In Hawk’s NFL world, a guy usually needs pads, a helmet, plenty of muscle and a full head of steam if he hopes to stop a guy dead in his tracks.
But she did it by just looking out into the big crowd and, in a little schoolgirl voice, telling her story.
It happened last month at the annual fundraiser — The Mane Event — A.J. and his wife Laura put on at their new home in Dublin.
The intent of the evening was to help fill the coffers of the Hawk’s Locks Fund, which — in partnership with the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State — provides wigs and other head coverings for cancer patients, burn victims and those with other medical conditions that cause hair loss, especially those involving children.
The June 28 outing drew 270 people, including some of Hawk’s former Ohio State teammates and other Buckeye players, as well as head coach Urban Meyer, who auctioned off a helmet he had signed. The emcee for the evening was Fox News senior correspondent Rick Leventhal.
But all these guys were mere warm-up acts for Lauren Slish, a shy 9-year-old who was coaxed to the microphone wearing an oversized blue cap, glasses, pearls and a colorful dress.
A fourth-grader-to-be at St. Mary School in Columbus’s German Village, she’s a budding ballerina, belongs to the 4-H Club (next year’s project will be raising a bunny), loves horses and is big sister to 2-year-old brother Cullen.
“She was perfectly healthy, but then she kept getting sick with flu-like symptoms through the winter,” said her mom, Elaine. “Her pediatrician said it was just a bad year for flu, but then in mid-March he finally wanted her to go to the hospital to have an ultrasound done. He thought maybe her spleen was infected.
“We knew something wasn’t right, but we figured we’d just get it fixed. But after the ultrasound, an oncologist came in and I went, ‘Uh-oh, this isn’t good.’ He was very brief and direct. He said he was sorry and gave us the news.”
Lauren was diagnosed with a Stage 3 Wilms’ tumor on her kidney and was immediately admitted to the James, which place she would not leave for two months.
The large tumor and her left kidney were surgically removed and then came a week of radiation treatment, followed by what will be a half-year of chemotherapy sessions at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
“Early on there were some complications,” Elaine said. “She was getting all kinds of medications as well as the radiation and chemo and she reacted badly. She’s always been sensitive to drugs and now it got to the point where they pulled me aside and said, ‘What do you want to do? She’s not gonna last like this.’ ”
When they cut down the drugs, Lauren improved and finally was able to go to her home in the small Franklin County village of Lockbourne.
But along the way, she was, in Elaine’s words, “devastated” by another side effect.
Lauren had been told she would lose her hair during chemo and it happened quickly, during the second week.
“It came out in handfuls and she was horrified,” Elaine said. “When she came home she was completely bald and she didn’t want anybody to know that. Now she always wears a hat, but they bother her. They itch her head, they slide around and they’re hot.”
Along the way a social worker gave Elaine and her husband Kevin a pamphlet about the Wigs for Kids organization, in the Cleveland suburb of Westlake, that makes custom-fitted wigs out of real hair that has been donated.
Some 25 to 30 pony tails are used in one wig and the intricately constructed pieces cost $1,800 or more. Wigs for Kids charges none of the children, and costs are handled by the group’s own fund-raisers, hospital charities and other foundations.
Elaine filled out an application (some 90 people are on the current waiting list), added a short bio of her daughter and sent it to Wigs for Kids. The people there were moved and she not only got an immediate response, but was told Hawk’s foundation was looking for a poster child this year.
Kevin, an Iraq war veteran now attending Ohio State, knew of Hawk and was excited by the connection.
“I don’t follow football so I didn’t know,” Elaine said with a laugh. “For the first week, I kept referring to him as A.J. Shaw.”
It didn’t take long for her to learn who he really was.
And we’re not talking about the football resume of the former Centerville High School star, a two-time All-American and the Lombardi Trophy winner at Ohio State and then, in 2006, a first-round draft pick of Green Bay, for which he’s ranked first or second in tackles seven of his eight NFL seasons.
The Hawk she got to know was the one summed up by Wigs for Kids rep Margo Sokol:
“He’s genuine, just a very low-key, down-to-earth guy who wants to give back and help kids look themselves and feel comfortable.”
And that’s the guy little Lauren got to know.
“He’s nice,” she said ever-so-quietly Friday afternoon. “Real nice.”
Tribute to Tillman
Besides his hard-nosed football prowess, Hawk was known for years for that long hair spilling out from beneath his helmet.
He and fellow OSU linebackers Bobby Carpenter and Anthony Schlegel had first grown out their hair in the Buckeyes’ 2004 season as a way of paying tribute to Pat Tillman, the long-locked, ferocious-hitting safety of the Arizona Cardinals, who had walked away from the fame and money of the NFL at age 27, joined the Army Rangers and ended up killed while on patrol in Afghanistan in April of that year.
While Hawk’s hair intent was heartfelt and honorable, the initial reactions from some folks were sometimes less than complimentary.
“Nobody was on board at the beginning, for sure,” he said, chuckling. “People told me I’d look like a thug. They said it wouldn’t look good. I knew it didn’t look good, believe me, but I wanted to do it. And people came around pretty quickly. They saw there was nothing to worry about.”
A couple of years ago, Hawk — now married to Laura, with a daughter Lennon and a son Hendrix on the way — said he decided to cut his hair:
“Through other guys I’d heard about Locks of Love, so I decided just to give my hair to a deal like that here in Ohio — Wigs for Kids.
The organization was founded 33 years ago by acclaimed international hairdresser Jeffrey Paul and his wife Zina.
“His niece had leukemia and was losing her hair,” Sokol said. “She was a gymnast and asked him if he could help her. He had studied wig-making in Europe and he created a hair replacement for her. She did her routine, it didn’t fall off and she was ecstatic. Right then, he kind of felt God calling him to make hair replacements for children.
“Once kids lose their hair, they look different and often they don’t feel good about themselves. The mirror inside gets broken and once it is, it’s hard to put it back together and regain that self- love and confidence you used to have in yourself.
“We help them get it back and look like the other kids and do the things other kids can do. We say we’re not in the hair business, the wig business — we’re in the business of restoring self-confidence in children.”
Future Cheesehead?
“We got hooked up with A.J.’s fundraiser kind of at the last minute, so we didn’t know what to expect,” Elaine said. “They gave us directions to his house and we got there early and he was still setting up. We caught him as he was running around — before he got all dressed up — and he could have been the guy next door.
“He was so friendly, so laid back and we felt comfortable right away. Lauren is pretty shy and reserved, but she really warmed up to him. He could have been someone she knew her whole life. You could tell he’s a dad.”
Hawk’s daughter Lennon is just over 3 ½ and his son Hendrix is 17 months.
“Yeah, they’re named after the musicians. We’ve definitely have got a musical theme going here,” Hawk said with a laugh. “For some reason I became a Jimi Hendrix fan in middle school. I think I found an old record in the closet that my dad had had. And I’ve always been a Beatles fan.
“We’re planning on having at least one or two more kids, so I’m hoping we can come up with some more musical names, whether it’s a boy or a girl. Right now I’m kinda stumped. Maybe that’s why we’re not trying for that third one yet.”
As small as the two children are, he and Laura have made sure to take them along when they meet the kids his foundation helps.
“We want to take them into a situation you might think they’d be a little uncomfortable with,” he said. “It’s good we all see what other families are dealing with and how lucky we are. But we also learn something valuable from them.
“Most of those kids and their parents have a better attitude about the adversity than we do. They’re so positive, so upbeat, so strong. They’re fighters and the more we see that, the more we know we’re behind the right cause.”
As they’ve partnered more with the James, whose scope Hawk first became aware of through his involvement in the annual Buckeye Cruise for Cancer, A.J. and Laura have expanded their scope and are planning to add more projects, including something called Hawk’s Heroes.
“Kids will get capes when they go into the hospital so they can feel like Superman,” Hawk said. “We gave our very first cape to Lauren at our event last month.”
And once on stage it did seem as if she made a Clark Kent-type transformation.
“She was really brave telling her story,” Hawk said. “She captured the whole crowd. We could see what we were doing actually made a difference in her life.”
Nikki Lewis, an events planner who helped the Hawks with their evening, agreed: “I’m a mother of two myself, and she just pulled all our heart strings. It took a lot of courage to tell her story. You could see she’s a positive, strong little girl.”
Along with donations and a silent auction that night, there also was live bidding on eight helmets signed by players like Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and linebacker Clay Matthews, St. Louis Rams linebacker James Laurinaitis, some others autographed by Buckeyes and that one from Meyer.
Altogether over $100,000 was raised that night.
One table picked up the tab for Lauren’s wig. And when she got the pamphlet with what Elaine said “must have been over 60” hair color choices, Lauren initially picked red.
“Mommy said no to that,” Elaine laughed.
A week ago the hospital gave Lauren a temporary hair piece to wear and “she just blossomed when she put it on,” her mom said:
“She wants to go out in public now and she keeps peeking in the mirror. I couldn’t believe the immediate difference in her.”
Even better news came Thursday when Lauren had her first scan since her operation and was found to be “cancer free,” Elaine said.
And now this Saturday — thanks to Hawk — she finally gets her much-awaited wig at a Wigs for Kids fund-raiser at the Cleveland Zoo. The day before she’ll be taken to a salon where it will be specifically cut and styled.
“I’m getting a brown one with a pink streak in it,” Lauren said proudly.
The hair will be long and the bangs will be side-swept.
“That’s the most exciting thing she has going on right now,” Elaine said. “She’ll be able to do ballet, even swim with it on. She can do all kinds of things now.”
When asked if Lauren may even become a Green Bay Packers fan, Elaine proved she not only knows the Hawk name, but knows his game. And that made her think of another head covering for her daughter:
“I think we might even get her a Cheesehead.”
Contact this reporter at 937-225-2156 or email Tom.Archdeacon@coxinc.com.
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