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Rams DE Grant
Wistrom and friend
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Rams DE Grant Wistrom does not do anything halfway. If grocery shopping ever becomes a
competitive sport, he’ll be the guy bull-rushing little old ladies in the
canned-goods aisle.
On the football field, he is a high-motor athlete who plays to win. Every down, every
game, every season. Winning isn’t the goal. It is the expectation.
It has also been the end result. Wistrom is to winning what Bill Gates is to money.
In high school, his team’s won two state championships in football. In college he
was part of three national championship teams at Nebraska. In just his second pro season,
he and the Rams were Super Bowl champions.
"Winning does seem to follow him," Rams OG Adam Timmerman said.
"He’s been on winning teams, and he knows what it takes to continue to
win."
Last season he and the Rams returned to the Super Bowl only to lose to the Patriots.
Wistrom, so used to winning the final game of virtually every season he has ever played,
viewed the final result the way someone looks at his driveway after a neighbor’s dog
has relieved itself there.
Immediately after losing in the Super Bowl, Wistrom described the team’s mood:
"We lost the Super Bowl. What do you think the mood is? The mood is crap. The whole
season is a waste. We play this game to win the Super Bowl, and we didn’t do it. We
were here, we were in position. We had a better football team talentwise, but they came
out and they wanted it more. That’s why we lost the game. The whole season is a waste
now."
This outburst might make Wistrom sound like a sore loser who just doesn’t get it,
but nothing could be further from the truth.
He is a hard-charging, driven achiever who raises the bar as high as possible and
expects to leap over it every time. View his outburst as the ranting of a man who demands
the most out of himself and his team. Furthermore, he does get it. He gets it better than
most NFL players.
Too many athletes step off the football field and onto the police blotter. Too many
athletes’ idea of altruistic behavior is holding the door open for a supermodel.
When it comes to altruism, Wistrom is Mother Teresa in shoulder pads.
When he is not playing football, he is putting smiles on the faces of children who have
cancer. As is always the case for Wistrom, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing
all the way. Halfway is for losers, and this past season’s Super Bowl
notwithstanding, he doesn’t lose very often.
It was during his college days that Wistrom first got involved with a child with
cancer. Kendall Chalmers was diagnosed with leukemia in October 1996. He was 6 years old.
The Chalmers family was friends with the Wistrom family. Larry Chalmers, Kendall’s
dad, has been a Nebraska football fan for over 30 years. He got to know Ron Wistrom,
Grant’s dad, through Nebraska football.
After Kendall was diagnosed with leukemia, he went through 3½ years of chemotherapy.
Kendall’s dad knew his son’s hair was going to fall out from the chemotherapy
treatments. He also knew that the Nebraska defensive linemen shaved their heads the night
before their games. So Kendall’s dad called Grant’s dad to see if Kendall could
be made a part of that tradition.
Ron Wistrom checked with Grant. The timing could not be worked out to do it the night
before the game. Instead, Grant said Kendall should come to the team’s training room
after the Oct. 12, 1996, Nebraska-Baylor game. It was there that Wistrom and a couple
other star defensive players for Nebraska took turns cutting off all of Kendall’s
hair. It was a pre-emptive strike that would allow Kendall to shave his head on his terms
rather than on cancer’s terms. He became bald and beautiful, just like his football
heroes.
"It became something that was fun," Larry Chalmers said. "It became a
positive instead of a negative. It was going to become a negative because, ‘Oh,
I’m losing my hair,’ to ‘Hey, an All-American for Nebraska cut my
hair.’ Actually, three All-Americans from Nebraska cut (his) hair."
Wistrom continued to offer encouragement to young Kendall over the years.
"It wasn’t a passing, ‘Here, kid, I’ll sign your football,’
" Larry Chalmers said. "Grant was very good about taking the time, and he’d
see Kendall, and he’d grab him and pick him up and say, ‘Hey, buddy, how are
you? Are you feeling OK? Hang in there.’ "
Immediately after Nebraska won the national championship during Wistrom’s senior
season, he picked up Kendall and brought him over a fence so pictures could be taken.
In the spring of 2000, Kendall was done with chemotherapy treatments, so a chemo-free
party was held in his honor. Wistrom was out of town but arranged to call Kendall during
the party. Upon hearing Wistrom’s voice, Kendall’s face lit up in ecstasy.
Kendall’s cancer, happily, is in remission. Since turning pro, however, Wistrom
has continued to spend time with kids who have cancer.
He has become a fixture at the Bob Costas Cancer Center in St. Louis on his days off.
"It’s amazing to see him interacting with the kids because some of these kids
are really, really sick," said Kathy Reznikov, a spokesperson for the Bob Costas
Cancer Center. "Some of them in the in-patient unit are very, very sick, and he goes
in, he sits down with them, and even for the kids who don’t know what his real job is
— you know, that he’s a football player and that he has all this prominence
— he’s this great guy who comes in and takes the time to spend some time with
them. And from kids who are very, very tiny to kids who are teenagers. Teenagers have a
really rough time with cancer or anything else that sets them apart. But when you’ve
got cancer, you’re facing something that a lot of people will shy away from still,
even in this day and age. And Grant comes in and he talks to them just like they’re
any other kid.
"Sometimes he just comes in and he plays games with the kids. For that kid to then
be able to say to his friends or his family, ‘I know him,’ that means that
there’s something different about them, but in something positive that’s
different about them. It’s not the cancer. It’s the fact that that guy is my
friend, and that means the world to them."
Wistrom also takes his show on the road. The last two years he has taken young cancer
patients on trips to Wassau, Wis., as part of a program with Buccaneers OT Jerry Wunsch,
who also brings kids with cancer.
When the kids first get on the airplane, many of them are nervous because they have
never flown before. Some don’t want to leave. The first night of the trip, there is
some crying. They want to go home. By the second night, Wistrom can’t get the kids to
call home because they’re so busy having fun.
On the first trip, Wistrom said to the kids, "I challenge any of you to have more
fun than I am on this trip, because you’re not going to."
Call it a photo finish, because everyone has an amazing time skiing, snowmobiling and
swimming on these trips. On the most recent trip, there was an outing to Lambeau Field,
home of the Green Bay Packers. A snowball fight broke out on the field, eventually
escalating to include about half of the 30 kids. One of those kids was Wistrom,
aggressively throwing snowballs. He’s just a big kid. Always has been.
Growing up, he was a come-to-life Dennis the Menace. One afternoon the summer before
his sophomore year in high school, Wistrom put in a full day of troublemaking, setting
fire to his backyard, punching a hole in the wall and breaking his dad’s welder. The
fire in the backyard is something about which, even to this day, his parents have never
unearthed the whole story. The hole in the wall occurred when he got mad at his younger
brother and wanted to punch him but realized he would hurt him and chose to hit the wall
instead.
He was grounded for the entire summer as a result of his busy day.
"He was the only kid in the world that was anxious for two-a-days to start so he
could see his friends," his mom, Kathy Wistrom, said.
Ron Wistrom, Grant’s dad, said, "Grant was the kind of kid that would always
stretch things to the limit. … Not in a bad way. Just all boy."
Grant matured over the years — he had a 3.95 grade-point average in high school,
he was a captain of the football team at Nebraska — but he has never lost the
childlike qualities that so endear him to the kids with cancer he hangs out with all the
time.
During a party for the kids a year ago, everyone played softball, with a beach ball
being used for the ball. The kids in wheelchairs who couldn’t run were pushed from
base to base by Wistrom and Timmerman.
When Wistrom took a group of kids with cancer to the Raging Rivers Water Park in August
2001, he was the oversized kid going down the slides. He was the oversized kid running
around, chasing the other kids. He was the oversized kid wearing a Viking helmet with
horns coming out. "We were facing the Mississippi River, and he thought (the helmet)
was appropriate," Bob Costas Cancer Center administrative director Barry Friedman
said. "That’s just the kid coming out in Grant."
In so doing, he helps the kids with cancer do things that often seem impossible —
laugh, smile, have a great time.
"Grant’s a big kid, and he lets himself do that, and that allows the kids to
be kids again," Friedman said.
Wistrom creates an atmosphere in which the kids, surrounded by their peers — but
not surrounded by the chemotherapy treatments, needles and terror of a hospital setting
— feel comfortable.
During the trips to Wisconsin, the girls who arrive wearing wigs usually remove them by
the second day as they get comfortable with their baldness. The kids start sharing their
experiences with chemotherapy and operations.
"They don’t have the peers at school that can understand what they’re
going through," said Marsha Steffen, a nurse coordinator at the Bob Costas Cancer
Center who has gone on Wistrom’s Wisconsin trips. "For them, this is their
support group."
The kids start displaying an independence they don’t always have at home, where
everyone treats them with kid gloves.
"They’re pretty sick here at the hospital, but take them outdoors and put
them in a place like that with a new experience and introduce them to the football
players, and they just had amazing courage and wanted to try things, so they did all of
the outdoor activities and just had a great time," Steffen said.
On the football field, Wistrom is a championship-winning machine who suits up for a
Rams team that played the role of Goliath and was slain by underdog David in this
year’s Super Bowl. He was not happy to win so many battles only to lose the ultimate
war.
Off the field, Wistrom sides with his many little Davids battling cancer. Since he is
not a doctor who can find a cure for cancer, Wistrom helps his little underdogs win small
battles by putting a smile on their faces.
On one of the trips to Wisconsin, he told the kids with cancer that he was proud of how
strong they were. Then he told the kids they were his heroes.
A smallish, weak 12-year-old boy who has had a bone-marrow transplant that led to other
problems then said, "I’ve never been looked up to by anybody before, much less a
big ol’ football player." |
