THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160536
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
Twenty-seven years later, David Hayes is back on the same Kempsville baseball field, doing what it seems he's always done. Pitch.
Hayes pitched there in 1969, a few months after he lost a leg to synovial sarcoma, a rare cancer. He pitches now to his Bronco League Chiefs, one of whom is Hayes' 12-year-old son Matthew.
It's not the field on which Hayes compiled a 4-1 record as a senior to help Kempsville High School win a league title in 1976. It's not the field on which Hayes fashioned a five-inning perfect game for Newport News Apprentice School in 1980 vs. St. Paul's.
But it's a baseball field he knows and loves. The place that welcomed him back after his right leg - the pushoff leg for a righthanded pitcher - was amputated at mid-thigh when he was 11. That let him create and nurture an inspiring story of will and survival.
He never missed a game back then. The kid had one leg, for Pete's sake, a prosthesis where flesh and bone used to be, a life radically altered. But he never begged off, never gave back the ball on his turn to pitch. Never thought of it.
``Nothing told me I couldn't do it,'' Hayes, 37, says softly in the living room of his Kempsville ranch house. ``Nobody told me I couldn't do it. I just kept playing with all the kids around the neighborhood. I wasn't as fast as I was, but I could still play ball with them. I lost my leg, not my arm.''
Today, he never misses a day of work as a shipyard machinist. Never misses a session of batting practice. Never misses an opening to tell you how normal and unremarkable his life really is.
``I go to work, come home, go to practice, come home, eat dinner, go to bed,'' Hayes says and shrugs, as if to say ``Doesn't everybody?''
Well, yes and no. Not everybody survives cancer, for starters.
It came out of nowhere during the fall of '69. Hayes was a recreation league running back who one day felt the back of his painful right knee and discovered a lump.
Within a couple days, the leg was examined, diagnosed and removed, as quick and drastic as that. Amputation still is the primary treatment for this aggressive form of cancer, though the American Cancer Society says the five-year survival rate for victims of synovial sarcoma, if caught early enough, is more than 90 percent.
Within two years, though, Hayes endured two more brushes with mortality when spots appeared on and were removed from his lung. And before the second lung surgery, a liver biopsy was ordered.
``They wouldn't even do the chest if it had spread to my liver,'' Hayes recalls. ``I remember the doctor telling me if I wake up and have chest tubes in me, everything's fine.''
``He told me he remembered dreading the chest tubes,'' says Karen Hayes, who was three years behind David at Kempsville and married him in 1981. ``But then he cried because he was happy, because that meant they didn't find it in his liver.''
And that was that. No recurrence of cancer in the days since, which include time at James Madison University and Old Dominion, four years at the Apprentice School, a solid career, the birth of Matthew, Heather, 9, and Lauren, 6, and his work with Kempsville Pony Baseball.
Hayes has lived twice as long with an artificial leg than with his original, so it's simply part of who he is. He barely acknowledges the word ``handicapped,'' doesn't mention his cancer unless asked and rarely speaks to groups.
He just lives. He golfs, he swims, he's water skied. Snow skiing is on his to-do list. He's not nuts about it, but he goes to the beach with his kids. Wearing shorts is out, though. It's one of Hayes' few admissions of being ``different.''
``He won't even get a handicapped sticker so I can park right at the front door of the mall,'' Karen Hayes says with a laugh. ``I know for a fact that there are a lot of people in this world who don't have anywhere near as dramatic a problem as he does that use it the full extent.
``That's why he's kind of an inspiration to me, because I don't care what it is, he doesn't let things bother him.
``He's very positive about everything. He doesn't like anything pessimistic in our house.''
Hayes has had his share of sheepish moments - his leg was known to occasionally work loose or fly off when he pitched, requiring some impromptu wrench work. But he never ditched a challenge even 20 years ago, says Garland Payne, who helped coach Hayes' Kempsville Thorobred team.
``It had to have happened sometime, sooner or later,'' says Payne, a longtime member of the Norfolk Sports Club, which honored Hayes with a special award for courage in 1976. ``But never that I heard of or that I saw.''
Hayes mentions one time - he quit his attempt to walk on to Madison's baseball team as a freshman after two days.
``It was the first time I really didn't give it the effort,'' Hayes says. ``I guess I was intimidated. I didn't know anybody, they didn't know me.''
Hayes later transferred to ODU, then followed a couple friends to the Apprentice School, where he pitched two seasons before switching to golf. But baseball is the glue between him and Matthew, a lanky lefthander who works the same mound his father did - at the same age.
``It's hard to believe,'' Matthew says. ``When he talks about it, it sounds special. I think it's pretty good, actually, that you can be a baseball player and have one leg.''
One leg. And one impressive legacy. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
David Hayes, who coaches the Bronco League Chiefs in Kempsville Pony
Baseball, says he lives a normal life. ``I go to work, come home, go
to practice, come home, eat dinner, go to bed,'' he says with a
shrug.
Among the players Hayes coaches is his son, Matthew, far right, who
says of his dad's story, ``It's hard to believe.''
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY BASEBALL CANCER by CNB