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For Geoff Arnold, Gary Papa Run a milestone in cancer battle

07/02/2014, 4:30pm EDT

By Josh Verlin & Garrett Miley

Garrett Miley (@GWMiley) &
Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
--

Saint Joseph’s assistant head coach Geoff Arnold has gone through the highest of highs this season.

He and the rest of the Hawks cut down the nets in Brooklyn, N.Y. and took home some A-10 hardware back to Hawk Hill, then got to coach in the NCAA Tournament.

He was named one of the 100 best-looking people in college basketball by Sporting News in the fall of 2013.

He also beat cancer.

“I got diagnosed last July,” Arnold said. “I was actually at a recruiting event. I was at Jimmy Salmon’s event down in [Atlantic City]. My doctor called--I had taken a biopsy--and told me that it came back positive. That’s when I found out.”

The diagnosis was prostate cancer, though luckily his doctors caught it early. According to the American Cancer Society, those with either “local stage” or “regional stage” prostate cancer have a five-year survival rate of “nearly 100 percent,” so the outlook was always positive.

But no matter what stage, prognosis or anything else optimistic, hearing the ‘C’ word at any stage of the disease brings with it several immediate responses. Luckily, Arnold had some positive family history to carry him through the news.

“That drive back from A.C. was like ‘whoa this is serious,’” he admitted. “But, I knew that my brother had beaten the battle. He’s a bike rider and he’s back to riding miles and miles and miles and so I felt that, you know what, I can beat this.”

The diagnosis came across as a shock to the entire Saint Joseph’s community. Cancer affects every human being in this day and age, but the Hawks’ basketball program was one that had a special connection with the disease.

Head coach Phil Martelli has been a longtime supporter of Coaches vs. Cancer, a program run by the ACS that’s raised nearly $90 million to help fight the disease. On an even more personal level, Martelli’s sister-in-law passed away from cancer, shortly after the 2012-13 season.

“You can’t print my initial reaction,” Martelli said about hearing Arnold’s diagnosis. “And then my rational head takes over, because he was optimistic. My first thought was about his wife and his daughter to make sure they were as okay as you can be with that type of diagnosis.

“Number two, I had tremendous belief in Geoff because of his physical strength, his mental strength, and his spiritual strength, that he was going to come out of this on the other side stronger and better in all areas.”

Arnold has a close relationship not just with Martelli and the staff, but the entire university as well. A four-year letterwinner for the Hawks from 1982-86, he became a Saint Joseph’s assistant for the first time in 1993 and worked under Martelli for the first time in 1995-96.

He then followed former SJU teammate and close friend Bruiser Flint to UMass and then Drexel, finding success in both stops. He rejoined Martelli’s staff in 2008-09, and has been on the sidelines at Hagan Arena since.

With his sixth season back at SJU looming after the diagnosis, Arnold was not the type to want to miss any sort of basketball activity.

“I had the surgery on September 4 [2013] and you have to do a biopsy,” he said. “The pathologist has to get your prostate after they remove it and I elected to have the surgery…the rough part of it was the getting back to normal, or attempting to getting back to normal.”

And though Arnold would be forced to miss a few practices after the surgery, he didn’t miss a single game all season.

In fact, he wanted to get back to normalcy so much, sometimes his boss thought he was “trying to do too much too soon.”

“There were times when I thought that maybe he had a little bit less energy...whether it’s back to back practices or coming in after treatment,” Martelli said. “He didn’t owe us anything. He owed us to give himself the chance to be the 100 percent Geoff Arnold again.”

Arnold admits he’s not currently back to a full 100 percent, but said “it’s pretty much come back. All of my bodily functions have pretty much come back, my bladder control and things like that.”

That might seem like more information about the 49-year-old than needed, and that’s one of Arnold’s goals.

“I try not to spare any details when I talk to people about it because it’s something that I went through and for a long time I believe that men didn’t talk about it in the way that they should have to make other men aware of it and what’s going on,” he said.

Back on June 15, Arnold led a group of 24 people in the Gary Papa 5K Run, a fundraiser for Prostate Health Initiative (PHI). PHI named their event after Papa, the longtime Philadelphia sports broadcaster who passed away from the disease in 2009 following a six-year battle.

It was his only daughter, Gabrielle--a rising senior at Germantown Friends’ School--who suggested he get involved.

“She said ‘Dad why don’t you do it, and I’ll do it with you,’” Arnold said. “The event was fantastic. I thought it was a celebration of life in past because people had shirts saying ‘In loving memory’ and things like that. I thought it was a celebration of past life, of present life, and future.”

Of course, the Saint Joseph’s community came out to support Arnold and the event, which went on to break its goal of raising $250,000. Arnold’s nephew, recent SJU grad Langston Galloway, came back to Philadelphia from his native Louisiana, but with Galloway hoping to get a shot in the NBA this summer and fall, Arnold made sure his nephew walked with his brother-in-law instead of running with the rest of the group.

“I did not want to be the one that he had a calf strain or was jogging and had to run around someone and bumped his knee. No, no, no not on my watch,” he said.

Another Hawk, Papa Ndao, ran "stride-for-stride" with Arnold.

Medically cleared of the disease since midseason, Arnold initially saw his disease as something that he'd put behind him, that he'd conquered fairly easily. He didn't realize how much of an impact his diagnosis had ultimately had on those around him.

“I think the thing that I never thought about that got me emotional…was when my daughter put up a post on Facebook and she was talking about our relationship,” he said. “She said ‘my family has been through the lowest of the lows and the highest of the highs.’

“I know what highs she’s talking about--winning the A-10 Championship. But lows? I didn’t realize how that affects a 16 year old girl. The fact that she was terribly afraid even if I wasn’t going into surgery, she was terribly afraid…I don’t see it that way because as an athlete and that kind of stuff, when you’re in the battle you’re in the battle. You don’t look around and see how the crowd is reacting.”

The Gary Papa Run only solidified those feelings. Cancer isn’t Geoff Arnold’s past, it’s just part of who he is now, and moving forward. And he’s far from alone.

“I try to say that there’s nothing different, but being out there showed me that it was different,” he said. “It made me say ‘wow,’ because I just looked at it as something in front of me.”