Raiders' Underhill in contest of his life

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Raiders' Underhill in contest of his life

By Tom Archdeacon
Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2009


FLORENCE, Ky. — He said he could barely walk.

"I woke up and my legs were so swollen I couldn't reach around them with both hands. Same with my ankles. They were so bloated, my shoes were warped. I had what they called neuropathy, a nerve disorder in my feet that made them numb. I felt like Bozo the Clown trying to walk."

That's how Ralph Underhill wobbled into his doctor's office two months ago and — once his blood pressure and pulse were found to be way out of whack, as well — he was sent straight to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Northern Kentucky.

Tests there confirmed his kidneys were barely working.

"They just wore out from diabetes," he said of the disease he first learned he had some 27 years ago when he was in the midst of his Hall of Fame coaching career at Wright State University.

"I might have had it longer than that, but that was the first time I had a physical that was more than 'turn your head and cough,' " he said in typical, candid style.

While he had tried to keep the disease in check — a task that didn't always succeed — he now realized he was in serious trouble.

He needed dialysis and a kidney transplant.

Word of his plight leaked back to some of his friends, both in Dayton and around Northern Kentucky, where he grew up and lives again as he cares for his 94-year-old dad and 87-year-old mother.

Suddenly, though, those two were healthier than he was.

"I was scared to death when I heard what he was facing and I wondered how long he could last," said Ron Agnor, a former local Teamsters president and an Underhill friend since third grade.

"Ralph was the Jim Thorpe-type in high school. Every sport — he could do it all."

It was similar in his coaching career, which spanned high school to the pros and especially blossomed at WSU, where, in 18 years, he compiled a 356-162 record and had eight teams make the NCAA tournament, including the 1983 team that won the Division II national title.

That team, by the way, will be inducted into the WSU Athletic Hall of Fame at halftime of the Raiders' Feb. 7 game with Butler at the Nutter Center.

Initially, some of Underhill's most loyal friends around WSU worried the 67-year-old coach might not be able to make it to that date.

Although always the optimist — "Hey, when you've won something like 1,000 games in your career, you look at life's sunny side, not the shady side," he said — Underhill admitted in his most private moments he did have some grave doubts.

He said his longtime friend, Steve Moore — who had been a rival Kentucky prep coach and then served on his two staffs in the American Basketball Association — recently died from kidney failure.

"He had had diabetes only 12 years and now I've had it for 27," Underhill said. "And one time I remember him telling me his doctors told him he was only getting 25 percent usage of his kidneys and now mine were down to 15 percent.

"I started thinking, 'How am I gonna make it when all my numbers are worse than his?' "

Friends and

the will to win

George Hamilton first met Underhill when Ralph was an assistant coach at University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a team with whom he also won a national title.

"When I came to Chattanooga, I moved into the same apartment complex he lived in," Hamilton said. "Our wives met first, then Ralph and I became friends.

"He got me my job with Budweiser and then convinced me to come see a game. I didn't know anything about basketball, but right off I enjoyed the heck out of it."

When Underhill got the head coaching job at Wright State in 1978, Hamilton helped him move.

"We had two U-haul trucks," he said, laughing. "Ralph got the one with the radio, I got the one without."

After that, Hamilton was a regular at WSU games:

"I'd come up to the season openers and some of the tournament games. I was there when they opened the Nutter Center and when they beat Xavier. And you know what? When I was up there, he had a 100-percent winning streak. I never saw him lose a game there."

So when the 71-year-old Hamilton heard Underhill had to go on dialysis, he joined his old buddy again.

"My wife, Lois, is a diabetic and had a kidney transplant 18 years ago," Hamilton said. "I know what an ordeal it can be, so I came up and stayed with him a week. But he wasn't too happy about it. He said, 'George, I don't need a baby-sitter.'

"And I said, 'I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing it to make myself feel better about all this.' And right away, I could tell he was going to be able to handle it."

It goes to the core of Underhill, friends say. He's a competitor and doesn't want to be beaten, no matter what the challenge.

"Going back to the third grade — whether it was 1-on-1, playing H-O-R-S-E, whatever — I wanted to win," Underhill said.

He learned all he could about his own situation and soon was taking his daily dialysis at home — first with IV bags hung from a pole and now with a peritoneal cycler, a blood-cleansing machine he hooks to a catheter in his abdomen while he sleeps each night.

But the bottom line was he still needed a kidney and he said he could not consider asking either of his daughters to be a donor.

Melinda — who runs Bello One, the fashionable men and women's clothing boutique in the Fifth Third Building in downtown Dayton — has had some health issues of her own and, in Underhill's words, "that was the knockout there."

His other daughter, Kim, has two children, 13-year-old Selena and 8-year-old Kiara.

"Say one of her young children needed a kidney and I had taken their mother's," he said shaking his head. "I couldn't do that."

As he put his name on a long waiting list, he huddled with his new team.

"I've had a lot of good teams in my career, but these four doctors — one for my diabetes, my kidney, the cardiologist and the one for internal medicine — are the team I'm counting on for my biggest win," he said with a smile. "And me? I'm just the guy trying to come off the bench."

But every team has a fifth starter and his turned out to be the ultimate go-to gal.

"She's a miracle," Melinda said quietly. "A real miracle for my dad."

Underhill was just as awestruck when he spoke in a hushed tone about what was transpiring:

"It's like hitting a full-court shot at the buzzer ... It just takes your breath."

Rescue is on the way

Underhill was visiting Hamilton recently and happened to meet a middle-aged couple at a pool party. He told them a little of his story and thought no more about it until Hamilton — who regularly walks with the woman, a 52-year-old school teacher — told him about the "amazing" offer.

"She was going to give one of her kidneys to a friend she taught with, but he died," Hamilton said. "Then she turns around and says she'd give the kidney to Ralph.

"She and her husband have no children and she just wanted to do some good. She teaches special needs children, so I think that tells you something about her. You've got to be very special to do that."

Melinda said the fact that Hamilton was involved in this unlikely scenario doesn't surprise her.

"He's always been my dad's good-luck charm," she said. "And now, thanks to him, Dad has met the guardian angel who can save his life."

Underhill and the woman are a blood match and each has gone through testing for the procedure. If possible, she wants to wait until her school year is done.

Until then, Underhill is doing the best to stabilize his health with his nightly dialysis and his daily insulin shots.

When we met at a Florence restaurant for brunch the other day — a session that spread over more than two hours when his conversation went from his health to Wright State memories that included his players, the fans and especially his longtime assistant, Jim Brown, who also is being inducted into the Hall, Feb. 7. Underhill was wearing an old windbreaker with a Wright State emblem on it and his 1993 Raiders' NCAA tournament ring.

The tail of his coral-colored dress shirt was out for reasons that soon were obvious. Before he ate, he pulled out a needle-tipped NovoLog FlexPen, set the dial and discreetly lifted his shirt just enough to give himself an insulin shot in the belly.

On his one side, there also was a port with a small tube that he hooks to his dialysis machine at night.

"The way I'm looking at it, I've had a lot of good wins in my career, so I don't want to go out on the losing side on this one," he said quietly. "I'm doing everything I have to so the next time you come to see me, you're not visiting me at my local cemetery."

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