Missouri’s Gary Pinkel confronted by life without football

As he tried to fend off an emotional shock wave that soon would choke him up, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel stumbled some on Monday as he described one of his typical points of emphasis at speaking engagements.

“ ‘It’s all about football,’ ” he said.

Pausing with a wry grin as he realized his mistake during a news conference at Mizzou Arena, he added: “Excuse me: ‘It’s all about people.’ Not football. I guess I’m really struggling with this, aren’t I?”

The Freudian slip that preceded his tears moments later was forgivable enough for a 63-year-old man whose existence has revolved around the game for most of the last 50 years, including the last 15 at Missouri.

It was particularly understandable given the abrupt end to his career announced Friday, when he revealed he was contending with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and would retire at season’s end.

Even for a man who’s spent considerable time riding motorcycles or boating and been known to arrive by helicopter for recruiting trips, there never has been an adrenaline rush like the one he’s known in coaching — whether through the thrill of the competition or in the fulfillment of molding young men.

So when he was diagnosed in May, Pinkel’s competitive instinct honed by a quirk of fate early in his life made him initially hope he could will the disease into submission — or at least render it a back-burner matter for the foreseeable future.

Even then, though, an epiphany was emerging as he started thinking about how much time he has left to live:

“When you get it, it’s so numbing … You’re driving around for a week, you just glance at yourself in the rearview mirror and look at yourself and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”

So that lurked and nagged and tugged at Pinkel.

Even as he made the initial decision to proceed with coaching after receiving treatment in May and June.

Even as he moved forward, because that’s what he always does, and even as he continued to feel fine (as he does now).

Finally, profoundly struck by the suffering of others around him receiving treatment before and after a PET scan in late October, a switch flipped, he said.

He never was going to be coaching at 70, he reminded on Monday, but now he was framing the broader question differently.

“Would you rather die on a football field, or would you rather die on a beach?” he said, somewhat playfully but not exactly jokingly. “And I’d rather die on a beach, OK?”

But after announcing his decision amid unrest on campus and with his final home game awaiting Saturday, Pinkel will be confronted with a few new quandaries.

For one thing, there is the matter of how a regimented control freak will use a vast expanse of time he has never before known … underscored by a new sense of mortality.

“I have no plan. And that’s not good,” he said. “Because I have a plan for every day of my life.”

Even as he vowed to move towards doing something “significant,” perhaps involved in some way with MU, Pinkel contemplated the upside of time to exhale after the season.

Most of all it will mean time with his children and eight grandchildren and wife, Missy, who suggested she may steer him to dabble in coaching youth soccer or learning to cook or improving his dance, uh, moves.

All of that, of course, is a secondary concern.

Because for as good as Pinkel looks, as much as he is deflecting concerns and prayers for him to those who are suffering more, he has follicular lymphoma and all that comes with it.

“It’s a blood disease, and there's no cure for it," Pinkel said. “You manage it. That’s pretty much what you do for the rest of your life: You manage it, you deal with it.”

The new normal comes with a poignant twist for Pinkel, much of whose attitude and persona has been driven by a form of survivor’s guilt he’s known since his late teens.

His older sister, Kathy, suffers from a rare and little-known neurological disorder, hereditary spastic paraplegia, that left her unable to walk in her early 20s.

Pinkel always was close to his sister, who moved in the last few years from Columbus, Ohio, to Columbia with her husband, Greg Grinch.

Growing up in Akron, Ohio, where his father always worked two jobs, they shared a room until he was 7.

At least a time or two, he cried when they were separated at Sunday school. One of her early schemes to run away from home was foiled when he wouldn’t go along as planned.

So her health issues were emotional enough for Pinkel, two years younger, who as she was weakening would take her on his arm and glare at gawkers, thinking, “Don’t you look at my sister like that.”

But that didn’t prepare him for what came next.

When he got a call from his mother, Gay, during his senior year at Kent State that the disease also had struck his younger brother, Greg, Pinkel immediately began sobbing.

He had saved Greg from drowning years before when he had fallen as a tot in Chautauqua Lake in New York, and looked out for him like you’d expect a doting brother to.

And there was nothing he could do about this, compounding something he already was feeling.

“It was like for some reason I was ‘The Chosen One,’ ” he said in an interview in his office a few years ago. “I just felt like, ‘Why me? Why them and not me?’ ”

The combination permeated and propelled Pinkel, whose brother suffered a heart attack and died a day before his 47th birthday in 2005.

Pinkel’s incessant drive, his “no excuses” mantra, his senses of responsibility and loyalty and accountability…

All were directly related to the circumstances — particularly the strength and dignity with which his sister handled the disease.

He’d tell anyone who would listen, from players to reporters to friends, that she “never once” complained about it as she earned a degree in education, had two children and a 25-year government career.

Ask her about the dynamics yourself, and essentially you’d get a shrug.

“Well, we didn’t sit around talking about it,” she said during a visit to their home in Columbus a few years ago. “I mean, it’s there and life goes on.”

So now all of this will flow through Pinkel in another sort of way as he enters uncharted territory.

He smiled Monday at the mere mention of his protective sister, who “didn’t even want me riding a motorcycle.”

Just the same, he added, “No one’s whining or complaining here.”

Add it all up and you can see how and why Pinkel will embrace what’s next — identity change and mysteries and all.

“I feel,” he said, “very peaceful.”

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 7:29 PM with the headline "Missouri’s Gary Pinkel confronted by life without football."