A Coach's Final Play

On March 4, 1993, Jim Valvano shuffled to the podium at Madison Square Garden. The man who had sprinted across the court ten years earlier, searching for someone to hug after his NC State Wolfpack stunned Houston for the NCAA championship, now needed help climbing the stage. Cancer had ravaged his body. He was fifty-seven days from death.

But Valvano had not come to the first ESPY Awards to say goodbye. He had come to start something. Accepting the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award, he announced the creation of the V Foundation for Cancer Research. His voice cracked but carried: "Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul." Then he left the audience with eight words that have outlived him by decades: "Don't give up. Don't ever give up."

Valvano died on April 28, 1993. The V Foundation has since raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research.

Paul writes in Romans 5:3-5 that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope — a hope that does not put us to shame. Valvano lived that chain in public. His body was failing, yet his suffering forged something indestructible. That is the gospel pattern: hope is not the absence of suffering but the fruit that grows through it, watered by the love God pours into broken vessels through His Holy Spirit.