Sylvia Hatchell returns after missing last season to undergo leukemia treatments

This is a parable. Something about a basketball team finding its way. Or is it?

Think a little bigger. Wander off the court, and picture this: You’re dangling from the edge of a cliff with a 20,000-foot abyss. There’s not much choice here. Fall to your death or look up and see the one person you’d ever want to see holding a rope, and your life. They will ignore the burn, the blood oozing from their palms, because devotion has no price.

Wait. Don’t put your trust in only a soul or two. The collective, you see, overwhelms the strength of one man or woman. It’s Herculean. So you want five, a dozen, a whole team to hold your rope and never let go. To be there for missed free throws and bad turnovers, yes, but also for more, for when forces unseen upend your life.

For when you get cancer, say. When, as the story behooves, you “Hold The Rope.”

“I appreciate my friends so much,” said Sylvia Hatchell, now in her 29th year as head coach of the North Carolina women’s basketball team — and her first since defeating cancer. “A lot of people don’t have the support system that I have. And there’s no way I could have have done it without ‘em.”

But this bigger-than-basketball lesson? She understood it before, as Hatchell calls it, a tsunami named acute myeloid leukemia, with its 65-percent survival rate for patients her age, knocked her sideways by way of an 8:20 p.m. phone call to her Chapel Hill home on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013. Before she trudged through four rounds of chemo — “You actually feel like a Mack truck has hit you” — at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, each punctuated by a “rock bottom,” Hatchell said, that felt far deeper than a metaphorical 20,000-foot dive.

Before she dropped to the court and hammered out pushups at a recent 6 a.m. practice, weeks after a bone marrow biopsy declared her cancer gone, because she was so jazzed about a play that went, unlike the tsunami, according to plan. Before Hatchell will return, after a season-long hiatus, to the Carmichael Arena sidelines Friday afternoon for UNC’s season opener.

“Every day, I’m just like, ‘Oh, God, it’s so beautiful outside,’” said Hatchell, 62, a 2013 Naismith Hall-of-Fame inductee and the winningest active coach in women’s basketball. “Even if it’s cold and everybody talks about how dreary it is outside, I say, ‘No, no, no. It is gorgeous. It’s beautiful. Hey, I’m here, I’m healthy. I’m with these kids. I’m at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No, no. Life is great.’”

The rope-holding that took place during Hatchell’s six-month recovery? The blisters are everywhere. She never spent a night alone from Oct. 11, 2013 to Apr. 17, always in the company of her husband, Sammy, a women’s basketball associate head coach at Raleigh’s Shaw University, or her son, Van, the 25-year-old managing director of the Chapel Hill nonprofit Extraordinary Ventures. Friends from the Smoky Mountains, her shag club, her hometown of Gastonia — they were there, too. She still has voicemails on her iPhone from Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, former Gov. Bev Perdue, Pat Summitt, Robin Roberts. And an avalanche of get-well sentiments from strangers, because the rope snakes far beyond one’s living room.

But the fear? That never subsides. You must hold tighter.

“In the back of my mind, I always felt she was going to get through it,” Sammy said. “I always had faith in God and faith in her. I thought if anybody could do it, she could do it. But you know that God lets good people die, too, and so you’re afraid, scared, petrified.

“That punch-in-the-gut feeling will persist,” he said. “I can still feel it if I think about it.”

When, two days after her diagnosis, her team gathered at the Lineberger to hear the news straight from her masked lips, Hatchell placed a blue and white rope before them on a conference room table. Some players were inconsolable, others stone-faced. Forward Xylina McDaniel folded into the arms of teary-eyed interim coach Andrew Calder, Hatchell’s assistant for 29 seasons. You’ve got to help the others get through this, he told the junior forward. You’ve got to hold the other end.

“It’s an inspirational story and you take it to heart,” McDaniel said, “but when you’re finally hit with a situation where you actually have to hold the rope for someone, it makes a lot more sense, and you take it to heart more. You live by that.”

But the rope didn’t begin with cancer. It arrived three years ago with a stranger, who, it turns out, was family all along.

‘I want you on the other end of my rope’

It’s spring 2011, and Rodney Cook’s in trouble. He’s 63, retired, and his heart is failing him. He needs a new one, and bad. His name goes on a transplant list. There’s no guarantee.

Wednesday, Apr. 20 comes, and with it a Rams Club speaking engagement at a Raleigh country club featuring coaches Hatchell, Williams and Butch Davis. Rodney’s son, Travis, a 36-year-old senior manager at an appraisal company, had tickets for his father-in-law and his dad, who went to UNC for undergrad and law school from 1965 to 1974.

Rodney had never heard Hatchell speak. It mattered little. Because, as Hatchell’s longtime executive assistant Jane High says, “You never know when you give a speech who you’re going to speak to.”

It began with a simple question from an audience member to Hatchell: How had UNC’s 2010-11 team turned an unspectacular regular season into a Sweet 16 trip? Simple: Hold The Rope.

UNC lost four straight to end the regular season. Before the ACC tournament began, Hatchell opened an email from Brenda Paul, the women’s basketball coach at Young Harris College in Georgia. It was the story of Hold The Rope. Hatchell ran to a pet store and bought a blue, white and black chew rope. She gave every player a copy of the story. If you can hold the rope for each other, Hatchell said, if you can believe in this, we will win the ACCs. Every huddle in Greensboro closed with mention of Hold The Rope. UNC won four games in four days and the ACC title, then rattled off three straight NCAA Tournament wins before losing to Stanford.

A month later, she tells the country club audience the parable and its basketball application. And there, seated somewhere in the throngs of UNC revelers, Rodney Cook has an epiphany, the kind that shakes cobwebs from a sputtering heart and makes it glow. “It just hit me,” he said. The event ends, and Rodney walks out of the clubhouse with Travis. He grabs his son and leans in.

"Travis," he says, "I want you on the other end of my rope.”

The next morning, a phone rings at the Cooks’ Raleigh home. It’s Duke University Hospital, and doctors think they’ve found the right heart for Rodney. He calls his kids. It’s time to hold the rope.

They need one first. Travis calls High on his way to the hospital and introduces himself. Rodney’s got his heart, Travis says. He wants to buy a rope like Hatchell’s. The coach gets on the line and suggests meeting near the pet shop where she bought the first rope. But Travis wants to see his dad before he goes under. “Travis, you go to the hospital,” Hatchell says. “Let me see what we can do about getting you a rope.”

Hatchell has all-day meetings with recruits. But she always keeps cash in her pocket. She plucks a 20. “Jane,” she says, “go out to the pet store and get a rope. And take it to Duke.”

She does, finding Travis, by then only a voice on the phone, when she grabs the rope from her shopping bag and waves it in the hall. High presents it to Rodney, along with a printed copy of Hold The Rope and a personal inscription from Hatchell: “To Rodney: We’re holding the rope for you. Love, Coach Hatchell.” High wishes the Cooks well and leaves.

That’s the last they hear of Rodney for awhile. They don’t know that the heart, in fact, wasn’t a match, that Rodney waited two more weeks for the right heart while online well-wishers flooded him with pledges to hold his rope. They knew nothing until High returns to Duke Hospital to await a sister-in-law’s surgery and spots a familiar man at the other end of the waiting room.

“Jane,” Travis Cook says, “my dad’s in surgery right now.”

Rodney returns home a few days later. He’s out of the hospital all of 15 minutes when he calls Sylvia and Jane. He reaches Hatchell on her cell phone while she’s fishing. “I want to come see you when I get stronger,” Rodney says. He does, in June 2011, but he arrives early for his 1:30 p.m. appointment. He has to track down Hatchell while she eats a hot dog at Sutton’s Drug Store.

Rodney forks through the crowd, heads straight for Coach. He wraps his arms around her neck. And he hands Hatchell a check for the Jessica Breland Foundation, benefitting the Lineberger Center’s care for the UNC forward, and eventual WNBA starter, who would trump Hodgkin’s lymphoma while playing for Hatchell.

“I want to give back,” Rodney says to Hatchell, “because you gave to me.”

Rodney, now, is family. He appears at every team function. It was meant to be, he says, this unexpected union between a man with a new heart and a coach with a new rope.

“But see?” Hatchell said Tuesday. “I always say, just like me having cancer: There’s a reason for everything. And like I told my team and I told Sammy, ‘You know what? If my team hadn’t been playing badly in February, Brenda Paul would never have sent me that story, and Rodney Cook would never have happened.’”

She smiled.

“Isn’t that something?”

‘It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?’

It did happen for a reason, didn’t it? She was already a longtime benefactor of the Lineberger. The N.C. Cancer Hospital named a classroom after her in October. She wants to build a workout room for chemo patients there, something more than the lone treadmill at the end of the hall, to give them the antidote of exercise that proved paramount to Hatchell’s recovery. But would her advocacy reach have stretched this far without warding off leukemia?

“No, no, no,” Hatchell said. “There’s no way.”

Would Wingate senior guard Jasmine DeBerry, a Charlotte native, have donated marrow on behalf of the stricken coach whose UNC basketball camps she grew up attending? Would she have found a perfect match with a 9-year-old girl who had leukemia, gone to Georgetown to give the marrow, or been given the chance to meet the girl next July with Hatchell by her side?

Would Rodney Cook have taken a call from an in-law in Mt. Airy, N.C., on New Year’s Day 2013, whose friend had slipped into a month-long coma? Would her friend’s wife have heard of the rope story and of the man who personified its core? Would he have driven to the man’s hospital with a rope signed by Hatchell’s team and told the tale, as he has to anyone who has reached out to him, by which he will always live?

“It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?” Cook said.

“So many times, we get so much junk in the way, you know?” Hatchell said. “Distractions and things, and trust me: Cancer filters all of that out. You see much more clear what really makes a difference.”

Like doctors and donors, friends and family, random kindness in the name of a not-so-random cause: carrying someone when they don’t have the strength to stand, holding to the other end of their rope, just as so many did for Rodney Cook and Sylvia Hatchell.

Remarkable, isn’t it, what a dog’s chew rope can do for the soul?

sports@dailytarheel.com