Published: August 02, 2007 03:03 pm         

It is more than coaching...

Bruce Tower coaches soccer through adversity

“Never give up!!” You don’t know what you can do until you try!!” — Longtime Gun Barrel City soccer coach and cancer survivor, Bruce Tower’s motto to his teams of the last 27 years.



By ART LAWLER

Staff Writer



LAKE AREA — A 12-year-old pre-teen came up to her coach at soccer practice one day and made him promise he would dance with her at her wedding someday.

Bruce Tower, who had been fighting cancer, promised Amber Rhodes, if there was any way possible, he would be there be there, and they’d dance.

A decade passed, and at times those closest to Bruce doubted if Amber’s coach would survive long enough for her to grow up, to find her man, to plan her wedding, and to have that dance with her former coach.

Those closest to him have learned a lot about Bruce Tower’s determination since then. He’s now been fighting cancer successfully for more than 11 years.

He doesn’t just tell his teams, like the Eliminators which Amber played on, not to give up. He never does it himself.

There have been trying times.

“We were really worried we were going to lose him this time,” said his wife, Carol, speaking of a reoccurrence of cancer that hospitalized him for 21 days in March.

Thanks to a new, experimental drug, lots of prayers and a promise he made to a little girl years ago, Bruce Tower survived, and helped get a new cancer drug approved by the FDA in theprocess.

On Jan. 20 of this year, when Amber Rhodes of Eustace married Justin Perry of Kerens, her former coach was there.

The way guests at the wedding remember it, Bruce grabbed the microphone and told everyone that Amber had made him promise to live long enough to dance at her wedding.

“I told her if there was any way possible, I would,” he said.

Then he looked at the grown-up Amber, now 22. “I did my best,” he said. “May I have this dance?”

“I was crying. He was crying. Quite a few people were crying,” Amber said Tuesday from North Richland Hills, where she and Justin now live.

“I love Bruce,” she said. “He’s been like a second father to me. He’s a wonderful man.”

She wasn’t always so sure, though.

“I was in the sixth grade when I first met Bruce,” she said. “He scared the living daylights out of me. He was loud, and he liked to yell, and I’d never been yelled at before.”

She adjusted. In fact, she played for him on his Eliminator teams for the next nine years.

That Bruce Tower is special to his players and his former players is a given. The feeling is mutual, says Terry Harris, who has served with Bruce on the Tri-County Soccer Association Board for years.

“He’s more than a soccer coach,” she said. “He truly loves all of his players and has a genuine interest in each one. He teaches them not only soccer, but life’s lessons.”

Whether it’s his wife, his family or his players, one constant always comes through:

Commitment.

It starts with the woman he met 36 years ago on an evening when things didn’t go so smoothly, as often tends to be the case on blind dates.

Carol said she wasn’t very impressed. According to her, neither was he.

But Bruce didn’t let Carol go into her house empty-handed that night. He gave her a single, long stemmed rose.

Twenty one days later they were engaged.

Every week since that first blind date, Carol has received one long stemmed rose from the man who has been her husband for the last 36 years.

Every week.

Even when he was halfway around the world fighting in Vietnam back in the late ’60s, his mother was under strict orders from her son to make sure his wife got a single long stemmed rose each week.

His Vietnam career ended in 1969 when he was on a rescue mission. The helicopter he was flying in suddenly pulled up to such an extent that Bruce fell out.

This may have been the first time he cheated death, but it wouldn’t be his last. The chopper went back to get him, and Bruce lived to fight another day — just not in Vietnam.

Since that medical discharge there’s been a lot of soccer in Bruce Tower’s life.

He expects his soccer teams to be just as dependable as he is, and for 28 years, he’s produced strong, well disciplined and well-behaved teams.

After he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1996, he continued to coach his two teams, taking his chemo treatments in the morning and working with the kids in the afternoon.

He calls the cancer his “inconvenience,” his wife said.

But Bruce did use it to motivate at least one of his teams when he decided his players were “slacking” one day during practice.

“Look, I really don’t feel so good today,” Harris remembers Bruce saying.

“I just had my chemo treatment this morning. Yet I’m here and I’m giving it my all. I expect you to do the same.”

Bruce teaches all of his kids the importance of responsibility, dedication and devotion, not just for soccer, but in life as well, said Harris.

She says he has paid for many of the soccer trips himself. Otherwise, many of his kids wouldn’t have been able to afford the trips, she said.

Bruce has coached some of his players on those teams for as long as nine years.

He’s known as a strict coach. He expects his players to be at every practice. If they’re not, they don’t play, according to those familiar with his methods.

His players have responded well to his coaching, too.

His Eliminator girls team had a reunion recently, and showed a video of the team and coach at a reunion tribute for Bruce. The girls on that team are women and young mothers now, and their children were in attendance this time.

They won’t be surprised to see him coaching their toddlers at any moment.

“Our two-year-old granddaughter can already stop the ball and dribble it,” his wife said.

As the video progresses, the camera focuses on Bruce congratulating each member of the team he took to the national tournament in Orlando, Florida.

And, of course, he is handing each young woman a single long stemmed rose.

His hospitalization in March resulted in him having to retire from his insurance job.

“An area on his pelvis, near the hip, was metastasizing,” his wife said.

So Bruce joined 250 other “guinea pigs” for an experiment called the Provenge Trial.

During that trial, he received his harvested dendritic immune cells, which were manipulated in a lab with prostate protein molecules and then infused back into his body as a new prostate cancer immune cell.

The drug paid off.

He is currently cancer free, and on May 15, the new drug, Provenge, was approved by the FDA.

As for the woman he started this long-stemmed rose thing with, Carol speaks for her whole family.

“We sure do love him,” she said. Both have been successful in the insurance business and Carol, who works for the Malakoff Insurance Agency, will be installed as President of the Federation of Insurance Women of Texas in the Woodlands this October.

“When we discovered he was in kidney failure, and had lost his job, he said to me, ‘You have been my rock all these years.’ And I laughed and said, ‘I’ve always looked at you as my rock all those years’.”

“I guess that’s why we’ve survived these 36 years,” Bruce said.

The challenges never stop coming for Bruce, though.

To this day, Bruce continues to coach, now with tubes running down the backs of his legs because of kidney and bladder problems.

Yet he continues to show up for practices. His latest group of impressionable youngsters sees him stand before them, imploring, as he has with hundreds of other young people, to “Never give up.”

Note: This story was supposed to be a surprise to Bruce Tower, but his wife Carol admits she failed miserably to keep the secret.

     

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