Cancer one more obstacle for UNLV grad assistant

The chemicals meant to kill the cancerous cells were dripping through an IV and into Mike Ferriter’s vein when the telephone rang.

Bobby Hauck: “What are you doing?”

Ferriter: “I’m in a chemotherapy session.”

Hauck: “Well, do you think you’ll have the energy to coach?”

Think of receiving good news at the worst time of your life, of being thrown a life preserver when you are convinced the next wave of depression and anxiety will pull you under for good.

Mike Ferriter always has been a one-moment-to-the-next guy, from when he was recruited to play football at Montana really only because his high school coach was a friend of the Grizzlies coaching staff, when he was switched from safety to wide receiver on his first day of practice, when he lost his starting job as a sophomore and earned it back two weeks later, when he suffered as grotesque a broken arm as you can imagine, when he received that call from the oncologist and heard the word cancer and his knees gave out and he collapsed in a heap of fear and tears.

“You fight or give in, and I wasn’t going to give in,” he said. “So you take it on and move forward.”

Graduate assistant coaches in college football have about as glamorous a gig as the person scanning returns at the library, only with hundreds of more hours of work and bosses, who during losing streaks can make Mr. Bookman seem like Mr. Rogers.

They are not hired for their ideas on X’s and O’s but rather a capacity to execute countless tedious tasks with the attitude of someone living their dream, expected to toil and grind and dedicate themselves to the football cause all the while working toward a master’s degree.

It’s brutal work if you can get it.

But there is also no place Ferriter would rather be than a member of Hauck’s first staff at UNLV, working for the man who gave him an opportunity to play at Montana, where he collected more than 2,100 career receiving yards.

It happened so fast. Cancer can be that way.

Ferriter in February had a lump he discovered in one testicle five months earlier re-checked. That was a Wednesday. The oncologist called that night. Ferriter was in surgery the next day.

Chemotherapy followed because blood tests showed his was a fast-moving cancer.

“You hear from others how awful chemotherapy is, but you really can’t relate,” Ferriter said. “It’s terrible. You feel terrible 24 hours a day. You no longer have control of your body. I was a guy in the best shape of his life and went to one who couldn’t get up to walk to the mailbox. But life goes on, you know? You adapt. The fear is still with me. It’s still in the back of my head. But people get through it and lead successful lives. Can’t let it slow you down. Can’t let it stop you.”

His parents taught him that. Mike and Betty. He calls them “the strongest people I have ever met.” One of his two brothers has a degenerative bone disease. There have been some long nights in the Ferriter home.

Hauck tells of recruiting a Montana kid he didn’t pursue that hard at all, of switching him to a position he had never taken a snap at, not even in Pop Warner. Coaches tend to remember those kinds of stories most, the ones impossible to forget.

“We have so much history with Mike,” Hauck said. “He was about the last guy we took in his (recruiting class). We put him at receiver and he was a natural. He has always fought back. He’s a battler. He is a guy who rolls with the punches and finds a way to overcome, just as he did with cancer.”

A scan in June was clear, and the next one is scheduled for October. Ferriter hasn’t forgotten doctors must check regularly for any signs of cancer. The fear never really goes away.

But there is work to do in the meantime, on the field as a graduate assistant and in the classroom as an exercise physiology major.

He is 25 and working his tail off and feeling great about it.

Is it true the only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next?

Must be. Mike Ferriter is living proof.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618.