During the postgame celebration, the team’s leading scorer, Danny McGeady — a towel draped over his left shoulder and both arms raised high in victory — stands laughing next to the equally-joyous Kurt Murnen, the full-faced fellow junior who had led the Greater Catholic League in assists that season and had just set a school record with 13 in this game.
Danny and Kurt weren’t just teammates, they were best friends and, as they would show time and again over the next couple of years, they’d help the other any way they could.
At that moment, with both of them so full of jubilation and expectation, life could not have seemed any better. But so much has happened since then and McGeady has watched two of the people most dear to him battle cancer:
In March 1999, when Kurt was 19, he died of bone cancer.
Theresa, Danny’s wife, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in late 2007 and since has successfully battled the disease into remission.
After losing Kurt so suddenly, Danny said Theresa’s ordeal left him with lingering issues:
“A lot of negative stuff built up. I was mad. I had had to watch it all again and I had had the same helpless feeling. And I knew so many other people were in similar situations. I wished there was something I could do.”
Now there is, and once again he and Kurt — who is providing yet another assist — are side by side on the competitive stage.
McGeady is running for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Man of the Year.
Five other area men are also vying — and five women are running for Woman of the Year — in the annual fund-raising competition that concludes with a gala silent auction and dinner at Sinclair’s Ponitz Center on May 9.
McGeady's campaign website — www.fc-44.com— comes with a touching letter he wrote about his wife and his best friend. The FC stands for Fight Cancer and 44 was Kurt's jersey number at Alter.
As for that old picture from the 1996 regional title game, it’s now the centerpiece photo of McGeady’s Man of the Year Facebook page.
Now 35 with two kids and two companies (Amish Cabinets USA and Dyer Contracting), McGeady said he didn’t plan on getting involved with the LLS.
“As I had gotten older and gotten all these responsibilities, I felt I was kind of losing myself as far as day-to-day things go,” he said. “I’d been talking to my buddy, Justin Bayer, about that — saying how I wanted to get back to doing something to help people — and he happened to be out jogging and ran into the woman in charge of the campaign. She was looking for volunteers and, well, it went from there.”
Jay Murnen, Kurt’s older brother, a former Alter player himself and another of McGeady’s friends, said: “Danny set out with two goals in mind. No 1, he wanted to do something to give back and, No 2, he wanted to make sure ‘his boy’ wasn’t forgotten. And in the process it’s helped him cope with the feelings he had after his wife went through her battle.
“It’s been therapeutic for everyone, but I’ll admit there have been plenty of tears, too. But good tears. When you see my brother’s memory and the history carry the day 15 years after the fact, that’s pretty special.”
Illness strikes
Back in the seventh grade, Danny went to Bishop Leibold and Kurt to Incarnation.
“We played ball against each other, but he didn’t like me,” McGeady said with a laugh. “Then we ended up together at Alter and that freshman season we got pretty close.”
That year the Knights’ varsity — which included Jay Murnen and Danny’s older brother Brian — made it to the state tournament. The following 1994-95 season, Kurt and Danny made the varsity as sophomores and played alongside their brothers.
All that set the tone for the next season, but following that regional title over Whetstone, the young Knights were ousted by top-ranked Orrville in the state semifinal.
A month later, Jay, a freshman at Miami University, fell off a banister in the Emerson Hall dormitory and plummeted three floors, landing on his head. He fractured his skull, broke his collarbone and initially it was feared he might not survive.
He spent three months in a coma and Kurt, along with Danny, was at his bedside daily.
“Kurt was the only one who could get Jay to respond,” said the boys’ father, Pat Murnen, a stalwart of the Dayton Flyers basketball teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “He could get him to blink his eye or squeeze his hand.”
Over the summer, Kurt and Danny did everything they could to ready themselves for a hoops season — Alter had everyone back — they thought they’d never forget.
And they were right — for the wrong reason.
“We were away at Five-Star camp when Kurt first started feeling bad,” McGeady said. “He was a tough guy, though, and we finished the summer, but I could tell he was hurting.
“Then (in late August) I was at home and the phone rang. It was Kurt. He said he had cancer. I knew that wasn’t good, but we didn’t realize the magnitude it could be. We were just babies.”
Kurt went through treatments and early in his senior season, now bald and wearing a chest protector, he played in some games.
“He wanted to keep playing, but … he just couldn’t do it,” said McGeady, his eyes filling with tears, his voice faltering.
Eventually, Kurt’s cancer was thought to be in remission and he and Danny headed to UD.
“Our moms wouldn’t let us room together (at Marycrest),” McGeady laughed. “We still had plenty of good times, but at the end of that year I remember him knocking on my door and just telling me, ‘I got to do it all again. It’s back.’ This time I didn’t have a great feeling.”
As Kurt’s health failed, Danny was buoyed by his longtime friend, Theresa Pittl. She had gone to Alter, they had dated briefly before college and then she had headed to the University of Findlay when he went to UD.
“When it was at the end with Kurt, she took good care of me and I needed her,” McGeady said.
The couple eventually wed and then had son Jack, who was about 18 months old when Theresa was diagnosed with the same disease her mom , Bonnie, had dealt with 17 years earlier.
“Although it was a completely different cancer than Kurt’s and the prognosis was much better, you‘re still terrified at first,” McGeady said. “And it was angering, too. I had hoped I was done with cancer, but it was back in our life.”
Theresa went through six months of chemo and he said she’s now cancer free.
“With Kurt, it’s gotten harder for me as I’ve gotten older,” McGeady said. “I felt he got cheated. I got cheated. My kids did. To them he’s Uncle Kurt, but they never got to meet him.
“I talk about him all the time because I want them (Jack is now 7 and Elise is 3) to know him. And in a way I think Jack always has. Before he could even speak, he would look at a picture of Kurt and try to say his name.
“And you know how people believe children can see things? I don’t know, but I will say when Jack was about 2 we were sitting there and I just said matter-of-factly, ‘Hey, you still see Uncle Kurt?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, sometimes.’
“I said, ‘When do you see him?’ And he just looks at me and says, ‘At night-night.’ ”
Flyers pitch in
McGeady launched the LLS Man and Woman of the Year campaign by addressing the Nutter Center crowd before the Alter-Carroll game this past February.
Since then he’s had a series of fund-raising events, although his Mardi Gras night at a local union hall on March 29 was compromised some by the Dayton Flyers’ unexpected run to the Elite Eight. That was the night UD played Florida in Memphis.
The Flyers, whose staff includes McGeady’s cousin, Eric Farrell, the assistant director of basketball operations, paid him back last week by taking part in a fund-raising autograph signing/ice cream social at Flanagan’s Pub.
“The players were unbelievable,” McGeady said. “The way they handled themselves was outstanding.”
Pat Murnen agreed: “They were absolutely tremendous. They were all there and they acted like they wanted to be there. I hate to say this, but back in my day if you asked 10 guys to do that you’d have guys saying, ‘We’re not going.’ ”
Sunday, McGeady has one last fund-raiser at the Milano’s in Miamisburg.
“I don’t know if we’ll win the dollar amount, but I’ve had a lot of people donate and I’ve seen there are a lot of good people out there. Sometimes you lose sight of that as you go about your daily life.
“Best of all, I think this is the start of a legacy for Kurt. And I think other things (the family is talking of an Alter scholarship in his name) will come from this. I just don’t want him forgotten.”
Not that that would happen in his home.
And that prompted one last story from him about a trip to Kurt’s grave in Calvary Cemetery on Memorial Day:
“Jack asked if it would be OK to jump off the top of the headstone and I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I think Uncle Kurt would like that.’ ”
And why wouldn’t he?
He and Danny weren’t just teammates, they were best friends and, like always, they would help the other any way they could.
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