By JIMMY D / Fantasy baseball | Jimmy's archive

“Break it to them gently when you tell them that I won’t be comin’ home again.”
Burton Cummings, 1979

Yes, Jimmy is back to his lame, old tricks of quoting AM radio staples of the 70s and 80s, but I heard this the other day and it fit with the grotesque intrusion that crashed my fantasy sports world.

As reality checks go, this was a Shaq O’Neal hammer dunk on the head and a Dave Schultz sucker-punch in the mouth rolled into one.

Burton’s plea for soft-pedalling bad news was the gist of what Jimmy’s brother-in-law Shane told him a few weeks back when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Jimmy was the first to learn the vile news and had the misfortune of passing it along to his mom and dad, friends and relatives in the gentlest of terms.

“I can’t sugar-coat this,” I remember telling him.

But he insisted the growth was probably benign, that he was headed for the cracker-jack neuro wing of Edmonton’s University Hospital for treatment and that the doctor was the Wayne Gretzky of surgeons, wielding a scalpel as expertly as the Great One once flicked passes.

If you are expecting Jimmy to have a point this week as it relates to fantasy sports, you can stop reading this now. I have no fantasy updates, no trade rumours, no Super Bowl recaps.

The only stats that accompany the column are 6 centimetres (the width of the golf-ball-sized tumour that had been causing Shane so much pain and trouble), 33 (the birthday he had just weeks before the diagnosis) and six (the number of patients who got a second shot at life Monday because of his donated organs.)

And the only tips I have this week are reality-based, as I hark back on a few recent emotional low blows.

Reality is, you can be the world’s greatest guy, a supremely talented artist, good-looking and smart, but you can also get cancer and be dead when you’re 39.

Reality is, you can be in your early 40s and playing with your kids and drop dead from a brain aneurism.

Reality is, you can be a healthy, athletic, devoted mother and a respected professional at work and be gone in your 30s if cancer has its way.

And reality is that a surgery can go well, but the post-op can go horribly wrong and you can be brain dead when you are 33.

So as Jimmy heads for 40 and starts getting a little paranoid, he’ll share a few pieces of recently learned wisdom.

1. Don’t try to match drink-for-drink with a grieving father.
You might feel your melancholy at losing a brother-in-law is severe, but it is tiny sorrow compared with a parent’s devastation at losing a child. And rum may dull the pain of an abscessed tooth or a sore back, but it can’t soothe a broken heart, so one or two nights is enough.

2. Take a vacation. Sure you can save your $1,000 and spend it in dribs of coffee and drabs of credit card payments. Or you can spend a week in the sun, drinking, reading, swimming, relaxing, whatevering. You can afford it, you want to do it - do it.

3. Get off your ass. There are always excuses to not do things. But here’s the catch. In the end, you won’t have seen things, gone places, met people, enjoyed experiences or abhorred them. Find reasons to do stuff instead of making excuses why you shouldn’t.

Don’t get excited about the Rolling Stones coming to Moncton, then talk yourself out of going because it’s gonna rain or because parking or accommodations might be a pain or because there’s nobody to housesit your cat.

4. Grow a weird beard. Just because.

5. Don’t save it all for your future, for your retirement. There’s no guarantee you’ll be around next week to enjoy it.

Shane lived that way. Maybe too much that way. He was in Florida one month, California the next, Whitehorse the next, slogging beer, driving nails, catching fish, telling stories.

He was the loudest one at the party when the guitars came out and the crooning of Wild World, Fogarty’s Cove or The Weight began.

He was like a second little brother to Jimmy, seeking his advice and even using it on the few occasions it happened to match what he was thinking. If it didn’t, well, thanks for the chat. And off he went.

But he was experiencing life at every turn.

He wasn’t saving it for later.

Good thing too.

Because he’s gone now.

With apologies to Burton Cummings, there is no way to break that gently.to anyone.

With apologies to Jimmy’s fans, he should be back on topic next week with Olympic hockey and spring training. In the meantime, get busy, get lucky and get a life - before it passes you by.

Jimmy D