Fort Collins – Football coaches are built too tough to cry.
So what’s a father to do, when all the love inside his heart spills out?
Spreading a forefinger and thumb until his hand forms the shape of an “L,” Colorado State football coach Sonny Lubick covers his face, then gently dabs at the tears making puddles of his eyes.
“You find out when your kid gets cancer that you aren’t nearly as tough as you thought you were. I was never so hurt in my life as when I heard that news about my son. It made me so weak, I could barely walk,” Lubick says. “All you can find inside yourself is some way to get through it.”
Let the chase for the Heisman Trophy and the battle for No. 1 begin. For all the thrills promised by the upcoming college football season, there might not be a better moment than the first steps a father and son take together Saturday, when CSU coaches Sonny and Marc Lubick run on the field at Hughes Stadium.
Six months ago, Marc Lubick was diagnosed with cancer.
Sonny Lubick has won 101 games with Colorado State.
This beats all.
“It will be great to run on that football field. That has been one of my inspirations the past six months,” says Marc Lubick, who seems to have defeated cancer.
“The prognosis is good,” says his father. “But you never know.”
Nothing can shake a powerful man to the core, leaving him to question all previous definitions of success, like the illness of his child.
The standard fatherhood manual is issued with chapters on driver’s education and the birds and bees, yet cannot offer any preparation for when the doctor wants to explain the meaning of rhabdomyosarcoma, a mysteriously frightening word for the rare disease that forced 28-year-old Marc Lubick to endure rounds of radiation and chemotherapy.
Taking charge fits the personality of every football coach. A winner does learn to delegate, but only with twitchy fingers attached to an iron fist, which seldom lets go of the really important stuff.
“I spent a lot of time in chapels,” admits Sonny Lubick, recalling the helplessness of being totally dependent on the wisdom and kindness of others to save his son. “Praying is all I could do.”
After playing football at Montana State, Marc Lubick jumped into the family business, where there’s always another game tape to analyze, no matter how tired the clock on the wall gets. In a hurry to make a name for himself, a child of the greatest coach in CSU history feels compelled to scrawl 1,001 things on his weekly to-do list. All his ambitions, save health, however, came to a screeching halt.
“You can deal with the physical challenge of cancer, you can fight through the pain. But, mentally, it takes a toll on you, and the strain is constant,” Marc Lubick says. “Not knowing if the treatments will work. Not knowing how long you will have to fight it. Every time you get an ache or pain anywhere in your body, you’re wondering if the cancer has moved there. It’s tough.”
Ten paces down the hall from where CSU’s head coach of 13 seasons sits on a leather sofa and vows to never let small stuff such as a blown blocking assignment give him insomnia again, Rams offensive coordinator Dan Hammerschmidt throws himself in to the details of a game plan to beat Weber State.
Hammerschmidt’s wife died in July after a brave, eight-year fight against cancer, a solemn reminder that regardless of the strength or goodness in a patient, sometimes all that survives is faith.
On opening day of the college football season, we walk from the darkness of the stadium concourse to the first glimpse at 100 yards of green grass awash in sunshine, and in that instant, no matter your age, we all feel younger, lighter, happier.
On the first Saturday of September, a 69-year-old football coach and his young assistant for Colorado State will run on the field with the Rams as the band blares the fight song. Maybe for an instant, if Marc and Sonny Lubick are lucky, they will remember how it felt for a little boy to catch his first touchdown pass from Dad in the backyard.
“I hate to break down in front of you,” says Sonny Lubick, who need not apologize for his misty eyes to anyone. “But, for a long time, I was praying to have Marc on the sideline with me this year.”
Those aren’t a football coach’s tears. It’s a father’s love.
Forever and always.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
