If we’re being honest, this is garbage. Chase Smith’s story was not supposed to end this way.
He was supposed to have gone to Tokyo last year — okay, this year, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic — to represent the United States at the Summer Paralympics in Tokyo. He was supposed to have enrolled as a freshman at IUPUI last August. He was supposed to buck the odds, spit in cancer’s face yet again and ride off into the sunset a winner, just as he always has in the past.
But life doesn’t always turn out like it’s supposed to, especially in an era where it sometimes feels like Biff Tannen really did steal the DeLorean.
(Fair warning: I might ramble or go off on a stray tangent or two as this column progresses, and I apologize for that. I’ve had some time to prepare for this, but I still haven’t fully processed it. I’m sure I’m not alone on that.)
Chase Smith deserved a better ending than the one he met on Sunday, but life seldom delegates outcomes based on merit. Sometimes good people get jerked — and Chase, better than good, got the rawest deal you can get.
But while he did not survive his fifth and final fight against Ewing’s sarcoma, there’s no blemishing his record in my book. I deemed Chase Smith “unbreakable” in a feature I wrote on him more than a year ago, and as far as I’m concerned, he still is. He’s the toughest dude I’ve ever encountered.
Chase had been diagnosed with cancer before I ever arrived in Johnson County, which was unfair for a number of reasons. It was a little unfair to me because I never got to see him as the healthy, prodigious young swimmer who was once ranked among the best in the nation for his age. It was obviously way more unfair to Chase on every level. I never got to see him as anything other than The Kid With Cancer, and that no doubt colored my coverage of him, whether I intended it to or not.
(I did make it a point not to use the C-word when I last wrote about him in November. Figured I owed him that at least one time.)
I didn’t feel sorry for him, even when I did, if that makes any sense. Yes, I felt horrible that someone so young had to face the absolute hell that he did. Chase Smith fought five rounds against one of the most aggressive cancers there is, and no kid deserves that, especially him. But I didn’t pity him in the truest sense, because I knew he didn’t really need or want my pity. He was enough of a badass to push forward on his own.
I’ve seen and covered a fair amount of insanely gifted and otherworldly athletes in person during my lifetime. I can tell you about the times I saw Curtis Bostic defy gravity and reason as a high schooler on the Boston University and Boston Garden basketball courts in the summer of 1990 and swear up and down that I’ve still never seen more freakishly awesome human athleticism up close, even if Bostic never became a professional star.
I can tell you about being in the press box for classic Notre Dame football games against Florida State in 1993 and USC in 2005, and how surreal both of those Saturdays were. I can tell you about watching Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Sarah Hughes and Annika Sorenstam and countless other superstars past, present and future. I can tell you about seeing Matt Grevers tower over the other boys on the starting blocks at the 2003 Illinois high school swim meet, certain that I’d eventually see him win an Olympic gold medal (he won four).
But I can also tell you that none of those athletes, none of those teams and none of those experiences left the same mark on me that Chase Smith did.
How could they? This guy beat cancer four times, with enough energy left over to qualify for the state swim meet three years in a row — and this tragic ending to his story could never discount any of that, because how many of us would have even made it that far? Probably not you. Certainly not I.
Sometime in the early 1990s, around the time I was ending high school and beginning college, I set a rule for myself — to never ask anybody who’s younger than I am for an autograph.
And I held to it for the longest. Heck, I didn’t ask anyone of any age for an autograph for the longest. Until recently.
Veering off for a second: When I was coming out of a math test in the spring of my freshman year at Notre Dame, I walked out of the exam room at the Hesburgh Library and was strolling through the lobby. Some dude on a bench asked if I knew whether a classmate of mine, presumably his girlfriend, was still in there. I did not.
As I walked away, it occurred to me that the guy who’d asked me that question was Othella Harrington, then a freshman at Georgetown and later a first-round NBA draft pick. I paused, spun back and asked him to sign the copy of the test I’d walked out with.
Harrington was about eight months older than me, so I didn’t break my rule (though I’d have broken it in that instance either way just because of the delicious randomness of the encounter).
Anyway, I don’t know if that signature even went home with me that summer, and I definitely don’t have it now, but I remember that instance largely because I can say with absolute certainty that I went 27 full years from that point without ever asking another person for an autograph. And I never broke my rule.
Until last year, when I trekked to the Smith house and left an envelope with my ChaseStrong shirt, a Sharpie and a note asking for his autograph.
I’ll never break my rule again, but I’m glad I did in this case. That shirt is now framed and hanging on the wall of my home office.
Cancer might have taken Chase from us, but it needed to come at him five times with everything it had before it was finally able to break him. I’ve written about him multiple times and heard stories from those closest to him that don’t just border on the unbelievable. They were unbelievable. They still are and always will be.
I hope to live long enough to see thousands more games, matches and meets, and thousands more amazing athletes doing amazing things. But I can’t imagine any athlete topping what Chase did in his 19-plus years.
His life on Earth might be over — but Chase Smith was larger than life. The legacy he built during his all-too-brief time with us will remain with us and inspire us for generations to come.
Any of us who had a chance to cross paths with him should consider ourselves fortunate — and try to carry that legacy forward.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
