For six weeks last fall, Joe Yevoli and his father’s mission was simple: Almost 30 years earlier, Joe Yevoli Sr.’s final season of college lacrosse had been stripped away. Now Yevoli, who transferred to Syracuse for his senior season in 2006 with hopes of regaining the reputation he earned at Virginia as one of the nation’s top attackmen, wanted to make it up to him.

‘I’m here for a reason,’ Yevoli said in an empty conference room in mid-October. ‘Whether or not that’s the reason I don’t know, but it’s kind of like to give my dad a second chance.’

A second chance.

Fitting phrase. Yevoli and his father are quite familiar with second chances, and their lack thereof. Because with Yevoli and his father, nothing comes easy, including whether or not his father would have that figurative senior season. But that pales in comparison to the many other obstacles they have faced together.

A week after speaking in that conference room, their mission wasn’t so simple: Yevoli was forced to play father to his own father after Yevoli Sr. was diagnosed with cancer. Like their mission wasn’t so simple two decades earlier when the stakes were also life and death, this time involving Yevoli’s mother. Like their mission wasn’t so simple the two years before those six weeks when Yevoli was severely injured at Virginia and almost didn’t find another home for his dad to watch him play once he was finally healthy.

Through everything, Yevoli and his father developed a bond that most fathers and sons couldn’t possibly match. They never would have made it past any of these obstacles alone. And today they are closer than ever because of it all.

*

Yevoli Sr. was behind the wheel. His wife was with 1-year-old Joe and two of his cousins in the backseat as they drove on the highway near their home in Massapequa, N.Y., on Long Island.

Suddenly, a speeding car lost control and flew over the median and landed directly on top of them. Father fractured his skull and broke his right arm, which required nearly a year to heal. Son managed to escape with bruises.

But Joe’s mother died. So did one of his cousins.

Right away it was clear: Not everyone gets a second chance.

So it was just the two of them. Yevoli Sr. eventually sold his bar and devoted his entire life to his son. He made him breakfast, packed his lunch, drove him back and forth from school, helped him with his homework. Money from the sold bar and several small businesses kept them afloat.

‘My uncle wasn’t an overly involved father when Joseph was first born,’ said Jen Altman, one of the cousins who survived the accident. ‘I mean of course he loved him and was involved but didn’t do a lot of the diaper changing and things like that. But after the accident he worked from home and became the complete stay-at-home mom all in a heartbeat.’

But he didn’t lose the dad in him, either. Yevoli Sr. helped lead North Carolina to the 1977 NCAA quarterfinals, and he was determined to create an even better player who would enjoy even more success. His son bought into it.

One night, Nick Romeo, one of Yevoli’s three best friends, wanted to see a movie. The teenage Yevoli mumbled an excuse, as he often did. Romeo found out later Yevoli was at a park firing lacrosse balls at his father.

Even when Yevoli would go out with his friends, his father’s influence never left him. When they were old enough, Romeo’s parents trusted the four of them with Knicks tickets. Only Yevoli felt obliged to outline the night’s entire plan so his father wouldn’t worry.

‘A lot of his decisions that he should probably have been able to make at that time, he kind of had to run them by his dad, and not even by his dad’s command,’ Romeo said. ‘I guess growing up he was so close to him he always wanted to make sure everything was OK before he did anything. I don’t think that was something that showed a lack of independence but rather a close relationship. He looks up to his dad above anybody. That’s his idol – you can tell.’

It’s no coincidence Yevoli said his idol is also the ‘the scariest person on the planet’ when mad. There was the time he refused his father’s demand to shoot away from the house and obliterated a 15-foot window. There were the times he was caught sneaking out to visit his high school girlfriend because his father never let him visit her in favor of lacrosse. But his father just wanted what he thought was the best for him.

Yevoli Sr. remarried when his son was 11 and had three younger children, but his relationship with his oldest hasn’t diminished. After all, he was the one who answered all of Joe’s questions about why he didn’t have a mother. He was the one who answered all of his questions – and still does – about how to dodge better around the cage.

‘Pretty much everything I know now is basically because of him – especially with lacrosse,’ Yevoli said. ‘He was my coach for pretty much every sports team I’ve played on. I owe a lot to the guy. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him, that’s for sure.’

And maybe vice-versa.

*

One week after sitting in that barren conference room in mid-October, Yevoli raced home in fear. Out of nowhere, his father – his idol – had cancer in his leg and lungs. Yevoli Sr. said doctors gave him a 15 percent chance to live. A second chance wasn’t promising.

When he arrived, Yevoli was shocked to find his father the most upbeat person in the living room. But Yevoli should’ve known. In the months following the news, he and his father both responded with total resolve.

‘To tell you the truth, I’ve never really seen my dad struggle with anything,’ Yevoli said. ‘Even when everyone found out he was sick and I came home it was like everyone else was upset but he was like a rock – same old dad.’

At first, his father and stepmother, Janice, insisted Yevoli return to school. But to no avail. Yevoli eventually withdrew from Syracuse for the fall semester to care for his dad and younger siblings – Kristen, 10, Nick, 9, and John, 6 – because Janice works as a schoolteacher. Yevoli replaced his father as the one who made breakfast, packed lunches, shuttled the young ones back and forth to school, helped with homework. His father cared for him all those years and he owed it back.

‘It really touched me when he came home,’ Yevoli Sr. said, choking up. ‘You could see it in his face that he really cared. We hugged and cried. You know how life is – you don’t get to say ‘I love you’ a lot. When he came home, I saw the love that he had for me.’

Though he had no intentions of returning to Syracuse if his father’s condition didn’t improve, Yevoli channeled his energy into training harder for a season than ever before. On the three days a week he didn’t lift weights, he ran two miles on hills, did 10 40-yard shuttle runs and finished by pushing a friend’s Chevy Blazer around a parking lot to strengthen his legs. All with his father’s weight vest on from UNC that he resisted wearing for years.

The result was a rapid 23-pound weight loss that put him at 177.

‘This could actually be the last time that he gets to see me play ever, and that scared the hell out of me,’ Yevoli said. ‘It was just me and my dad growing up and it was just weird to think of the reality that my dad isn’t going to be around here forever. I wasn’t ready to deal with that. I wanted to make him as proud as I possibly could for me.’

Yevoli Sr. started to make his son equally proud as he dramatically improved during winter break, albeit using highly controversial treatment. He refused chemotherapy in place of an alternative therapy developed by Fred Eichhorn, a man based in St. James, N.Y., who said he has a medical background but is not a doctor and is aware professional oncologists disapprove of his method.

Eichhorn believes people contract cancer from pesticides in the poor foods they eat and simply prescribes a self-developed drink rich in minerals called Cellect, which he said corrects the chemical imbalances caused by cancer in the body. Eichhorn claimed a 90 percent success rate, but said he had no research to back that up.

Eichhorn said the Federal Drug Administration investigated him in 2003, but found no evidence of making false claims. He said he is not allowed to market Cellect because the FDA requires eight years of studies with thousands of patients to confirm the drug is successful.

Andrew Evens, an attending physician in hematology and oncology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, said the possibility of curing cancer using this type of alternative therapy is highly unlikely. But Evens did say cancer can mysteriously regress in a short time.

Yevoli Sr. said he called about 30 patients who were in a similar situation as him who Eichhorn cured, and was convinced Eichhorn’s treatment was better than chemotherapy.

‘You gotta go by how you feel and I feel great,’ Yevoli Sr. said. ‘I’m 100 percent convinced this is going to work.’

Three days after first drinking Cellect on Nov. 10, the excruciating pain in his leg was gone. On Jan. 4, Yevoli said a PetScan showed the tumor in his leg – where the cancer originated – was half-dead. That was also about the time he started spitting up black, wormlike tumors from his lungs every two weeks, which Eichhorn said was a positive sign, but Evens had never heard of such a thing. Only then did Yevoli feel comfortable returning to school, knowing his father had a second chance – or is it third chance? – to live.

‘I think that’s a reason why Joe has dedicated so much to the season,’ Altman, Yevoli’s cousin, said. ‘Because in some ways, his dad does live through him. He coaches and he travels to every single game no matter where it is. When he got better, (Joe) became a little more relaxed and not so distracted. Sometimes you’d be talking to him but you could tell he wasn’t really listening to you because his mind was somewhere else. But he doesn’t seem that way anymore.’

*

And to think, Yevoli may have had to deal with his father’s illness without lacrosse as a diversion.

Last summer, there was an eerie dj vu when Yevoli faced the same unthinkable situation as his father – a lacrosse career cut short by one year because of disagreements with the coaching staff.

In Yevoli Sr.’s case, a year after helping lead the Tar Heels to the NCAA quarterfinals in 1977, the relationship between head coach Paul Doty and his players deteriorated to the point where UNC replaced him with Willie Scroggs. But it didn’t help. In 1978, discord between the players and coaching staff remained ripe and practices became scarce. The team managed to play its schedule, and finished with a miserable 6-6 record. But Yevoli Sr. refuses to call it a real season.

Such a parallel for his son would have been unfathomable back in 2002 when Yevoli outshined the more highly touted recruit John Christmas to earn Atlantic Coast Conference Freshman of the Year honors with 40 goals and 10 assists. In 2003, Yevoli had 23 goals and 26 assists as Virginia won the national championship.

But then came that day in January 2004 when he tried a new type of bench press. A searing pain shot through his back. It was the beginning of the end for Yevoli at Virginia. Trainers originally diagnosed it as a hip injury and gave the junior painkillers. But four games into the season – too late to redshirt – it was discovered he had fractured a vertebra in three places.

His father had good reason in ordering his son to shut down immediately. Yevoli Sr.’s brother, Charlie, was paralyzed in an adult summer league game when he crashed awkwardly into an opponent.

But Yevoli, for once, disregarded his father’s advice because he didn’t want to let his team down though he was in constant pain. This despite the fact Virginia was stock full of injuries and unlikely to qualify for the postseason.

‘Was I scared? Yeah,’ Yevoli Sr. said. ‘They weren’t going anywhere. I’ve got to give Joe credit.’

A cortisone shot only slightly alleviated the pain the rest of the season. Unable to dodge and shoot overhand from the left side, he was nowhere near the same player that earned All-America honors the year before. Still, he managed to finish second on the team in points with 19 goals and 12 assists as the team staggered to a 5-8 finish.

After redshirting the 2005 season because the injury was slow to heal, Yevoli said he had full intentions of returning to Virginia in 2006. But relations between him and Virginia head coach Dom Starsia soured as last season progressed.

They boiled over two days before the Cavaliers’ NCAA quarterfinal game when Yevoli surprised Starsia by asking for a release to explore transferring. Starsia granted the release only to schools not on Virginia’s 2006 schedule, prompting Yevoli to appeal to university president John T. Casteen for a full release. By the time Casteen let Yevoli free to explore all schools, it was late July, and transfer opportunities were scarce.

Yevoli still could have returned to Virginia at that point, but said with the way the situation unfolded, it was too late. Even so, he said he was close to returning to Charlottesville.

‘Had he given (the release) to me right away it probably would have made things much easier for both of us,’ Yevoli said. ‘There was a good chance I would have ended up going back to Virginia had it just been that easy. I think I would have looked at the other schools and I probably would’ve just realized that I had built up a reputation and it would have been an easier decision to go back there.’

But the Virginia coach doesn’t understand that philosophy.

‘That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It’s not logical,’ Starsia said. ‘If he was going to come back, why ask to leave in the first place? He caught us by surprise, and with the playoffs going on it may have taken a little bit more time than he wanted.’

For several weeks in August, it appeared Yevoli Sr. would never see the ultra-talented lacrosse player he created take the field again. Yevoli and his father had quickly agreed Syracuse was the right school, but logistics of enrolling so late made the transfer difficult. Finally, less than a week before classes started, Yevoli found a spot in the School of Information Studies. Soon after he met his new teammates, and they meshed right away.

‘I’ll tell you exactly what he told me,’ Altman said. ‘He used to love Virginia and thought they were a real team until he got to Syracuse. He said he didn’t know what a team was until he got there. At Virginia it was a little cliquey – like these two hang out and these two don’t and you don’t really talk to this one. He said at Syracuse it’s not like that. Everyone supports you no matter what you do.’

*

But nobody more than his father. Because that’s what it all comes back to.

With his mother dead when he was one, his father continues to teach him – even now when his father is sick – everything he knows about life, and particularly, lacrosse.

Toward the end of winter break last month when his father’s health improved, the two resumed their trips to the park. Yevoli Sr. couldn’t play goalie like old times, but he gave constant instruction, particularly on his son’s shot (‘lock and load,’ he told him). And when his father stayed at home, Yevoli ran hills and pushed cars.

‘When Joe came back in January he was like a new person,’ Syracuse head coach John Desko said. ‘He was physically fit – you could see in the course of practice what he had been working on, things that we didn’t see in the fall. He just came back with a whole new attitude and a whole new outlook.’

No, life isn’t normal again like it was that day in the empty conference room – Yevoli Sr., while better, still has a long road ahead of him – but life is as good as they could have asked for in late October. Yevoli can now focus nearly all his efforts into proving – not to critics – but to himself and his father he can be as good as he was his first two years at Virginia. And judging by Syracuse’s talent in 2006, maybe even win a title.

‘I always play for my dad because I know how much he likes to see me play,’ Yevoli said. ‘The happiest I’ve ever seen him was the day that I won the national championship. I’d give anything to see that again.’

In other words, a second chance.

Published on February 21, 2006 at 12:00 pm