BAMA SLAMMA: Baseball Unites Cancer Heroes

Boston Red Sox president and CEO Larry Lucchino introduced a new game to the Kirkland House speaking circuit last night: Hot Potato.

Undergraduates fumbled with Lucchino’s hard breaking stuff as he tossed hats, t-shirts, and autographed baseballs (House Master Tom Conley came away with a Jonathan Papelbon sig) around the stately Kirkland JCR. Ask a question, get a prize. Ask a particularly flattering question, get a sweet prize. And so it was a surprise, really, when members of the Harvard baseball team, which co-sponsored the event, presented the Boston head man with a gift of his own.

For the first time, Lucchino shook the hand of Wes Cosgriff.

In March of last year, Cosgriff, a big, 6’7 left-hander for the Harvard team, sat slumped and emotionless on the couch at his home in the New York area, doing absolutely nothing. After months of treatment, he was mired in his third cycle of chemotherapy for testicular cancer.

And at one of the worst times of his life, he said, he received an unexpected gift from an apparently anonymous source. His mother, Elyse, dropped a care package from the mail in front of him. A big care package.

“It was just this huge box from the Boston Red Sox,” he said. “I didn’t know anybody from the Boston Red Sox.”

In the box: a jacket, a shirt, a hat, a DVD of the team’s championship season, a baseball, and the last part—the best part—a letter. Lucchino, a man whom Cosgriff had never met, had himself survived cancer against the odds. Twice—in the mid-80’s with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, for which he received a bone marrow transplant, and in the 90’s for prostate cancer—Lucchino had experienced the twin hells of cancer and chemo.

Lucchino’s long letter to Cosgriff, in which he described his own battles and offered hope, put the Harvard junior in unpredictably happy straits. His invitation to watch a Red Sox game in the owner’s box, since fulfilled—“the only way to watch a game at Fenway,” Cosgriff said with a smile—made it great to think about life after cancer.

“It meant more to me then,” Cosgriff said, “than I could have imagined at the time.”

Cosgriff put down the letter and climbed into the shirts, the hat, and the jacket. There he was, a 6’7 living-room advertisement. Then he sat. "Just sat there," he said.

“I had nothing else to do. It made my day,” he said. ”I just forgot about everything else.”

As the spring progressed, Cosgriff made unlikely strides in his fight against cancer. Harvard Coach Joe Walsh would visit him for lunch almost daily, returning in time for afternoon spring practice. It was Walsh who went through some distant personal connections to orchestrate the letter exchange.

“I didn’t know how Larry even got Wes’s address,” Walsh said.

At the end of Lucchino’s session in Kirkland, Cosgriff wore a big grin as he clasped hands with the Red Sox president. The rest of the room watched in choked-up silence, hanging onto every word of resident scholar and moderator Peter Emerson’s tribute to Cosgriff, Walsh, and Lucchino. Among Emerson’s remarks was an apology to Lucchino for shedding light on an act of poignant relative anonymity.

Lucchino stayed late to chat with Cosgriff, Walsh, Harvard captain Morgan Brown, and Elyse and Richard Cosgriff, Wes’s parents.

“I was happy to drop him a note,” Lucchino said afterwards, adding simply that when he had cancer, “People did things like that to me.”

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.