A Heavy Dose of Reality

Matt Stevens remembers well that Friday night in April 1994. He had invited a group of friends over to his apartment in Venice to watch the first Evander Holyfield-Michael Moorer fight on pay-per-view.

But it was the phone call that made the night memorable.

On the previous Wednesday, Stevens had undergone one of his monthly blood tests, as he’d been doing for 10 months after surgery for testicular cancer. Only this time, he was asked to return for another test on Thursday.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Stevens kept telling himself.

To help ease his concern, he decided to have a party, inviting friends over to watch the fight.

His apartment was jammed when the phone rang about 9 p.m.

“I thought it was one of my friends, saying he was going to be late,” Stevens recalled. “But it was my oncologist, Marilou Terpinning. She told me my tumor markers were skyrocketing through the roof and she needed to see me first thing Monday morning.

“Here there were 25 people at my apartment and I had to go back out there and act as if everything was normal.”

Robin Douglas, Stevens’ girlfriend then and now his fiancee, wasn’t fooled.

“I knew just by looking at him,” she said. “It was his shoulders. His shoulders were drooping.”

She might have known, but she didn’t want to believe it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, confronting him in the hallway.

“I’ll tell you later,” Stevens said.

“No, tell me now,” Douglas said.

“It’s back,” Stevens said. “The cancer is back.”

*

Well-liked, handsome, bright, a high school and UCLA football star with an infectious smile and a personality to match, nothing bad had ever happened to Matt Stevens.

“I threw five interceptions in our opener against Oklahoma my senior year,” Stevens said.

OK, nothing really bad.

At Fountain Valley High, he was one of the top-rated prep quarterbacks in the country.

As a junior at UCLA, filling in for an injured David Norrie, he was the Bruins’ starting quarterback when they beat Iowa in the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 1, 1986, 45-28.

He was the starting quarterback for the Bruins in the 1986 USC-UCLA game, a 45-25 UCLA victory. His 39-yard Hail Mary pass at the end of the first half gave the Bruins a 31-0 lead, earning him the nickname “Hail Matty.”

Stevens played pro ball too, briefly with the Kansas City Chiefs, quarterbacking the indoor Los Angeles Cobras in 1989, and spending seven months of 1990 playing for the Legnano Frogs in Italy.

After that, he went to work for a savings and loan, making as much as $110,000 a year.

Life was good.

But things started going bad in 1993, when his S&L; went out of business. Stevens caught on with a mortgage brokerage, but instead of earning a salary, he was working strictly on commission.

That June, when one of his testicles became “as hard as a rock,” he went to have it checked. He was in surgery two days later.

“I got to the doctor, thinking I needed a prescription, and he tells me if I don’t have this surgery I’m going to die,” Stevens said.

The actual operation wasn’t that big a deal.

“It was outpatient surgery,” Stevens said.

He limped out of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica that afternoon and that evening went to a local hangout to have a beer with a friend and contemplate life with only one testicle.

Then a good thing happened. On July 4, Stevens was in the wedding party of a former UCLA teammate, tight end Jim Mastera. Another former teammate, quarterback Brendan McCracken, was in the wedding party too, and McCracken’s wife, Mary, had a friend visiting from Dallas.

That’s how Stevens met Robin Douglas.

The first date went well and the couple had a long-distance relationship for several months.

“We talked on the phone almost every day,” Douglas said.

By November of that year, Stevens had persuaded her to move to Santa Monica. A graduate of Texas Christian with a degree in journalism advertising, she found a job in her field.

Things went well until the Northridge earthquake on Jan. 17, 1994. Douglas’ apartment was destroyed, and Stevens’ commission-only job went as stale as the real estate market.

But things didn’t get really bad until that fateful call on the night of April 22, a call that turned their lives upside down.

*

When Stevens met his oncologist that Monday morning, he had a choice to make.

One possibility was more surgery, delicate surgery for the removal and dissection of lymph nodes. It was a procedure that would probably leave him infertile and came with no guarantees.

Another choice was radical chemotherapy.

There was one more option. Stevens could do nothing. And probably die.

“I went into total denial,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me.

“I chose the chemo, not knowing exactly what I was getting myself into.

“If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have chosen the chemo. Anything would have been better than that. If I knew now what I didn’t know then, and they said, ‘It’s either chemo or we have to break your arm,’ I’d say, ‘Here, snap the sucker.’

“They blasted me with drugs because I was only 29 and in good physical condition. It was radical, really radical chemo.

“It was three three-week cycles over nine weeks. Each cycle started out with five hours of chemo, done intravenously, for five straight days, then one hour every Tuesday.

“Robin was supposed to come and pick me up the first day of treatment, but I forgot, and in somewhat of a delirious state, I took a bus home, which was a big mistake. I barely made it back to my apartment.”

Through the next nine weeks, plus an additional six weeks or so of recovery, Stevens went to hell and back.

He lost weight, he lost all the hair on his body, including eyebrows and eyelids, he vomited almost hourly, his nose ran constantly, he broke out in ugly rashes and he suffered cold sweats and shivers. His immune system shot, a case of sinusitis almost did him in.

He said there were four days he missed entirely.

“Robin woke me up and said it was time for my Tuesday treatment,” he said. “I said, ‘But it’s only Friday.’ She said, ‘No, it’s Tuesday.’ ”

Douglas, who had moved into Stevens’ building after her place was destroyed by the earthquake, became Stevens’ constant companion, caretaker, nurse and savior.

Stevens’ mother, Barbara Loyo, a retired community college worker, at first would drive up from her home in Orange County.

“I really didn’t want her or anyone else to see me the way I was,” Stevens said. “She would just break down and cry. It was just too tough for her. She couldn’t handle it.”

Stevens’ father, Marvin, lives in Vermont, where he owns a used furniture store. Stevens’ parents divorced when he was 16.

Marvin Stevens would call and send money, a couple of thousand all told.

Money became a big problem. Stevens’ insurance ran out after he’d finished with the chemotherapy and he had to pay the post-care expenses out of his pocket.

Neither Stevens nor Douglas was bringing in income to live on. Stevens wiped out his savings and went about $25,000 in debt, maxing all his credit cards.

“My parents would have given me more money, but I was too embarrassed to let them know I was having financial problems,” Stevens said.

What saved him, he said, was that a banker friend, Jim Mortenson, came through with an $11,500 loan, payable in 1999.

On one of Stevens’ better days during treatment, Douglas suggested they should do something normal, like take in a movie.

Stevens hated to go out looking the way he did, but for Douglas’ sake he agreed to go to a movie. They chose “The Crow,” starring the late Brandon Lee, which was playing at a theater on the Third Street Promenade.

About halfway through the movie, Douglas reached over to touch Stevens’ arm. He was covered with sweat.

“He didn’t say anything because he wanted me to enjoy the movie,” Douglas said. “I said, ‘We’re getting out of here.’ ”

Stevens picked up the story from there.

“We didn’t make it,” he said. “On the way back to the car, I threw up in an alley and then collapsed in exhaustion. I told Robin to go get the car. I just lay there, my head practically in my vomit, next to a trash bin. I’m sure passersby thought I was drunk.

“Robin somehow got me in the car and we went home. We thought, ‘Well, we won’t try that again.’ ”

*

As word began to spread about Stevens’ illness, friends began to call.

“I was embarrassed,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to think I was going to die.”

Usually, Stevens wasn’t able to talk when the phone rang.

“I got to know a lot of Matt’s friends just by talking to them on the phone,” Douglas said. “Terry Donahue called all the time, always concerned. He’s such a nice man.”

Said Donahue: “One of the neat things about coaching is the relationship you build with your players. You grow fond of guys like Matt and David Norrie, but you have so many players you never really get a chance to tell them or show them how you feel about them.

“When a tragedy happens, like what happened to Matt, it’s shocking and very upsetting. I would just call to see how everything was going and to see if he was OK and if there was anything I could do.”

Said Stevens: “So many friends called, and even if I couldn’t talk to them, it meant so much to me. Even Darryl Henley called from jail.”

(Henley, a former UCLA teammate of Stevens and Los Angeles Ram cornerback, is serving a 41-year federal prison sentence for conspiring to run a narcotics ring and plotting to kill a judge.)

Douglas said through it all, her love for Stevens only grew. She said the thought of bailing, just walking away, never occurred to her.

“I couldn’t have blamed her if she did,” Stevens said. “I mean, usually when you court someone, you try to look your best and show the person a good time, wine and dine ‘em. This was just the opposite, I mean total opposite. I looked like death warmed over and taking care of me certainly wasn’t fun.”

Douglas might not have thought of bailing, but Stevens did.

“A few times I thought, if I could just drive, I’d get in my car and drive off a cliff,” he said. “I don’t think I really would have done it, but I sure thought about it.”

After the chemotherapy, Stevens’ cancer went into remission and the tumor markers returned to normal.

But Stevens said he needed about another year to recover mentally from his ordeal.

“It took a long time for my self-esteem to return,” he said. “I remember the first time I could walk normally, without help. I remember the first time I could jog, the first time I could run. It all came back, bit by bit.”

These days, Stevens’ life is good again, maybe better than ever.

“It changed my whole attitude about life,” he said. “I now realize just how precious every day is.”

Stevens, taking a cue from fellow UCLA quarterbacks Tom Ramsey and Norrie, is trying broadcasting. He works with former UCLA nose guard Mike Martinez on the UCLA pregame shows on Sports Radio AM 1150 and is the sideline reporter on game broadcasts.

He also works for American Golf and is the general manager at one of the most picturesque public courses in Southern California, Los Verdes, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

He has written an autobiography about his ordeal. The yet-to-be-published work is about 250 pages long.

“I want to share with others what I went through,” he said. “I wished there had been a book I could have read.”

But more than anything else, what Stevens got out of it all is a woman he knows loves him.

“For Robin to stick by me was incredible,” he said. “Without her, I would have never made it.”

They will be married April 18.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE RIVALRY / UCLA vs. USC

WHEN: Saturday

SITE: Coliseum

TIME: 12:30 p.m.

TV: Channel 7