Tweet
In Search of Donor, a Soccer Player’s Family Finds a Community
J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesReal Salt Lake’s Andy Williams with his wife, Marcia, who has a rare form of leukemia and has struggled to find a bone-marrow donor.
By BILLY WITZ
Published: November 10, 2008
SANDY, Utah — For months now, the emotions have welled up whenever Andy Williams has left the field after games. Some of it has come from his desire to lift Real Salt Lake to a new place, the Major League Soccer playoffs. Some from knowing that at 31, he is in the twilight of his career.
Enlarge This Image
J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesReal Salt Lake's Andy Williams.
Mostly, though, it comes from thinking about his wife, Marcia.
She received a diagnosis this summer of a rare form of leukemia and has struggled to find a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant. Without one, she is likely to leave behind her husband to raise their daughter and hers from a previous relationship, alone.
The time Williams spends on the field is an escape, a chance to exhaust his body and refresh his mind, to pour himself into something without so much gravity. When he prepares to return to real life, he empties his reservoir.
“I cry after every game, every time,” said Williams, who sometimes puts a towel over his head to hide his tears. “Every time I play, I’m not playing for myself. I’m playing for Marcia and the kids. When the game is over, it doesn’t matter if I’ve played 30 minutes or 90, I have to let my emotions go.”
As he spoke last week, he sat in a room overlooking the field at Rio Tinto Stadium with the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains in the distance. It is there that Real Salt Lake will play the Red Bulls on Saturday in the next round of the M.L.S playoffs, after eliminating Chivas U.S.A. in the first round. Marcia was at his side, often placing a hand on his knee.
Both possess charming smiles, the kind that make fast friends. But both are private by nature, and as they have traveled with the girls from city to city during an itinerant soccer career — first with Shai-Ann, who is 14, and then with Alexia, 5 — they have preferred to think of themselves as a unit.
Their families were back in Jamaica and their friends in Florida and New England, so they would count on each other.
That has changed, too.
Once word of Marcia’s illness filtered out, the soccer community and much of Salt Lake City have made them feel like they are not alone.
Deb Harper, a Real Salt Lake fan and the owner of a construction business, has founded Soccer Unites Utah, which is trying to raise awareness about the need for bone-marrow donors and raise money to pay for Marcia’s medical expenses that are not covered by insurance.
Marcia (pronounced Mar-cee-ah) calls Harper “my angel.”
There have been others, too. The team’s owner, Dave Checketts, has pledged $10,000, and the club flew Marcia to New York for a second opinion. Chivas U.S.A. is auctioning jerseys from last Saturday’s game. Pablo Mastroeni, a teammate of Williams’s in Miami, will donate a World Cup jersey for auction. And the Jamaican reggae star Shaggy is recording a public-service announcement for bone-marrow donors.
Yet for the most part, this has been a grass-roots campaign. Two high school girls teams put on a charity match. A 10-year-old boy in Houston who remembered when Andy stopped to talk with him after a game donated $20. And Real Salt Lake players wear green Soccer Unites wristbands.
“It’s important for Andy and Marcia to know how much love and support they have,” Harper said.
It is not what the Williamses expected when Andy was left unprotected in the expansion draft four years ago and chosen by Real Salt Lake. Williams, a skilled midfielder, made his debut with the Jamaican national team at 16. As a 20-year-old, he played for Jamaica in the 1998 World Cup. But he never seemed to play enough defense to please his M.L.S. coaches, and he was shunted off to five teams in seven seasons.
“I was terrified,” Marcia said of moving to a largely white community dominated by Mormon culture. “My first thought was I was going to have to wear long dresses and I’d see men with many wives. I told Andy I’d go back to Florida, finish my nursing degree and he could meet me there.”
Now, four years later, Marcia says she feels at home. She relishes how family-oriented the community is and describes her neighbors as caring and color-blind.
“God must have put us here for a reason,” said Williams, who also has a 10-year-old son, Jordain, from a previous relationship who lives in New Hampshire. “If we were in New York or Chicago, I don’t think the support would be the same.”
Marcia Karyo Williams appears to be the picture of health — her skin appears as smooth as cocoa butter, her eyes wide and bright beneath a knitted wool cap.
(Page 2 of 2)
It is much the way she looked in March, when she became continually fatigued. She would drop off the girls at school, work out at the gym in the morning, then return home so worn out that she would crawl into bed and sleep. This went on for weeks.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesIn an itinerant soccer career, Andy, Marcia and their two girls have considered themselves a self-contained unit. But people in Utah have welcomed them.
She thought she might have diabetes, which runs in her family, or a virus. Her husband told her not to worry, that it was all in her head.
“I knew it wasn’t in my head,” Marcia said. “I knew something wasn’t right.”
In May, she saw her doctor, who ordered blood tests. But leukemia was not considered because she showed none of the other symptoms that accompany the disease: bruising, bleeding and fever.
Then she developed a strong metallic taste in her mouth, which set her mind racing back to the nursing courses she had taken. She remembered this taste was associated with cancer. She rifled through notes on phlebotomy, or drawing blood. One possibility was leukemia.
Finally, in early July, the diagnosis was made: Acute Myeloid Leukemia Type 6, one of the more virulent strains.
Treatment for blood cancers generally involves chemotherapy, followed by a bone-marrow transplant. The difficulty is finding a donor match. The best chance comes from siblings who have the same parents; the odds of a successful sibling match are 1 in 4. The outlook is far worse when the search extends beyond siblings or involves a black patient, according to Dr. Finn Petersen, who is treating Marcia.
Shai-Ann understands the gravity of her mother’s illness, but Alexia knows only that her mother sleeps a lot and may have to go to the hospital for a time. Marcia said it was the thought of not being there for her daughters and husband that pushed her to speak about her illness.
“We’re going to exhaust every area to try to find a donor,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I want to be around for my family.”
A year ago, after his first season as Real Salt Lake’s coach, Jason Kreis had a heart-to-heart talk with Williams, his former teammate. If he wanted to come back, fitness would be king.
Williams arrived at training camp in February having lost weight and was in his best shape in years. Just before the season, Checketts addressed the team. Afterward, Williams stood up and asked to speak. He told Checketts that this team was ready, committed and capable of something special. The team’s general manager, Garth Lagerwey, was dumbfounded. The Andy Williams he knew as a teammate in Miami drove flashy cars with shiny rims, rarely made a peep and generally did his own thing.
“The Andy of 10 years ago never would have done that,” Lagerwey said. “Now, he’s one of the leaders.”
Occasionally, teammates will ask Williams about his wife, but mostly they leave it alone unless he brings it up. Their wives, along with the coaches, have tried to comfort Marcia, be it with a telephone call or by delivering food or a cup of coffee.
“It’s amazing how he’s been able to juggle it,” his teammate Kyle Beckerman said. “We all know he’s feeling it.”
So none of them failed to understand the significance of Williams’s play late in the regular-season finale at Colorado.
Salt Lake needed a draw to snatch the final playoff berth but trailed, 1-0, for most of the game. Then, in the 90th minute, a headed ball found Williams alone in front of the goal. He shot, and Colorado goalkeeper Bouna Coundoul made a diving save to stop it. But the ball went right to Williams’s teammate Yura Movsisyan, who knocked it in, sending Real Salt Lake to the playoffs for the first time.
As Williams recounted the moment, the gamut of emotions — his eyes being like grapefruits when the ball landed at his feet, to the despair of having his shot saved to the exhilaration when the rebound was put home — danced across his face. As her husband spoke, Marcia beamed at the recollection, too.
In another context, it might have been described as a miracle. But for those near to the Williamses, that is the one thing they are still awaiting.
Comment