Silent fight to rise above adversity
Former San Francisco 49er R.C. Owens rang me back from Manteca, Calif., minutes after the football organization told him I had called. I asked how the 69-year-old was recovering from his July 4 kidney transplant.
“Topnotch! Top of the morning! Top hat and tails!’
In other words, the usual. Owens has always been as cheerful as a kid heading off to camp. Always happy to see you. Always doing fantastic.
Which is why his closest friends at the 49ers never knew the weight of the secrets he carried. They didn’t know about the son and the daughter he lost long ago as a result of a car accident. And they didn’t know he battled a devastating disease right before their eyes.
When Owens was diagnosed with hypertension 10 years ago, he told no one beyond his immediate family. When he began dialysis two years later, he did so in secret. That meant during football season, Owens had to find ways to get dialysis during the dozen or so weekends the 49ers were on the road.
He took the master schedule before the start of each season and arranged appointments at clinics and hospitals in Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, Seattle — every city the 49ers visited. He would get up at 2 a.m., catch a taxi, begin the 3-hour-45-minute treatment before 4 a.m. and be back at the hotel as everyone else was just rising.
Former player Keith Fahnhorst, who underwent a kidney transplant nearly two years ago, said, “I was shocked when I heard about it, although it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. It goes along with his personality. But I feel bad he felt he had to keep it from everybody.’
For eight years, Owens managed to treat his kidney disease in secrecy. He made his doctors promise never to tell the 49ers. He also did not want to be defined by his illness. Personal troubles, Owens believed, had no place on a football team.
Owens was on the kidney transplant list for several years when, in 1996, his doctor called with good news. They had a match. He needed to get to the hospital immediately. Owens’ mother had passed away three days earlier, and Owens was flying to San Diego the following day to deliver the eulogy.
“I’d like to accept,’ Owens told the flabbergasted doctor. “But I can’t.’
He continued to wait year in and year out, undergoing his dialysis in secret, keeping up his energy so no one at the 49ers would suspect. It wasn’t until April of this year that Owens discovered, through a friend who is a physician, that his name mistakenly had been dropped from the kidney recipients’ list.
He got himself back on the list. Still, he told no one at the 49ers, though publicizing his plight might have attracted a donor. Then he got the call at 6 a.m. July 4. By evening, he had a new kidney. Word filtered out, in large part through a mass e-mail from Nicole Gisele, Walsh’s former assistant. Soon players and coaches were streaming into his hospital room at Stanford.
Maybe Owens was able to do so much because he loved his work. Or maybe it was because he came of age in a time when hard work was nothing exceptional, and what made you special were not your Oprah-Dr. Phil troubles but your silent struggle to rise above them.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].