Fighting On

By DAVID WHARTON

Aug. 31, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

All spring and summer, Antuan Simmons dreamed of playing football again. The dreams were good.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I was making plays.”

Still he awoke in a cold sweat, unable to fall asleep again, knowing how far he stood from making it back to the field.

So it seems almost miraculous that Simmons will start at free safety in USC’s opener against San Jose State on Saturday. It’s been not much more than a year since doctors found a series of tumors in his abdomen, since surgery and complications left him hooked to tubes, close to dead.

The ordeal withered his body, leaving his chest sunken, his legs spindly. He spent last season watching his team from the sideline, waiting to heal to the point where he could try to get back in shape.

“It wasn’t something I was looking forward to,” he says. “I knew it was going to be a long road.”

But Simmons did not know he would run into a new strength coach at USC, a horse of man who would push him down that path.

While the young defensive back dreamed at night, Chris Carlisle worked him to near exhaustion during the day. They sometimes exchanged angry words but the coach never backed down.

“He knew where I was coming from,” Simmons says.

That’s because Carlisle, the whole time, was struggling to do his job while enduring radiation and chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease. They were fighting a war together.

Late last winter when USC Coach Pete Carroll was assembling his staff, he hired Carlisle away from Tennessee. Before then, Simmons and Carlisle had lived a nation apart--with similar stories.

Simmons’ cancer was discovered late in 1999, shortly after surgery to relieve back pain. Doctors noticed a series of masses along his aorta, wrapping around his kidney.

Left in place, the tumors might have become malignant. As it was, Simmons developed postoperative bleeding, then fluid around his heart. A five-day hospital stay stretched on for weeks and, by the time he was released in the summer of 2000, he had lost nearly 40 pounds.

The preseason All-American should have been preparing for his senior year. Instead, he returned home to Sacramento where his mother, Faye, put him on a another kind of regimen: Lasagna, baked fish, chicken and rice. “You’re going to get that weight back,” she told him.

Faye also reminded her son of when he was 7, when he’d told her that he wanted to play football and she’d answered, “Just keep that in your heart and in your mind.”

Last August, Simmons accompanied the team to New Jersey for the Kickoff Classic game against Penn State. After USC’s victory that day, former coach Paul Hackett handed him the game ball. There wasn’t a dry eye in the locker room.

But, as inspiring as his recovery was--the story was covered by all the local papers--Simmons remained 20 to 30 pounds lighter than the days when he was intercepting passes and blocking kicks, a three-year starter with a reputation as a playmaker. He had to undergo various tests and hernia surgery before he could start rebuilding his body.

The 22-year-old, whose most remarkable feature is a broad smile, says only, “There were a lot of days when I felt discouraged.”

About the same time, in Knoxville, Carlisle was helping the Volunteers prepare for the Cotton Bowl. A former offensive lineman at Chadron State College in Nebraska, he felt chest pains and broke into a sweat. At the emergency room, the doctor said his gall bladder would have to be removed. And there was one more thing.

“The doctor asked, ‘Is your wife here?’ ” Carlisle recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty serious.”’

It was cancer and, at 39, Carlisle was looking at radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Like Simmons, Carlisle took strength from family, from his wife Louon and 2-year-old son Alex. And, like Simmons, he would soon get additional support from the USC football team.

Another major university had expressed interest in hiring him but did not call back after learning of his cancer. Carroll, on the other hand, did not hesitate.

Starting his new job in February, Carlisle had to be on campus by 6:15 each morning, when the first players arrived for voluntary, off-season workouts. He stayed until the last group finished, often as late as 7:30 p.m.

“The team kept showing up day after day,” he says. “Nobody quit on me.”

So he could not quit on them. He felt a responsibility to the players, one in particular.

“He was a scarecrow.”

That’s how Carlisle recalls Simmons, who weighed 162 pounds when they met. They talked about cancer, compared notes. They knew what it would take to get Simmons back on the field.

“He pushed me harder because of it,” Simmons said. “He never babied me.”

Some days, Simmons wanted to give up. Some days, he did not think he could finish his sessions in the weight room, his running on the track. His surgery almost a year earlier had required the reconstruction of a major vein.

“[The vein] wasn’t as efficient as it needed to be,” says Russ Romano, USC’s head athletic trainer. “He’d run and his leg would tighten up.”

Romano was there to lay Simmons down, elevate his leg, stretch it out. Carlisle waited nearby, eager to get Simmons going again. Simmons would get angry, sometimes shouting, maybe even cursing.

“You get irritated when you get tired,” the player says sheepishly. “We had our exchange of words.”

Says Carlisle, “You don’t take to heart what kids say when they’re tired. Sometimes he would say something under his breath but I became deaf to it.”

The coach had a personal stake in Simmons’ progress. Every other week, he would take a red-eye flight to Knoxville for Friday-morning chemotherapy. He slept all day Saturday, then got back on a plane to be on campus by Monday morning.

When chemotherapy ended, USC doctors started him on radiation every weekday for a month or so. The treatment burned his esophagus, making it difficult for him to speak. Still, he did not miss a day of work or spring practice.

“The nausea from the chemotherapy and the exhaustion from the radiation, when they started getting to me, I drew energy from the team,” he says. “In my mind, they were part of the healing process.”

And for every extra pound that Simmons bench pressed, for every tenth of a second he shaved off his 40-yard dash time, Carlisle took hope because, in his heart, the coach carried a murmur of fear:

If Antuan fails, I might fail too.

“When we put five pounds on him, then 10 pounds, I knew we could get him through,” Carlisle says. “I knew I could make it through.”

Contrary to expectations, Simmons participated in spring drills but remained weak, working lightly, merely getting his feet wet.

Summer training camp brought more challenges.

He felt a pain in his chest during physical exams, so team doctors held him out of practice for several rounds of tests. Says Romano, “We had to rule out everything.”

Cleared to play after a few days, Simmons found himself in a backup role at cornerback.

But now he was strong, his weight up to 184 pounds, his confidence growing.

Teammates could see him getting his spark back, breaking on passes, making big hits. Early in camp, the coaches switched safeties Matt Grootegoed and Frank Strong to outside linebacker, creating an opening for Simmons, who had played safety as a freshman.

“We knew Antuan had some history there and he’s smart,” associate coach DeWayne Walker says. “We wanted to get our best guys on the field.”

The senior quickly earned a starting spot and his teammates voted him captain. The other day, after a session in the weight room, he burst into Carlisle’s tiny office.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

Simmons pulled up his shirt to expose an upper body rippled with muscles. “I’m ready for Chippendale’s,” he said.

Carlisle had some good news too. He’d seen doctors for his six-month checkup and been declared cancer-free. Because recurrence of Hodgkin’s disease usually happens quickly, every month is golden.

“I’m feeling good,” he says.

When the Trojans take the field Saturday, each man will pause to say a prayer of thanks. They have a bond now, not one they would have chosen but a bond nonetheless.

The player will be nervous, eager to get a few plays under his belt.

“There will be a lot of adrenaline,” he says. “I’ve been through some amazing stuff.”

Same for the coach.

“I can’t wait till he makes his first big play,” Carlisle says.

“Then everything will be in the past.”

SAN JOSE STATE AT USC SATURDAY, 3:30 P.M. TV: FOX SPORTS NET 2