PART 3

A BIG HEART IN A SMALL BODY: JOHN PLAYING TEAM SPORTS

Throughout elementary school and into middle school, John developed a love for sports—mostly football and baseball, but hunting and fishing as well. Scott bought John and Lexie orange hunting vests, and once or twice a year they walked into the woods with him.

John also had a competitive streak; he took losing very hard. While he was never quite athletically or physically gifted, John had the mind for the game, and he gave it his all. As his childhood friend Mitchell Meyers recalled, “Johnny wasn’t the most athletic kid on the team, but he always tried harder than everyone. . . . He showed a lot of emotion when things didn’t go his way, like if someone beat him during a drill, but it never stopped him from trying. He would get madder and try harder.”

Mike Tibolet grew up with John, attending the same schools and church. Like with most young boys in western Pennsylvania, sports had a major impact on their daily lives. “Almost all of my memories with Johnny during our childhood [had] something to do with sports,” he said. “Whether it was Little League, football, basketball, etc., we were always either playing with or against one another. We would watch the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins games whenever we could.”

Sports also helped John get used to Conway Elementary School, according to his third-grade teacher, Cindy Zeigler. “John’s favorite subject, without a doubt, was recess. He loved how we played football together,” she told me. “I did my best to make sure everyone had a time to shine on the field. I think this was important in helping him get acclimated to the school. Everyone feels better when [he or she] can showcase a gift. He couldn’t wait to get on the field every day.”

When John was thirteen, he joined the Pony League under the mentorship of baseball coach P. J. Calvin. While John could play ball, hitting never had been his forte; he kept getting hit when he came up to bat. Instead, Coach Calvin taught John the game. He learned how to read the pitchers’ feet and hands. John worked on his defense and his running, growing confident in his strengths.

Still, after one too many bruises in the batter’s box, he made the switch to a new territory: the football field. John was never a starter; more like a twenty-third man. All his friends grew, yet he stayed small. Football has always been a game of strength and size. At five foot five and 108 pounds, John had difficulty competing against the bigger kids. Mitchell remembered, “We were always matched up against each other during drills in football, and he would always get so mad if I beat him during a drill!”

Still, John kept at it. In the eighth grade, John’s team played a road game against Montour Middle School. The coach was short on players and started John on offense. Freedom’s team was getting destroyed. Toward the end, the team ran a play where John’s route was to run a streak straight to the end zone. The quarterback saw him behind the safety and threw the ball to John as hard as he could, and off John went. He jumped and fell back, the ball hitting his chest as he scored his first touchdown—a 45-yard pass, no less. Mitchell recalled, “I remember running down, and he was so excited. I mean, he might’ve been the happiest kid on the earth that day!”

Even so, the elation from the play was not enough to convince John to stick with football. He was getting older, but his body wasn’t getting bigger. Freshman year and training camp were around the corner, and he was afraid of getting hurt—that football would be just like baseball. “Football is my game,” John told his father that summer. “I love it, but I’m afraid I’ll get crippled or something.”

John was on the brink of quitting and had to make a decision: play or go. One day after practice, he turned to his coach, Andy Yeck. They were en route from the field back to the school, John with his head down, trying to hide his concern. Coach Yeck pulled him aside, and John told him his fear. “I don’t think this is for me,” he said, tears welling up. “I’m too small to play the game.”

Coach Yeck disagreed. He told him to look at the sophomores who weren’t much bigger than him, yet they were solid contributors, just like John would be if he stuck it out. “If [you] have the willingness to try and then head over to the weight room after practice, [you will] see positive results in no time.”

To the coach, it was a typical conversation he’d have with anyone else in John’s position, but it changed John’s world. John promised to follow Coach Yeck’s advice. He persevered as football became something more than a challenge.

By the time training camp rolled around for his sophomore season, something was different. He wanted to go. He wasn’t the youngest or the littlest anymore; there were freshmen under him. He left for camp with his fans, stereo, and an air mattress—the works. He brought them home three days later, but he also brought a new perspective. It was like a different John Challis walked through the door.

“He was much more respectful; he was his own man,” recalled Scott. “He spoke for himself. I felt like something clicked in him, and now he was in charge of his life.”

John loved Freedom football, his coaches, and his teammates. As he got older, it stopped being about winning a game or losing it. Scott told me, “Don’t get me wrong—he liked to win, but it was more about being part of something. He used to get mad at players who would quit because they thought they should play more. It was a lot more than just playing—it was about friendships and being part of a team. John got his playing time, but Freedom never had a big team and didn’t win many games. Once you were getting beat by thirty-five points, the mercy rule would take effect. Freedom’s coaches started to substitute players in and out, and as parents, we liked it because John got quite a bit of playing time.”

As he had with baseball, John started to become a student of the game. He learned the techniques, and even if he didn’t have the build to execute them, he helped out his teammates in any way possible, teaching them how to grasp the system. John played his strengths. His father swore John could have been a football coach.

John definitely took his lumps out on the field. Even though he added on some muscle in high school, he was still a flyweight, but this didn’t stop him from going against the heavyweights on the line of scrimmage. John’s good friend Adam Rose (six foot two and around 220 pounds) recalled lining up against John at a practice during his senior year (John’s sophomore year). “John lined up at tight end across from me. He was normally a split end or wide receiver, and so he wouldn’t have to line up against a defensive lineman like me,” he said. “I’m about half a foot taller than him and a good hundred pounds heavier than he is, and he comes running up to the line and looks across and goes, ‘I gotta block you?’ One of the coaches is standing to the side, and he’s barking at John, trying to motivate him, even though he knew it was a huge mismatch. After the ball was snapped, John comes firing out. . . . I pushed him off, but he kept pumping his feet and kept trying to block me. He brought it all; he fought it with everything he had.”

The Freedom team that year wasn’t very good, but in their last game, Adam’s final game, they were beating Shenango High 35–0, and the coach put in some of the younger guys to get them some playing time. Adam recalled what happened next: “John was lined up at cornerback and he was against a real tall receiver, who ended up beating him for a touchdown. Highly upset with himself, John trudged over to the sidelines and said to me, ‘I’m sorry I ruined your last game.’ I was standing around with a few other seniors, and I tried to make him feel better by telling him, ‘It’s not that big a deal.’ But he was genuinely angry at himself for giving up that touchdown and feeling like he let me and other seniors down. That was typical John, always worried about others and not himself.”

Being part of the Freedom team became even more significant for John after his cancer diagnosis. When he was discharged from Children’s Hospital after his second and final round of chemo, he didn’t want to go home—he wanted to go straight to summer workouts for football practice. John watched from afar, setting a lawn chair on a hill that faced the field. He wrapped himself in a blanket even though the temperature and the humidity levels were both in the high eighties. When he did venture down to the field, he rode around with the football team’s trainer, Vince Sinovic, in his golf cart.

This was John’s first time around his friends since they had found out he had cancer, and some were uncomfortable talking to him. It was a disease kids didn’t understand. It was hard for them to face their friend. Scott recalled, “He knew they didn’t know what to say. At this time John was feeling his friends thought cancer was contagious.”

A year later, John told Scott and Gina he had to get ready for football training camp. He told them that he couldn’t miss it. At first Gina wasn’t thrilled about John going to camp again. “I thought it wasn’t the place for my sick son to be,” she said. But then she realized it was in John’s best interests to be part of the team. “I learned real fast that sports and keeping busy was the best thing for him. He wanted to live, and so if he was going to live any length of time, he had to be a part of things and feel good about himself.”

The other aspect of football camp that soothed her worry was that it only lasted three days, and John would be at the high school, two minutes away from their house. Scott cleared everything first before he and Gina gave John the okay to attend. “I talked to the coach and he said he didn’t have a problem with it, so we took up the air mattress, sleeping bag, fans, and everything else you take to football camp,” he remembered.

Lynn Lehocky, Pam Helch, and Beth Herzog were Scott and Gina’s inside spies. Lynn, Pam, and Beth were football mothers who were there at six in the morning, getting ready for the morning breakfast. Scott or Gina would call them to check on John each morning and again in the evening, when the women were cooking dinner for the team. “It was important to John to belong with the rest of his team. That was his second family,” Scott said.

In late October, his football coaches asked John to speak to the team before a game. Shawn Lehocky, John’s good friend and football teammate, said, “John gave us insight to his fight and his personal beliefs in that speech. He talked about his will to succeed and how we sometimes put too much emphasis on the little things in life that are more of a burden than a problem. He also explicitly stated that you will never know when your last play will come, or even further, when your last day will be, and until that time, play and live every moment like it is your last.”

As to the speech’s impact, Shawn recalled, “To hear this speech from someone that has suffered through pain and bad news for many months really made you feel that whatever issues you were facing personally were so microscopic in the scope of life. This made our team focus and understand that we need to rally around our emotional leader and truly self-reflect as to the meaning of living a fulfilling life.”

The speech left a huge impression on not only the team, but the coaches as well, many leaving the locker room with tears running down their faces.

While John’s off-the-field contribution to the team was tremendous, his yearning was to suit up and play with his teammates again. The third week of October was when John told his mom and dad that he had to play football one more time. Scott recalled the conversation and his first reaction: “I told him, ‘John, you’ll get killed out there.’ I’ll never forget the look, with his arms out, and the sound of his voice when he said, ‘Dad, I’m dying. What else can happen to me?’ ”

Scott told John that he would make it happen. He met with the team’s coach, J. C. Summers, and asked him if he could do something for John. He wrote a letter stating that the school district would not be held responsible for anything if John got hurt. The game was to be an exhibition game that they played at the end of the season on November 1, 2007 against Hickory High School.

However, Gina and Scott had other plans. Lexie had been picked for cheerleading all-stars, and there was a banquet for her the same night John was playing. At the banquet, Gina and Scott kept in touch with their good friend Karen Roman, who kept them informed on what was happening at the football field. At the first opportunity, as Scott remembered, Lexie said, “Let’s go watch Johnny.”

In the second quarter, John ran onto the field and the crowd erupted. But a moment later their cheers went silent after Freedom snapped the ball; John had fallen and no one was around him. But then just as quickly as he had fallen, he got right back up.

Gina, Lexie, and Scott got to the field and were able to see John get in the game twice more. The first time, John kicked off the ball, and right after, seven teammates surrounded him to protect him; the three others tackled the Hickory player with the ball. The final time, in the fourth quarter, John got in as a slotback on offense. The play went to the right side, and he was on the left side of the field. Freedom’s running back started up the right side, but then he cut back to the left side, heading right for John. The play was just about over, and John went up to one of the Hickory players and blocked him. Scott later learned that Coach Summers had set up the play so that wherever it went, John would be on the other side of the field, far from the action.

After the game, as the Freedom team filed into the locker room, John looked around the room and began to tear up. He said, “Thanks [coaches and teammates] for letting me dress and play in our last game as a senior class. It felt good to finally feel like a part of this team again and . . . it gives me more of a reason to believe that I can do anything, regardless of my health.”

It was a night no one would ever forget. “We were all pretty emotional,” Mike Tibolet recalled. “We realized how happy he was to have been able to step on that field with us for the last time as a team. That speech truly inspired me because it showed that no matter what, anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”

The next week, John turned his experiences playing in his final game into a fiction piece for a class assignment. Titled “The Great Return,” it was about Freedom star running back Jake Woodley, severely injured in a car crash. Doctors told him he would never play football again, but Jake decided that he would overcome the odds and take the field once more. Every day Jake worked hard to move his legs from his wheelchair, but nothing seemed to get them working. One day his friend Keith Stedman came over and talked about a guy he knew who had cancer, whose doctors and coaches told him he would never play football again. Then during the last game of the year, this guy ran out onto the field with his team and got into three plays. He was so happy he could prove everyone wrong. Keith told Jake that this guy never gave up on his dream, and he shouldn’t either. This story made Jake realize there was still hope. So when Jake worked out he thought about the guy with cancer and used him for inspiration.

“The Great Return” by John Challis

Jake worked out harder and harder, he prayed and thanked God for helping him first be able to stand and then start walking. Even though Jake had to use a cane, he was starting to believe that he would play football again, the game he loves so much, one last time. As the team’s season started, Jake would run at the school’s track at night so no one could see him as he struggled to get his coordination back. He ran sprints and worked out on the ropes but time was running out. There was only one game left in the season and Jake had to convince his doctor to let him play in the game. After an extensive physical his doctor gave him the OK and Jake snuck into the locker room while everyone was at practice and got his equipment and jersey and ran back to his care so no one noticed.

As game day arrived Jake walked into the locker room with his equipment, there was complete silence. The team was speechless; Jake gave the coach his release and said he was ready to play. When the team got in the tunnel to run onto the field, his coach asked him to lead them out. The crowd cheered loudly as Jake’s name was announced. Through three quarters Jake just stood on the sideline and he was nervous that the coach wouldn’t put him in the game. Jake told him he was ready and he also said “don’t do this to me; I worked too hard to not get in this game.” With two minutes and thirty-three seconds to go in the game Jake got the call. The crowd was screaming and yelling. The play was a half back option on the right side and the linebacker hit Jake at the line of scrimmage. Jake laid there and it was complete silence. His best friend, Bobby Macando, the center, came over and out his hand out and Jake grabbed it and jumped up. The crowd started to cheer with relief. The next play was a pass play, Jake didn’t really care if he got the ball, and he just wanted to be there. As he walked off the field at the end of the game, he told his coach that he completed what he started and thanked him for the opportunity to play just one more time. At the gate after the game, Jake was shocked to see his friend Keith Stedman standing there with some guy. As Jake approached Keith he knew the guy he was with was the guy who had cancer. The one who inspired him to quit feeling sorry for himself and made him realize no one was going to make him walk again except himself.