This is it for the Colorado Rockies, three games to pull off the greatest come-from-behind feat in franchise history.
Do or die, the players and pundits will say, a fight for life.
But if the Rockies want to know a little something about comebacks, about surviving when everybody else has already tagged your toes, they might do well to listen to a team member who isn’t even going to be in the ballpark these next three days.
As fans lined up outside Coors Field to get last-minute tickets, Chris Forbes spent Friday driving across 190 miles of east Texas swelter just to see a junior college all-star game. This is what you have to do, the Rockies scout says, to build a foundation for pennant chases.
That Forbes can even push the accelerator down is something of a miracle since 7 1/2 years ago a doctor gave him six months to live. A few months earlier, Forbes was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after doctors found a lump under his armpit.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, the doctors told him they found two inoperable brain tumors. He started getting treatment. He went back to work at the junior college in Kansas City where he was coaching baseball. His weight dropped from 180 pounds to 130. And then one day at practice he collapsed.
Doctors told him death was near. He was 27 years old.
“Not only did I know I had cancer, but you look in the mirror and you start seeing it,” Forbes, now 35, said. “You see the look on the faces of your friends and family, and that’s the hardest part. I did a living will. I did all the adult stuff, even though I didn’t feel like an adult yet.”
He kept going in for chemotherapy even when he felt like giving up. One afternoon in March, leaving the hospital in Kansas City after a chemo treatment, he crawled into his Isuzu and drove toward home. At a stop sign, a man yanked Forbes’ door open, stuck a pistol in his side and cursed at him to get out.
A man with a gun picking on a dying cancer patient.
Forbes barely even glanced at the man. His car was already in gear. As Forbes punched the accelerator to flee, the man pulled the trigger. The bullet burned through Forbes’ belly. Trying to hold the blood in, Forbes drove himself back to the hospital.
“That’s the turning point,” he said. “That’s the point that kind of shakes it up and gives you some fresh air. Honestly it takes something like that to make you realize you can bend without breaking. That was the best thing to happen to me.”
Forbes went through six hours of surgery that night, but the next day he checked himself out to go coach his junior college team’s game. He started reading everything he could about cancer. He fired his doctors and began interviewing new ones.
Forbes was a 5-foot 11-inch shortstop who grew up in Monument and made it to as far as Single A professional ball only because he worked harder and played harder than anyone else. Now he wanted to find doctors who would attack cancer the way he attacked the game.
He found a doctor in Los Angeles willing to operate on his brain tumors. He went to the renowned M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to treat his lymphoma, which doctors there diagnosed as leukemia. He began talking to other patients in the cancer ward, drawing encouragement from them and returning the favor.
In November 2003, Forbes’ cancer went into remission. Since then he has spoken to numerous cancer patients about his experiences. He climbed Mount McKinley to raise money and awareness for leukemia research. He has had a lymphnode and part of his spleen removed as lingering effects of his treatment.
In January, the Rockies hired Forbes, who had been a coach at the University of Northern Colorado, to be a scout in Texas. An underdog in an underdog organization, as Forbes puts it.
This summer a woman sharing an airplane row with Forbes saw a tattoo on his arm — one that says “Hope” — and struck up a conversation with him. She was also a cancer survivor, she said, and her sister was suffering from breast cancer. She gave Forbes her sister’s number, and Forbes called her the next day.
“He gave her a breath of fresh air that still makes me tear up every time I talk to her,” Linda Williams, the woman Forbes met on the airplane, wrote in an e-mail.
“There is not a needle prick or X-ray that I wouldn’t do over again,” Forbes said. “I’m a firm believer … that things happen for a reason. I needed cancer to complete me, to make me a better person.”
“Every now and then you have to take the blinders off and realize there’s more than wins and losses — although I’d really like to win tonight’s game.”
John Ingold: 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
