Randy Wright, coach at Porters Chapel Academy flips a baseball at the Eagles’ field.(The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[05/27/02]Randy Wright won’t get out of his blue plastic chair until he reaches down, adjusts the bottoms of his baseball pants and fidgets with the shoelaces.

An old habit. Wright uses those few seconds to compose himself and think once more about an upcoming trip to the pitcher’s mound. It started several years ago, and now he won’t get up without tugging just for a second on the bottom of those pants.

“It just gives me an extra second to think about things,” Wright said.

He walks to the mound with an expression of confidence that rarely leaves the 31-year-old’s face. It’s a move he’s made since taking over the fledgling program seven years ago and one he’ll make many more times.

A simple baseball move made by a baseball guy, for if Randy Wright is anything, he is a baseball guy. It’s baseball that has helped him overcome an opponent much more difficult to figure out, let alone beat. Baseball helped Randy Wright beat cancer.

Cancer? This guy?

He has a wife and 1-year-old daughter. When not coaching baseball, he’s playing golf or softball or whiffle ball or tiddlywinks or whatever he can do that’s outside.

Cancer? How can he smile and say things like, “I don’t even think about it anymore.” Testicular cancer affects more than 8,000 people a year in America and it tried its best to beat Randy Wright.

There are some people, though, you just don’t want to pick a fight with.

“They told me that it was the most curable form of cancer,” Wright said. “When they said that, it brought out my competitiveness.”

To understand how he beat the disease, though, one must get a feel for that competitiveness that flows through his veins masked as blood. He wears his heart on his sleeve and never thinks he has a chance at losing at anything he does.

“Wanna know how competitive Randy Wright is?” said his best friend and ex-college roommate Jamie Creel, the coach at Vicksburg High. “I bet his parents spent about $5,000 remodeling their house from all the holes he punched in the wall when I’d beat him at Super Tecmo Bowl.

“I’m talking about big holes.”

Wright’s father quit playing backyard games because, “we would be out there for seven, eight hours until I let him win,” Randy Wright Sr. said. “After a while, I just quit. He never would give up.”

Strapped to a chair for eight hours a day, five days a week, Randy Wright took a needle in his arm and waited.

The chemotherapy the strongest form possible infiltrated his blood stream causing instant nausea and fatigue. After each session, he was weak to the point where he couldn’t drive and could hardly move.

“It’s one of the most awful feelings in the whole world,” Wright said. “It’s not painful, it just drags you down. It makes you sick and leaves an awful taste in your mouth.”

The treatments were for five days, then a two-week respite, followed by five more days. This went on for four weeks worth of treatment.

“I was sick all the time,” Wright said. “We’d have to pull the car over to the side of the road on the way home sometimes because I was so sick.”

Certainly he went home, laid down in front of the television until he drifted into a sleep that would bring him to the next treatment.

Yeah, right!

“I went straight from the treatment to football practice,” said Wright, also an assistant on the PCA football team. “I told them to speed things up because I have to get to practice. They told me if I carried on with life as normal as possible, the chances of a full recovery were better.

“I never missed a practice or a game that whole year.”

American Cancer Society statistics say that the survival rate after five years is 95 percent. On Aug. 4, it will have been five years since Wright first went into the hospital for his hernia operation.

“Every time I would come home, it would be tough,” Creel said. “To see your best friend go through cancer made me realize nothing is guaranteed.”

Wright’s job almost wasn’t guaranteed, either. Eight months before starting cancer treatment, he was fired by the PCA school board. It took an outpouring of support from players many of whom enrolled at other schools and his “win at any cost” attitude to sway the decision.

A special meeting was called in January 1997 and Wright was reinstated.

“I had a lot of people that supported me throughout that,” the ever-candid coach said. “There were a few that didn’t support me, but a lot went to the table for me.”

The second decision has paid enormous dividends.

Wright built the program using some home-grown talent, a few out-of-area transfers and some from the bigger schools in the county.

“He does a great job,” junior Andrew Embry said. “We know what he’s been through and see how much he cares about us. It makes us want to go out and play harder for him.”

He doesn’t mind players coming from other schools to join his team.

“There’s always one or two that may not be quite ready to play on that level,” Wright said.

“I give them a chance and they respond.”

Wright has not had a losing season in his years at Porters Chapel and plans on staying at the school for as long as the school will have him.

Wright doesn’t keep his cancer a secret. It’s been in this newspaper before and the memories are fresh.

Could it be that it’s easier to talk about something after you’ve whipped it? Who knows, except Wright himself.

Rarely at a loss for words, Wright balances Goldie’s and baseball with lots of golf. With his mind so occupied and the cancer five years in his past, he can afford to not think about it.

“This really hit home for me because we are mirror-images,” Creel said.

“I was thinking, here’s a guy that was 26 years old going through this type of ordeal, it could be just around the corner. He’s a fighter and a competitor.”

That fight will carry on luckily for a long, long time. Cancer tried to beat Wright. Wright won.

He smiles often now, usually when talking about baseball. He’s planning a clinic with Creel and Warren Central coach Randy Broome to continue to mold home-grown talent into the future stars of tomorrow.

Stars he will get to see, thanks to an undying commitment to beating a disease that ravages so many lives.

“When the doctors made cancer out to be a win-lose situation, it made me want to win,” Wright said. “I looked at it as a game; something I was going to do.

“I did what I had to. I took all the chemo I had to take and I beat cancer.”