By Harry Minium
If you’re in Chartway Arena when the Old Dominion basketball team plays in November, take a good look at the ODU bench and you’ll see a bunch of scruffy faces on guys who will look like they need a shave.
Most of ODU’s basketball staff put aside their razors for a month beginning Nov. 1 for a cause near and dear to head coach Jeff Jones. He recruited a team (Team Blue) for the Grow & Give program, a fundraiser for Zero Prostate Cancer. Funds raised by the team will fund cancer research, patient programs and awareness outreach.
If you follow ODU basketball, then you surely know that Jones is a prostate cancer survivor. In brief: He was treated with both surgery and radiation in 2015, yet the cancer returned. When he announced last fall that the cancer had recurred, he said the cancer can only be controlled with drugs and that there is no cure.
A year later, things are looking up. Jones underwent treatment for months, then took a break, which is typical for this type treatment.
The good news is that the cancer has not grown in the time since, and that’s something doctors said was very unlikely to happen.
He enters this basketball season as healthy and active as I’ve ever seen him.
The story of his struggle with cancer while coaching the Monarchs began to make national news last spring when ODU won the Conference USA title and played in the NCAA tournament.
“I feel great,” he said recently.
Jones recruited a couple of other prostate cancer survivors for Team Blue, former ODU star Dave Twardzik and myself, for Team Blue.
Twardzik is a former ODU All-American and the color commentator for Monarch basketball radio broadcasts. He will be joined by Ted Alexander, the popular radio voice of the Monarchs. They will be joined by John Richardson, Bryant Stith, Chris Kovensky, Gus Fraley, Jason Mitchell and Dennis Wolff from the basketball staff and Grant Gardner, one of my compatriots in athletic communications. Assistant Kieran Donahue declined to join, saying he’s “genetically challenged.”
Donahue and I apparently share genetic traits. I recently experimented for the Give and Grow month by not shaving for a few weeks. When I asked people in the office how it looked, some couldn’t help laughing under their breath.
Come Nov. 30th, I’ll have a month’s worth of peach fuzz.
You can donate to our team by clicking the link below.
Donate to ODU Grow and Give team
Jones has become a passionate spokesman for men 50 or older getting tested for prostate cancer. All it takes is a simple blood test to detect whether you might have cancer.
Jones did not get tested until he was required to in order to purchase life insurance. By then, his cancer was already advanced.
Had he been tested earlier, doctors would have caught the cancer at a time when it was more easily treated.
He has spoken at national and local cancer events and was honored last season at ODU basketball and baseball games last season to spread awareness.
Of the Give and Grow program, he calls it “a pretty simple and itchy way to promote to promote the fight against prostate cancer.”
On Nov. 17, he will participate in a run at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront to raise money for Zero Prostate Cancer. Twardzik will be running and I’ll be jogging in the 5-K race.
How to enter Prostate Cancer Run
“This is definitely something I feel strongly about and want to give an assist in any way that I can,” Jones said. He added that because his first priority is coaching ODU’s basketball team, he won’t commit to anything that interferes with basketball.
“We all have a finite amount of time,” he said. “My first commitment has to be to the team and the people who rely on me.
“Not shaving in November doesn’t detract from that, but hopefully will get the word out about prostate cancer and the need for men to get tested.”
Contact Minium: hminium@odu.edu