[BobbyB]

Finder: Dozier, Duranko tackling ALS
Sunday, January 28, 2007

By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Twenty years ago this month, another crushing block by brutish fullback Steve Smith sprang D.J. Dozier to the touchdown that won Penn State the 1986 national championship. It is a portrait etched into Nittany Lions lore: Dozier genuflecting in the Sun Devil Stadium end zone. Nowadays, Dozier prays that sales of a lithograph reproduction of this memorable moment can help to raise funds to offset the medical costs of a Smith who lay dying gradually, hooked to a ventilator and feeding tube, at his Texas home.

Twenty years earlier, Pete Duranko played a menacing defensive tackle for the Notre Dame team that won the 1966 national championship. He was a Johnstown jester and merry prankster of a teammate who walked on his hands or performed backflips in practices there and with the NFL Denver Broncos. Nowadays, Duranko is bound to a wheelchair, requiring his wife or caregivers to attend to his needs, and determined to solicit donations for the disease that slowly, dreadfully kills vital people like him, Smith and 5,000 others yearly.

Super Bowl week might seem such an inappropriate occasion to talk about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the ALS better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

But somebody has to speak for Smith, who can no longer, and the litany of NFLers who have died from the disease that gets no grand Hollywood support, no national telethons, no campaigns from any of the games it has affected much beyond Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling's hey-look-at-me crusade. In sports alone, this degenerative nerve disease has claimed ex-Steelers defensive back Bob Hohn of 1965-69, former Houston defensive tackle Glenn Montgomery at age 31, three members of the same San Francisco 49ers teams all around 50, along with champion boxer Ezzard Charles and Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter. It also afflicts newspaper city editors and college presidents and Harvard business-school students and grandmothers and CEOs, such as one-time Minnesota Vikings linebacker Bob Basten, diagnosed four years ago at 42 and already in a wheelchair.

So Duranko speaks for them all. Loudly. Clearly. Daily, if allowed.

"It's not a popular disease," Duranko said the other day. "ALS, most drug people don't want to spend time on it. Only 30,000 people have it; 5,000 die a year, and 5,000 more get it.

"There are a lot of people who have ALS, they're so embarrassed, they don't want to come out in public. There are a number of people who don't even get help for it. They get upset, mad, stay in a corner and die.

"You're used to being so independent, then you have to depend on people. I used to be able to play racquetball and cross-country ski. But sometimes I can't scratch my own nose or I can't even pick up a cup of coffee with one hand."

This is a guy who was an All-American at Notre Dame. Who helped to bring winning ways to the Broncos and spend some weekends as an Army reservist at the contaminated Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Who returned home to Johnstown and toiled in the steel business. He was diagnosed in 2001, after taking arthritis pills that weren't working and seeing four different specialists.

As an ALS middle-aged poster child, he sang at a fund-raiser on a Broadway stage and met Bruce Springsteen at a New Jersey function. He spoke to Charlie Weis' team at Notre Dame's 2006 Blue-Gold spring game about how he long wished he could've been the 1966 team captain, even trying to fix that election. Wouldn't you know, at their 40th reunion last fall, the fellas made him honorary co-captain.

"I don't sit back and cry," Duranko said. "I feel lucky. I'm 63 now, but I act like I'm 12 and feel like I'm 85. I've lived a long time and got to meet a lot of people. My faith is strong. If I can help somebody, even one or two ... or if I raise some money, you never know when a cure will be discovered."

Smith's final diagnosis came in 2002, on Sept. 11 of all dates. He lost 100 pounds by last May before the feeding tube. He is 42, the father of two teen-agers.

Even Lou Gehrig's face and his immortal words about being the luckiest man on the face of the earth haven't helped to find a cure. So Dozier and former Penn State co-captains John Shaffer and Shane Conlan autographed 1,986 copies of that lithograph, available at Iplayedthegame.com. "For a good cause," he said.

"The disease has no prejudice, in terms of how it operates," Dozier added. "Let me tell you, the great thing that's happened with this [lithograph]: It has brought a lot of awareness to Steve's situation. Now we've had Penn Sate alumni from all over the country who want to give directly to Steve. ... At the end of the day, that's really what it's all about. You reach out and help a friend, an ex-teammate, a good guy."