Anglers Hooked on Good Cause
Today during a reception at UC San Diego, representatives of the Pete Lopiccola Cancer Research Foundation will present a $75,000 check to the university’s Rebecca and John Moore’s Cancer Center.
As usual when the one group has made the donation to the other, it will be amid no great fanfare. This time, though, they will be celebrating a milestone many believed, when these meetings began 12 years ago, would never be achieved.
Today’s donation pushes the total contributions over the $1-million mark. Specifically, since the Pete Lopiccola Memorial Marlin Tournament -- held each year in the Baja California resort city of Cabo San Lucas -- began its partnership with the cancer center in 1990, the Pete Lopiccola Cancer Research Foundation has raised $1,045,500.
More than half of that money has supported the efforts of 17 researchers called Lopiccola Fellows. During today’s reception, three of the fellows will give presentations on work that includes new insights into how tumors form, why some cancer cells are resistant to chemotherapy, and how to make malignant cells self-destruct.
“The Lopiccola Foundation and the tournament committee are to be commended,” Cinda Lucas, president of the UC San Diego Cancer Center Foundation, said in a statement prepared in advance of today’s reception. “Because of your tireless efforts, the Cancer Center has been able to purchase critically needed equipment and to fund bright young researchers who are making important scientific contributions to the world’s knowledge about cancer.”
A whopper of a statement, and at a time when Southern California’s sport fishermen, more than ever before, are being portrayed by environmental groups as destructors of the underwater universe, lumped in the same category as commercial fishermen, whose motive is money, whose gear is destructive and who undoubtedly have contributed to the decline of some of our fisheries.
The hundreds who have fished in the annual Pete Lopiccola Memorial Marlin Tournament -- they’re mostly from Southern California and many return year after year -- could fire up the publicity machine and broadcast, to anyone who would listen, all the good that they have accomplished.
But that’s not what this group is about. What these fishermen are about, for four days each year, is “fishing for a cure,” and doing so “for Pete’s sake.”
Too bad Pete Lopiccola isn’t around to witness the handing-over of today’s check. But in a way the beloved young skipper, who died of leukemia two days before his 30th birthday in 1987, will be present.
With his death, the tournament was born, over a few beers on a Cabo San Lucas beach, not far from the waters the captain from San Diego used to ply with such passion each season. And through the tournament, his spirit lives, even if, with so many years gone by, few of the participants in recent years knew him.
“A lot of us never even met him, but we all have our own Petey,” explained Chuck Faith, chairman of the foundation. “For me, it’s my father. I watched him die of cancer. Others have watched their fathers die and others are cancer survivors themselves.”
“The Petey,” as it is commonly called, awards trophies instead of cash purses, and enforces a strict catch-and-release policy when it comes to billfish.
I covered the event in the fall of 2000. It was the 13th annual, held at the Hacienda Beach Resort. But 13 was not an unlucky number. Through entry fees and a banquet auction of items donated by participants and outside contacts, organizers raised a record $136,000. They raised an additional $50,000 for the Cabo Foundation, which helps Mexican children in need of medical treatment.
How they opened so many wallets was through a method some might consider stealing. They brought in a ringer from San Diego: a cheery young blond with enviable beauty, but with a life story nobody else would want.
Briten Douglas, then 14, told of the 10-hour surgery she’d endured the day she was born, to correct a birth defect called bladder extrophy. Her parents were warned she might not survive the operation and that, if she did, she might never walk.
After the operation, she spent several weeks in San Diego Children’s Hospital’s intensive care unit. She went home in a body cast and eventually, long after the cast had been removed, took her first shaky steps. She didn’t get far. Complications kept arising and doctors ordered her back to the hospital and scheduled another major operation, a reconstructive surgery that included bladder augmentation.
The night before the surgery, when Briten was 4, it was discovered that 69% of her blood was cancerous. She was suffering from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a killer of tens of thousands annually.
The reconstructive surgery was postponed and Douglas spent the next several years enduring spinal taps, blood draws and chemotherapy, which took all of her hair and tugged fiercely at her lovely smile.
She said that she made a lot of new friends at the hospital, but added, “Some of those friends didn’t make it through their fight with cancer ... so I got to go to their funerals. Those sad days are something I will never forget.”
Her leukemia having finally gone into remission, Douglas regained enough strength to have the surgery she needed, but there were more complications. The hospital became her home for another nine months.
“I finally went home,” she told an increasingly tearful audience. “That fight was as hard as my battle with leukemia ... but ... we won! And by we, I mean all the teams of doctors associated with the hospital and UCSD. All that time ... you were doing your part. If you were down here in Mexico fishing, you were doing your part.
“For Pete’s sake. That’s why I can be here today.”
Thinking back, I couldn’t recall who won the tournament or what was caught to win it. Since none of that really mattered, I chose not to look it up but instead checked in on Briten Douglas.
The news is all good. Her leukemia remains in remission. She’s captain of the junior varsity cheerleading squad at Escondido High and maintaining a 4.0 grade-point average.
Now, that’s a keeper in anyone’s book.
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FISH REPORT: Day in Sports
