Prep Sports

PIEDMONT — Deion Ammons treasures the game-worn, No. 3 autographed jersey Dwyane Wade sent him. It gave Ammons a smile during a low moment in the 15-year-old's battle with cancer.

"We're going to have to get him a frame for it," said Annette Ammons, Deion's mom. "I don't think he's going to wear it."

The jersey Deion can't wait to slide over his slender, 6-foot frame bears the No. 31. It's the blue and gold jersey he wore as a freshman on Piedmont's varsity basketball team last season, right up to the point when large-cell B lymphoma announced its presence.

When Deion wears that jersey again, he expects that it will announce his return as the quiet-but-talented player his coaches and teammates know.

And it looks nearly certain that he will see that day.

Doctors caught the cancer as an isolated tumor between his heart and left lung. Deion's youth and strength made aggressive treatment possible, and the tumor shrank. His latest biopsy determined that chemotherapy reduced the threat to a dead mass.

He's undergoing the last of his five seven-day treatments this week. He'll have less-intense treatments over the next few months, but he's nearly beyond the worst of it.

Soon enough, he can resume running sprints across the yard in front of his family's gray and maroon home. It looks like he will dribble drive past his scary ordeal.

"It'll just feel good to be back playing," he said.

Hardly like Deion

Matt Glover has coached Deion since seventh grade, and the Piedmont assistant learned quickly about the teen's dedication.

Come time for Deion's seventh-grade season, he had a broken arm. Glover told the young player he could sit out of sprints, but Deion wanted to run.

"Every day of every practice, he ran," Glover said. "He was our leader. He won each and every suicide every day.

"He still wanted to run. He still wanted to be part of the team."

That's why it seemed so odd when Deion's energy tailed off early last season. Despite being the only freshman to make the varsity team, he seemed lethargic to his coaches.

Piedmont coach Tommy Lewis thought what his experience taught him to think.

"He just wasn't having good practices, and this is a terrible way to feel, but I was wondering if maybe he had picked up some habits," Lewis said. "That's almost one of the first things you think about. Maybe they're doing some things outside the school that you would hope they wouldn't be.

"… Now I feel so bad, because he never gave me any reason to think anything like that."

Even Deion was fooled. He knew nothing of the tumor pressing against his heart and lung, curbing his breathing and blood flow.

Up until a week before he learned he had cancer, he was running sprints across his yard.

"I didn't notice it," he said. "No sir."

A mom just knows

Annette noticed, although cancer wasn't her first thought.

Even when Deion came home from his team's Christmas break trip to Florida with cold symptoms and headaches, no one suspected the worst. A doctor prescribed antibiotics and cough medicine.

Then Annette saw other anomalies.

"One of the games we were at, I could see that his veins were popping out on his head and this vein here (on his neck); it was standing out," she said. "I told his daddy, 'Look at Deion's veins.' He said, 'He's all right. He's just been pumping iron. They do that when they're pumping iron.'"

Still, no one suspected a tumor creating the pressure that caused the visual symptom. Then came the Sunday in Janurary when Darrius Ammons, Deion's other brother, reported that Deion fainted and hit his head at their grandmother's house.

The incident left a hole in his grandma's wall and suspicion in his mom's mind. Another trip to the doctor the following Tuesday revealed that Deion's blood pressure was "extremely high," Annette said.

Doctors ordered a chest X-ray, after which Annette took her son to McDonald's. The two ate and went to visit a relative. There, they learned that James Ammons, Deion's dad, had been calling.

Doctors wanted Deion back for more tests … immediately. Because Deion had just eaten, they had to wait until Wednesday morning.

By Friday, the family was in Birmingham. Doctors at Children's Hospital performed their own tests and confirmed the terrible news.

"I was shocked," Deion said. "I was just kind of scared."

So was Annette, who lost a kidney and had a colostomy as a result of her 1993 battle with cervical cancer.

"I just cried the whole time," she said. "I tried to clean myself up before they came back from the CAT scan.

"It was scary. I know how hard it is."

The news hits hard

Reactions to Deion's diagnosis among those who know him followed one track … why THIS kid?

"He's one of those, it makes you sick," Lewis said. " … He's the sweetest, quietest kid you've ever been around. It just makes you sick.

"It's one of those that makes you question stuff. You know what I'm talking about?"

Deion's coaches say they're lucky to get five words out of him, but two of those words will be "yes, sir" or "no, sir."

"It just goes across all lines of kids at school," Lewis said. "You just can't find anyone that has anything bad to say about him.

"I know people want to say that when someone's had something happen to him, but in this case it's the truth. He is just a universally liked kid. He just doesn't have a personality flaw that I've ever been able to detect."

Treatments begin

Deion's doctors determined that he had an isolated tumor. Because of its location near his heart, they didn't want to risk removing it.

Because of Deion's youth and strength, they opted for aggressive chemotherapy. The goal was to shrink and kill the tumor with the medications.

Deion was given an 85 percent chance or better to make a full recovery.

He got the first of his five seven-day treatments to date during the second week of February.

"They're rough," he said. "You feel real bad, tired. You're like, so tired."

Annette could relate … to a point.

"I didn't have chemo," she said. "I had all radiation and surgery, so I couldn't tell him how rough that would be because I hadn't had that."

The treatment ran down Deion's immune system, so he spent the better part of his treatment time in the hospital or at home. That minimized his exposure to seasonal infections, but it isolated an adolescent from his friends.

"They call me a lot," he said. "They talk to me on the computer, friends. They say that they're thinking about me, praying for me."

Deion made an appearance at the Northeast Regional. He wore his varsity jersey and sat on the bench during one of the Bulldogs' games at Jacksonville State University.

But an occasion meant to lift his spirits turned sobering upon the announcement that Bradey Munroe, a senior on White Plains' team, had died from soft-tissue sarcoma.

"When he came home, he was really sick," Annette said. "I knew that's what it was. It was his nerves, once I heard what they told them.

"It was probably the first time he actually had been that sick. From when we had been home, he hadn't been sick at all. When he went to the tournament down there in Jacksonville, and they announced that, then he came home and he was sick. It scared him."

An upbeat dad

James tried to reassure Deion that night, reminding him that Munroe had different kind of cancer.

That's James' style. While Deion's mom could relate as a cancer survivor, James served up his upbeat personality to his son.

"One thing that makes it bearable when you go see him is his dad is such an optimistic guy," Lewis said. "You just can't feel bad sitting around his dad.

"You're sitting there looking at a 14-, 15-year-old kid on a bed, and his dad, he's got a great dad for the situation."

James has tried to stay upbeat through working odd hours for a concrete company in Georgia, getting little sleep and making several drives back and forth to Birmingham.

Maybe it was fatigue, but even James has had moments where humor failed him. It's difficult watching one's child lying in the pediatric intensive care unit.

"Well, it upsets me," he said, choking back tears. "I go out in the parking deck, out by myself sometimes. It bothers me.

"I try to tell a joke or two to make it funny to keep him laughing and not so much him thinking about being sick. I try to keep him happy."

What can a father and son joke about in such times? They look at each other, grin and say in unison, "Ms. Lucy."

Ms. Lucy is a nurse the family has come to know at Children's Hospital. They say she wears glasses low on her nose, and she has that look as she peers over them.

"She'll come in there, and we'll get a good laugh off of her," James said. "She's an older lady, good woman.

"That look when she comes in. His machine is beeping or something, and she'll come in and give him that look, and it will be funny."

Outpouring of support

There's another older lady the Ammons family would like to know. Annette simply calls her their "angel."

They looked out their front window and saw the woman walking up and down their street. They asked if they could help.

The woman had heard about Deion's plight.

"She said that her husband had died of cancer, and she handed me an envelope," Annette said. "I asked her name, and she said, 'My name isn't important.'"

The envelope contained a check for $863.

The Ammons family couldn't peg an exact figure but say they have received about $3,000 in private help. Much of it has come in the form of gas cards, with Deion's teammates and classmates kicking in money during their workouts in the Piedmont High School weight room.

There have been fund-raisers, care baskets full of food and other forms of support.

"Mrs. Patti Glover, she has been wonderful," Annette said. "I just can't thank Mrs. Patti enough.

"When we went over there (to Birmingham), she called at 8 o'clock in the morning. She'll call at lunch. She would call after school: 'What do you all need? Do you need me to go to the house, clean your house, cook, anything?'"

Perhaps no gesture lifted Deion's spirits more than the Dwyane Wade jersey.

Deion calls the Miami Heat his favorite NBA team and Wade his favorite player.

"He's just good," Deion said.

Steve Smith, Piedmont's football and baseball coach and athletics director, learned of Deion's allegiances and contacted the team.

"It was right after Bradey had died, and we were worried about his psyche and everything," Lewis said. "Coach called wanting to get a signed picture or something like that."

Two days later, Smith walked into the school lunchroom with a UPS box. It contained the jersey, along with a handwritten letter:

"My name is Tragil Wade, the sister of Dwyane Wade. I'm taking this time to encourage you and Deion to stay strong. Dwyane was unable to write anything at this time, but he sends his love with a Miami Heat, game-played white jersey signed by him personally. Again, stay strong and let Deion know we thank him for being a fan. Keep us in your prayers, because Deion is in ours."

Smith called Deion's parents to see if they could bring him to school for a surprise.

"When he came back, he couldn't quit smiling," Annette said. "He was just smiling the whole day, so it just made his whole day that day."

Many good days lie ahead, it appears.