bicycles than on the floor," Williams told the crowd about his team, which is trying to work through some injury issues. "We won't be very good the next couple of weeks."

Williams designed the breakfast to raise money from UNC Lineberger, and now in its 15^thyear, it has raised nearly $3 million for the cause. This year's final total won't be known until the online auction (which includes several opportunities for unusual Tar Heel access, including one that will be of significant interest for Carolina Insider podcast listeners) finishes on October 9. We tend to throw that total out and take it for granted. On a weekend when his team is practicing and important visitors in town, Roy Williams took time to raise some money, and his efforts have created $3 million that wouldn't otherwise exist to fight cancer. Ask someone whose family has been impacted by the disease--and we all know someone--how much that matters.

Friday morning's speaker was College of Charleston head baseball coach Chad Holbrook, but that description doesn't really do him justice. Holbrook's wife, Jennifer, worked with Williams in the Carolina basketball office, and Chad Holbrook was a Carolina baseball player from 1990-93 and part of the coaching staff that helped turn the Diamond Heels into a College World Series regular in the mid-2000s.

All of those are impressive credentials. But what really qualified the Holbrook family to be part of the Fast Break breakfast was their experience with their son, Reece, who was treated for leukemia at UNC Hospitals beginning in 2004.

Williams acknowledged that many cancer-related stories are not happy. But with Chad coming to the microphone, Williams said, "Let's hear some success stories."

And the Holbrook story is one of the all-time success stories. "Fifteen years ago," Chad said, "our lives were turned upside down." There were some bad days and a few good ones, and there was always the omnipresent threat--even on the good days--that things could get worse. But after three and a half years of treatment, Reece's cancer story ended happily. He is now a high school junior, a talented baseball prospect who hopes to make some return trips to Omaha with the Tar Heels in future years. Reece's illness helped create the Reece Holbrook Golf Classic, one of the best fundraising events in the Chapel Hill area for many years. It showed how capable the Carolina community was of caring for one of their own and shined a light on—as Chad correctly identified him—heroes like Dr. Stuart Gold, Reece's pediatric oncologist. And it was an early introduction to the way Williams wanted to run his program.

The first day Chad and Jennifer went to the hospital to receive Reece's diagnosis, Williams called Jenn into the hallway. "Take one day, take one year, take two years, or take however long you need," he told her. "Get your child healthy. And your job will be waiting for you when you get back."

During that time period, many Tar Heel fans were captivated by the exploits of Sean May and the 2005 national champions (Reece celebrated on Sean's shoulders on the Smith Center court after May's 26 point, 24 rebound performance against Duke in 2005) or Chad Flack, Andrew Miller, Robert Woodard and the 2006 Diamond Heels. The Holbrook family, some of the most loyal Tar Heel fans you'll ever meet, remember that time period as being one when they learned another truth.

"When you have a kid with cancer," Chad said, "the scores on the scoreboard don't mean as much as the blood results do."

The breakfast ended with tens of thousands of dollars being bid in a live auction hosted by Jones Angell. As Chad said, "We're here to raise money so we can have more stories like Reece." Fans can still participate in making those stories come true by bidding in the online auction through October 9.

University of North Carolina Athletics

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