With no basketball to coach, George Karl is tending to his other passion in life: fighting cancer, a disease he has beaten twice.
The Nuggets coach lent his voice Tuesday to the American Cancer Society and Quest Diagnostics, which are teaming up on a nationwide cancer prevention study. It aims to follow 300,000 people for 20 to 30 years to see how genetics, lifestyle and the environment affect cancer risk.
“There are a lot of people who want to get into this fight who don’t have cancer, and this is one way,” Karl said.
Karl is 21 months removed from a brutal battle with neck cancer, which came a few years after he beat prostate cancer. His son Coby is a survivor of lymph-node cancer.
Karl said he’s spending his spare time during the NBA labor impasse speaking at cancer charities and encouraging people to join the fight against the disease. With the NBA mired in a labor impasse, Karl finds himself stumped without a team to teach.
“I don’t know if the word’s ‘difficult.’ To me it’s just strange. I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I go to work almost every day when I’m in Denver, and then about 11 o’clock, I’m going, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ We’re not allowed to do anything. We’re ready. We’re ready for the season. We’ve just got to wait and see where it goes.”
