Des Moines Register
11-18-06
Keeler: Off the field, Mac’s kindness earns him a winning record
By SEAN KEELER
REGISTER SPORTS COLUMNIST
Victoria Fitzsimmons has never heard of Jamie Pollard.
She doesn’t care whether Todd Blythe will play today, or whether the Missouri
Tigers will let Bret Meyer walk away in one piece or two.
But little Victoria knows who Dan McCarney is.
She knows Dan McCarney is why she can take an elevator upstairs instead of
always being carried by her mother. She knows Dan McCarney is why she
doesn’t have to live in her grandma’s basement anymore.
She knows Dan McCarney is why she has the run of the master suite and a walkin closet big enough to hold an SUV.
“I always say this is Victoria’s house,” Mary Fitzsimmons says with a laugh.
“Because if it weren’t for Victoria, we wouldn’t be here.”
In June, Mary; her fiance, John Szelenbaum; and her 11-year-old daughter
moved into the McCarney Home at Crest Hill, a community in suburban Chicago
just outside Joliet.
The house was finished earlier this year at a cost of around $325,000. Most of
that money was raised through private donations — including several sizable
ones from McCarney, who resigned Nov.8 as football coach at Iowa State
University, and his wife, Margy.
It’s Senior Day in Ames. McCarney’s final game after 12 seasons with the
Cyclones kicks off today at Jack Trice Stadium. To us, he’s the dean of the Big
12 Conference.
To Victoria, he’s a godsend.
“I know he’s a football coach,” Mary says. She’s never met him. She wrote him
once. “He’s got to be a selfless man who understands the true meaning of life.
He’s completely and totally changed our lives.”
The Crest Hill community is a cul-de-sac with eight foster homes — another is
named after former Cyclone basketball coach Johnny Orr and wife Romie —
operated in conjunction with Our Children’s Homestead, a nonprofit child welfare
agency based in Naperville, Ill.
The Fitzsimmons family rents the McCarney Home at a reduced cost. It has
wheelchair ramps, an elevator, three baths and five bedrooms, one of which has
been converted to a nurse’s workstation.
That’s important, considering that Victoria requires almost constant medical
supervision.
She breathes through a tube lodged inside her trachea. Food is delivered
intravenously through a hole in her stomach. Every night, she’s attached to at
least four different machines before going to bed.
She has never walked, never spoken a word. She didn’t sit up for the first time
until she was 3 years old. She has learned to communicate through sign
language, but only in sentence fragments.
“Every time we go to the emergency room, (we ask), ‘Is this going to be her last
day?’” sighs Mary, who cared for Victoria at her mother’s house in Chicago for 11
years before Crest Hill. “She could be here 10 years. She could be gone
tomorrow.”
Her complications are so diverse that doctors have struggled to come to a
consensus on a diagnosis. Not that they haven’t tried — at last count, Victoria
has lived in two states, logged 74 medical procedures, 74 trips to the emergency
room, 47 hospital stays and required 37 surgeries.
“Here’s this coach,” Mary says, “who doesn’t know us but wanted to do
something to make a difference in a person’s life who, one, would never be able
to afford this house, and two, never would have the opportunity to have a child in
here that deserves something like this. I wish I had the perfect words to say, to
let you know what his generosity means.”
We’ll miss the generosity. We’ll miss the perspective.
Snarl about game strategy and missed kicks all you like, but when it came to the
off-the-field stuff, Dan McCarney got it.
Like Santa Claus, Mac kept a list, and he checked it twice. On the Friday before
every Iowa State home game, the coach took about a dozen Cyclones out to visit
patients at local hospitals. A sign-up sheet was posted earlier in the week, “and if
it wasn’t full, he’d be the first to address it,” former Cyclone center Luke Vander
Sanden says. “He’d get on guys. It was so important to him.”
To whom much is given, McCarney liked to tell his players, much is expected.
Luke 12:48.
“With Dan, family was always No. 1,” says Bob Geniesse, chief executive of Our
Children’s Homestead and a longtime McCarney friend. “No. 2 was Iowa State.
The third thing was his charitable work, just giving back to the community.”
Toy drives. Charity auctions. Few knew better the value of a signature, the power
of a smile.
A coach is measured by wins and losses. A man is measured by the lives he
touches.
“If you were able to speak to Coach McCarney,” Mary asked Victoria the other
day, “what would you say?’
Her hands shot up quickly. Thank you, she signed.
Then she did it again. Thank you.
And again.
And again.
“Normally,” Mary says, “she says ‘thank you’ once.”
The only bottom line in Victoria’s world is life or death. She knows nothing of
expectations, resignations or Kansas 2005. All she knows is that Dan McCarney
will always be a champion. Her champion.
Columnist Sean Keeler can be reached at (515) 284-8102 or at
skeeler@dmreg.com