12/31/2009: Los Angeles, CA—CMTA CEO Lauds OSU Star Kurt Coleman for Role in Helping Combat CMTThe phone call came three years ago this month. Kurt Coleman remembers it as if it happened yesterday.
It's hard to forget the night your father called to tell you he was dying.
"It was Dec. 3, 2006," said Coleman, Ohio State's All-Big Ten strong safety. "And he basically just said 'I have cancer.' I started laughing. Why are you joking?
"And he was like, 'No, I'm serious.' "
It was breast cancer, a disease so rare among males it strikes fewer than 2,000 American men a year. But it kills more than 20% of those it attacks.
In the time it took for the laughter to turn to tears, football took on a new role for Coleman, then an Ohio State freshman. If millions of people were willing to hang on his every word just because he could run fast and jump high, he figured he might as well take advantage of it.
So Coleman, now an Ohio State team captain, started a campus group to raise money and awareness for the fight against little-known diseases such as male breast cancer, kidney cancer and Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT), a debilitating neuromuscular disorder similar to muscular dystrophy.
The results have far exceeded anything the eighth-ranked Buckeyes have accomplished on the field this season.
"I can't speak higher of Kurt," said David M. Hall, chief executive of the Charcot-Marie-Tooth Assn., a national nonprofit education and awareness group. "For Kurt to, on his own, adopt the cause and reach out to us, brought us a degree and an awareness and a spotlight that, quite frankly, we didn't have before.
"Kurt created a momentum that helped us in everything we did this year."
That included pressuring Congress for a recently awarded $1-million allocation to help diagnose and treat the disease.
"I can't tell you what it says about these guys," Hall said. "Kurt Coleman, in my opinion, will be running for office one day. He's a leader."
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