This was 45 floors above midtown Manhattan, January 1999, a few hours before Jim and Jill Kelly would host a benefit dinner across the street at the old All-Star Cafe. Kelly, the old Buffalo Bills quarterback, was talking about toughness, a subject with which he had long had more than a passing acquaintance.
“Look at him,” Kelly said. “He’s twice as tough as I am.”
Sitting in his wife’s arms was Hunter James Kelly, 2 years old, recently diagnosed with Krabbe disease, an exceedingly rare neurological disorder so obscure that many medical journals failed to even list it among childhood disorders. Already, Hunter had beaten the odds: Most victims never saw their first birthday. At the time, only one had ever reached age 4.
“My lottery baby,” Kelly said. “My one in a million.”
“Look,” Jill Kelly said. “The doctors say he’ll never smile. But he smiles with his eyes.”
“Tough little sucker,” Jim said, shaking his head. Across the room, Jim’s brother, Dan, did everything in his power to keep a smile on his face, even as he said: “This family believes in the power of prayer. Jim and Jill are an incredible source of strength. But even strong people reach their limit after a while.”
And that was all … well, before. Hunter would defy odds his whole life, living to age 8, but his death still was a shattering blow, and only a prelude to what awaited his father: A plane crash. A hernia. Scattered operations to offset years of NFL punishment. Cancer treatments that cost him most of his jaw. And a grim return of the cancer, this time with a vengeance.
That afternoon in 1999, at the Marriott Marquis, Jill Kelly was three months pregnant with the couple’s third child. That daughter, Camryn, now 15, would join her older sister, Erin, in a series of photographs in March taken from their father’s hospital room at Sloan Kettering as he was beginning his latest fight, one which he conducted using a simple mantra:
“I want to live many years more,” he said then. “But if that’s not God’s plan, it means I’ll get to see Hunter sooner than expected.”
A remarkable thing happened then. Kelly — always beloved in Buffalo, mostly overlooked elsewhere next to his contemporaries (John Elway, Steve Young, Dan Marino) — became an unwitting spokesman for the hope that accompanies so many daily struggles in so many workaday lives against a relentless disease. Hashtags sprouted across social media — #KellyStrong, #PrayersForJK, #GetWellJimKelly — and when he appeared at the Hall of Fame ceremonies in Canton last month, those wishes only intensified, especially when he was saluted in the acceptance speech of his longtime favorite target, Andre Reed.
“You’re the reason I’m standing here today,” Reed said, and when he was done, Kelly — grayer, skinnier, but still commanding — emerged with a football, threw one last pass to Reed, and … well, it was impossible that night not to wonder if we would have to hang on to that last image longer than we wanted.
And then … this.
“The great news is that upon physical examination, there is no evidence of the cancer,” Peter Costantino, executive director of Lenox Hill’s New York Head and Neck Institute, told the Buffalo News after Kelly visited the hospital Tuesday. “The treatments so far have completely eliminated Mr. Kelly’s pain, and his level of function has essentially returned to normal.”
Now, Costantino warned that while positive, this doesn’t preclude the need for future treatments, and Kelly’s own pastor told the newspaper he “has no final answers yet.” And anyone who has ever endured the emotional gauntlet that cancer sponsors understands the danger of celebrating too soon.
Still: Damn it all, we needed a story like this, and I do mean “we,” as much as the new diagnosis must be a triumphant private victory for Kelly and his family. In a week featuring so much peril at home and abroad, a week when even turning to the safe haven of the sports page invites images of Johnny Manziel’s middle finger and death on an upstate racetrack … we needed something to cheer about, to feel good about.
We needed to borrow a little #KellyStrong.
Fifteen years ago, Jill Kelly, holding her sick little boy, smiled and said, “He’s a strong little stinker.” Across the room, her husband was looking out the window, 45 stories over Broadway, watching the traffic crawl below. He smiled softly.
“Strongest guy I know,” the old quarterback said.
We have learned, quite well, where he got that from.
Good for Hunter’s dad. And for us.