GREGG DOYEL

Doyel on ChuckStrong gala: Wins are good, but this is better

Gregg Doyel
gregg.doyel@indystar.com

Before he said something you can't say in the newspaper, Grant Church stood near the indoor goalposts at the Indianapolis Colts complex and said something devastating about his mother.

"She asked us for permission to die," Church said.

Diana Church — please, call her Didi — was 53. She was the most positive person Grant Church knew, her stock answer to any stress or difficulty a reassuring, "It's all good." Doctors found a lump in her breast in January 2012. It's all good, Didi told Grant and her husband, Daniel.

And three months later, it was. The mass was removed. The cancer was gone. It was all good, and that's where this story shifts from Didi Church to Dr. Bert O'Neil, a cancer researcher who had been telling me — not 10 minutes before I met Didi Church's family — about the insidious opponent that is cancer.

"Cancers are so smart," O'Neil was saying. "You do one thing to beat it, and it can shift or hide or just disappear. Until it comes back."

O'Neil was talking to me at the third annual ChuckStrong Tailgate Gala, which started as Colts coach Chuck Pagano's one-man war against the disease that tried to kill him in 2012 — and has become one of our city's biggest fundraisers for cancer research. In three years the Tailgate Gala has raised more than $2 million for the internationally recognized IU Simon Cancer Center.

On Friday night the tally was $720,000 raised by almost 600 people who attended the gala at the Colts' Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center at $1,000 a ticket. They bid on silent auction items, including the Pacers' dinner for eight on the Bankers Life Fieldhouse court and Indianapolis Motor Speedway's four VIP tickets to next month's 99th Indianapolis 500 and Texans defensive end J.J. Watt's signed football and memorabilia from other NFL teams — Packers, 49ers, Ravens, Chargers, Titans — who wanted a piece of this fight.

O'Neil attended the tailgate with his son, Evan, who is 12, which was O'Neil's age when he learned his mom was dying of breast cancer in California. Bert O'Neil eventually settled in Zionsville and became a doctor who treats cancer patients with experimental drugs. There are days with modest victories — a new medicine slows a tumor's growth — and huge losses.

"The cancer comes back, worse than ever," O'Neil says.

And so O'Neil was telling me how cancer comes and goes and comes back, and not 10 minutes later I'm talking with Daniel and Grant Church and they're telling me it was all good in 2012 for Didi.

Until it wasn't.

"It was everywhere," Daniel Church was saying. "Her nervous system. She was hurting in her wrists, her elbows, legs …"

Five months after the lump in her breast was removed, five weeks after being told the cancer that seemed to be gone had come back in a fury, Didi Church asked family for permission to leave the fight. They gave it. Of course they did. She died June 10, 2012.

Three years later they are part of the ChuckStrong army. Daniel Church is on Pagano's (and the Simon Center's) board of directors and used the company he and Didi Church founded, DairyChem Laboratories, to purchase $25,000 worth of gala tickets. Grant Church is 23 and fired up to beat this opponent, this cancer, and saying words he suspects can't go in this newspaper.

"I'm sorry," Grant Church was saying after unleashing a torrent of passion about this fight. "You probably can't put that in there."

Maybe. We'll see. For now, here are some more words that have to go in this newspaper.

***

"Cancer took my mom away."

Missy Hillman is wearing brown puffy boots that look like footballs and watching the silent auction and saying her mom smoked and the cancer started in her lungs but moved to her liver.

"As kids you think of your parents as strong, and she was," Hillman says. "But you could see her start to fade away, and then she just gave up."

She was already in nursing school, but after cancer took her mom away Missy Hillman became a renal oncology nurse. Like Bert O'Neil, who became a doctor, Hillman lost a parent and got involved in the fight.

One way or another, everyone at the ChuckStrong Tailgate Gala was involved.

"We've been season ticket holders for years," Fishers' Jason Myers told me, standing with his buddy Brian Wright of Whitestown. "We're here because Chuck was so inspirational the way he fought cancer, and we want to help him."

And the Colts? Here for the same reason. Pagano didn't ask his players to attend. Offensive tackle Jack Mewhort told me Pagano didn't even mention the event. He figured they'd hear about it, or they wouldn't. Whether to give up their Friday night, Pagano figured, was their decision.

More than 50 players made that decision. New Colts Andre Johnson and Trent Cole. Veterans Mike Adams and Pat McAfee. Gosder Cherilus. Boom Herron. Coby Fleener. Mewhort. Former Colt Gary Brackett, whose brother Greg died of leukemia in 2005. They mingled with the crowd, more than 300 people on the same team.

Running back Jeff Demps walked past the punt return station, where Brian Wright was catching footballs shot out of a machine. Wright caught one, two, three. Holding them all, he caught No. 4 and Demps was now next to him, hooting and jumping. Here came the fifth ball, and Wright tried to catch it and could not — and lost the rest, footballs bouncing all over the ground as Demps flopped to the turf in dismay.

This was a night for fun and fundraising and the future, another $720,000 raised to help someone avoid the fate of Missy Hillman's mother in 1992 — and the fate facing a longtime Hillman family friend this week, a woman having her uterus removed to combat the cancer growing there.

"Cancer's the worst," Hillman says.

***

Every day someone approaches Chuck Pagano to talk about his victories. He has led the Colts to an 11-5 record in three straight seasons, but not those victories. Every day it's someone else, more than one, who say they've beaten cancer or are fighting it or lost someone to it. Every day they are thanking Pagano for what he did, and what he is doing.

When I get Pagano alone Friday night, I do the same. Then I point around the room, at all these people raising all this money for cancer research.

"Listen," I tell Pagano, "33-15 is good. But this is better."

"I agree," he says, and he is smiling, and he is blown away by the region's response to his cancer fight. "This city, this state, this organization is riddled with great people. I'm grateful, thankful, we have the support of people willing to be so generous."

About this time I see a flock of folks wearing "Team Didi" shirts with the picture of a smiling woman above the words, "It's all good." I ask the flock about Didi, and they point me to Daniel and Grant Church, and immediately Grant Church is spitting fire about cancer and the fight and the determination it will take to win it. And then he says something he doesn't think he can say.

"We're here," Grant Church says, gesturing at everyone in a 'Team Didi' shirt and then at everyone else at the ChuckStrong event, "because we want to win this fight. And to win, it takes initiative. Grab it by the balls."

Grant Church stops, smiles, and says, "Sorry, you probably can't put that in there."

Let somebody try to stop me.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel