PHILADELPHIA — Another baseball season — perhaps the one that would end with a chance to sign a professional contract — was weeks away when Luke Smith left his friend’s house a few days after Christmas.
Smith’s final season at St. Joseph’s University felt promising after the way the right-hander pitched during the fall. Smith was throwing harder than ever and in line to be one of the team’s top starters. All the work — the pitching lessons, the weightlifting, the practicing — was paying off.
And then his phone rang. A forgettable three-minute drive from one friend’s house to another became a life-altering trip.
A nurse and his parents were on the other line. The discomfort Smith felt under his left armpit? That was cancer. A biopsy discovered Grey Zone Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive subtype of lymphoma that is a mixture of Hodgkin lymphoma and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Smith needed to start chemotherapy.
His baseball season was finished, cancer derailing the 22-year-old’s dream just months before he was scheduled to graduate. For his parents, it was a stunning gut punch. But the pitcher — the one who fought his way into the St. Joe’s rotation and refused to wear sleeves on the mound even when it snowed — never flinched.
“I was just like, ‘All right, I’m not really worried about it,’ ” Smith said. “I’m not scared or anything like that. I’ll just have to do what I have to do to get it over with.”
South Jersey’s Burlington County Times once called Smith “Cool Hand Luke” for his presence on the mound at Delran High. In college, St. Joe’s coach Fritz Hamburg said Smith was the pitcher the Hawks always knew could get them out of a jam. No moment ever seemed too big. Why would cancer be any different?
Smith is living this semester in Manayunk with five friends just as he planned to before he received that phone call. He’s taking two classes a week — “It’s amazing he had to get cancer to go to class,” cracked his dad, Ken — and remains on track to graduate in May with a communications degree. Smith even stops by baseball practice wearing his chemotherapy bag. Cancer derailed his baseball career but Smith is determined to not let it derail his life.
“He hasn’t changed,” his mother, Lisa, said. “Nothing slows him down. He’s showing so much courage. He’s looking at it face on.”
“Keep my mind off what’s going on and keep living a normal lifestyle is what I promised myself I’m going to do,” Smith said. “Try to stay as normal as possible. I don’t go to bars and I stay away from public settings with a lot of people and I don’t touch food without washing my hands. But so many people reached out with advice and support. Don’t be overwhelmed or afraid. When you start doing that, that’s when things get harder.”
Smith’s college career has had ups — he started St. Joe’s first conference tournament game in five years and won his first four starts last season — and downs — he couldn’t pitch as a freshman because of a glitch in his high-school transcripts and didn’t earn another win last season after those first four — but this felt like the season everything seemed to be coming together.
Smith’s fastball was touching 90 mph and his slider was sharp. He learned the pitch when he was nine years old and he knew how to throw it for strikes. Mark Leiter Sr., the former Phillies pitcher, helped Smith add a cutter, the same pitch that helped Leiter’s son make the majors after being an underestimated pitcher at NJIT.
Perhaps Smith could defy the same odds with a strong senior season. It all felt so good in the fall that it was easy to be optimistic.
“You couldn’t really tell that anything was wrong with me,” Smith said. “I was doing hardcore workouts that I wasn’t doing years before so it definitely wasn’t something that I knew I had. My last five innings of fall ball, I was perfect. I didn’t let up a hit, a walk, or a run. I had like six strikeouts.
“I always felt like I had a chance to get to the next level. Even if it wasn’t getting drafted but getting signed or something. I’m one of those people who doesn’t really care what anyone says. I was ready to prove everyone wrong this year.”
Smith told Lisa Smith about the discomfort in his armpit when he went home for Thanksgiving. He saw the family doctor, who told him it could be a variety of things and ordered a PET scan and biopsy. A month later, he called his teammates during winter break to share the news and then teased them that they got dominated in the fall by a kid with cancer.
The Hawks played their first home games last weekend with three games against UMass-Lowell and one of those starts would have belonged to Smith. His parents would have been there, spending their weekend watching baseball like they’ve done for years. And his dad would have found a spot to hide away.
“It’s almost like self torture,” Ken Smith said. “You love it and you can’t wait until he’s out there but then you have to separate yourself from everyone because no one knows what’s going on in your head. You’re watching every pitch. You size up the umpire. You size up the catcher. You look at the infield. You want everyone to do their job so he can have success. It’s a whole different perspective. It’s a great way to watch the game, too. We love the game. He loves the game. And it’s so fulfilling especially when he gets out of a jam or just flat-out pitches great.”
A final chance to be tortured in the bleachers was stolen by cancer. But the Smiths said that’s not what they’re thinking about this spring.
“I want to see him on the mound again and I think he wants to but we kind of had to put things into perspective once we knew what was up,” Ken Smith said. “This was a really harsh dose of reality and life really quick. You have to block out all the crazy thoughts in your head. You can’t look five years down the road. You can’t look even five weeks down the road. We said, ‘We’re going to take this day by day, accomplish what we need to accomplish today, and then tomorrow we’re going to start all over again.’ You don’t know what you don’t know. If you start to let your mind wander, nothing good ever comes from that.”
Before each practice, Hamburg walks around the field and checks in on each player to see how they’re feeling. Smith always had the same answer: “Excellent,” he said. And now Smith’s mom hears him tell the same thing everyday to his nurses. He’s the same guy.
His hair — “I had a pretty insane head of hair. That’s what people really know me for,” Smith said — fell out shortly after he started chemotherapy. A buzz cut didn’t work and the hair was so patchy Smith decided to shave it bald. And then he started receiving videos from his teammates, who all decided after practice to shave their heads like their pitcher. Even the coach — “They say now I look like the guy from Breaking Bad,” Hamburg said — went bald.
“I sent him a picture last week and told him I was digging it,” Hamburg said. “Luke said it looked good. He said, ‘We both look like bad asses.’ He’s taking this thing head on. This is his game everyday. He’s pitching everyday against this thing.”
Smith handled that phone call in December like it was a bases-loaded jam. His parents were stunned when they heard the diagnosis but the pitcher calmly told the nurse: “I’m not afraid and I’m going to fight.” His parents quickly followed his lead, tapping into any resources they had to make sure their son had the best care possible. They used his words as a rallying cry, printing them on green wrist bands and giving them to anyone who wanted to wear one.
He wore his green band last month when he threw out the first pitch at Arcadia, where his buddy plays. He wears it when he attends his on-campus comedy class — “We’re not really learning about comedy right now. More like sad stuff. Hopefully it gets a little funnier soon,” Smith said — and wears it when he checks in on practice. And he plans to wear it when he’s finished his treatment.
Smith has seen other patients ring the bell and dreams every night of what that moment will feel like. Smith reached the halfway point last week and is scheduled to finish his 18 weeks of chemotherapy in April, a few weeks before his birthday. His baseball season was taken from him. But Smith still has something to chase this spring.
“He’s unflappable in this, like he is on the mound,” his father said. “That’s why he’s a pitcher. I know guys who throw harder. I know a lot of guys who have crazy pitches. But none of them can pitch because they can’t stand out there on the big stage and put the ball where it has to go when it counts. I couldn’t do it. You have to have the mind. What he does is between his ears more than anything else.”
