Jay Lefevers - Cancer on the Brain: One Mans Journey of Baseball, Business, and Beating the Odds

Published by Emerald Book Company
Austin, TX
www.emeraldbookcompany.com

Copyright 2012 Jay Lefevers

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Distributed by Emerald Book Company

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Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

LCCN: 2012930764

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-937110-25-3

Ebook Edition

My thanks go out to all the professionals in the medical field who, while merely performing their jobs, extended my life, not once but twice. The appearance of their names throughout this book, as a mere thank you, never seems quite adequate. Medicine can do only as much as the body allows it to do, and as strong as a person may be, it is difficult to overcome any trial and tribulation of life without support. Support from family and friends. My family not only supports me, every day of my life, but also allows me to live with my unique, and sometimes contrarian, point of view. They allow me to take risks, to fail, to say no, and to say yes to far more than I can often handle. For this gift and for putting up with me every day, I thank Lyn, Briana, Adam, and Olivia. Briana is my only biological child and never ceases to amaze me with her zest for life. As this book progressed, she became my co-author. I thank the many baseball players who granted me the honor of being their coach; several of their names are mentioned throughout this book. As I taught them the game of baseball, they taught me about life. To those co-workers and employees with whom I have toiled, I thank you for enhancing my life and my business. I extend a huge thank-you to Mary Catherine (M.C.) Coolidge, a writer in Sarasota, Florida, who helped shape this book. M.C. worked for my company over ten years ago; we have remained friends and colleagues in spite of the distance since she moved to Florida. She is simply the most passionate and inspiring writer I know. I recommend all to read her she will challenge you as a reader and make you think. See her website, www.mccoolidge.com. To my incredible team at Greenleaf Book Group, I thank you for listening to my story, particularly given I announced my visit with one day notice, for refining my tale with your amazing technical support, for the creative design, and for tutoring me throughout the complex maze of publishing. And most important, I thank God for providing challenges in my life and for gifting me the tools to face them. Its up to me to learn how to use these tools.

LOOKING OUT OVER THE GREEN BASEBALL DIAMOND , I was filled with great pride in the Yankees. OK, maybe the field wasnt green; rather, it was packed dirt with patches and clumps of brown grass yearning for water, fertilizer, or any form of care. And it wasnt the New York brand of Yankees. It was the Clarendon Yankees, the Little League team that I was coaching for the first time.

We had held our first practice a few months before, on the same dusty field we were now playing on. Beyond the outfield was a bus barn, associated with the adjacent elementary school; the dugouts, lacking any concrete floor, were often mud pits thanks to overwatering by the sprinkler system, which apparently spent more time watering the dugout than the dying clumps of grass portraying an infield.

The reason I began coaching was my stepson. After I married Lyn, my second wife, in 2002, I was determined to be the best husband and father I could be. I was forty-two, and now I had three kids to take care of: my biological daughter, Briana, thirteen, and Lyns two children, Adam, twelve, and Olivia, eleven, who rounded out an incredible blended family.

I had always been a baseball fan. The sport reeled me in as a player beginning at about age eight, encouraged me to collect hundreds of Topps baseball cards, and had me glued to the TV during every possible professional baseball game I could watch. I played the sport until I was about thirty, in the form of high school baseball, club ball in college, intramurals, city leagues, and even fast-pitch softball. Basically, if the sport involved a bat and a ball, I was playing it.

I was also involved in coaching Little League baseball. I had coached Junior/Senior Little League for five consecutive years during my twenties, but I had given up my love of coaching to focus on family as a young father and to focus on meeting the growing demands of my career. Now, almost two decades later, with my new and happily expanded family doing well and my businesses thriving, I felt I finally had the time to rejoin the coaching ranks with an inner-city program known as the Clarendon league, which covered central Phoenix. Adam, my stepson, had grown up in this league since T-ball, and coaching him, along with all of the other thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys in the league, would be fun and challenging simultaneously. By the end of the season, my first year back in coaching, my Little League baseball team, the Junior Yankees, had a record of eight wins and seven losses. Not too bad.

I really do believe that when boys participate in group sports like Little League, its a lot more than an opportunity to just play ball. I think coaches, and the interaction with teammates, can teach the team a lot about life, help them develop coping skills, and hopefully help them transition from boys to young men as they develop camaraderie and confidence. I wanted to teach these things to Adam, and to his teammates.

To me, coaching was a lot like running a business. Through the years, my commercial real estate appraisal company would grow from five to a team of twenty employees. After a mere six initial years in the industry, I naively decided to venture out from the security of an employer and open my business, with a partner, in 1992. My partner and I would gradually grow the company for more than eleven years, until he resigned, amicably, in 2004. At the time, the company had about ten employees and operated from an approximately 3,500-square-foot space. In early 2004, the business became a sole proprietorship, and over the next five-year period I would scratch and claw to build the company into a twenty-plus-person operation in over 8,500 square feet. Like coaching, operating a business involved organizing, practicing, motivating, and performing.

Adam stepped up and tapped his bat on the plate. He moved his weight to his back foot, rested his bat on his shoulder, and took the stance we had worked on. He was facing a much larger kid who owned the mound. As he gripped the ball in his right hand, the pitcher glared at the batter, who in this instance was Adam, with no smile, no frown, no emotion. Rather, the message he sent to the batter was, You dont belong here! His fastball approached speeds no other Junior pitcher was capable of matching, and his curveball would send batters bailing out of the box as if he were throwing at their heads. I would later come to know the pitcher as Jonathan, or J.T. or Jon, and he would become a big part of my, and my familys, life. I wondered what was circling through Adams head as he stood to face this pitcher in his first official at bat with our Yankees team. Hell, this kid scared me; Im sure Adam was a little uneasy. Nevertheless, I was excited for Adam and for our team. I felt great.