INDEPENDENCE: Coach Tyronn Lue knows why he broke down, why the tears flowed so freely after the Cavaliers won the NBA championship.
It wasn’t just that he’d taken over in January, that he saw his team rally from a 3-1 deficit against the Golden State Warriors in the Finals, that he’d helped end Cleveland’s 52-year championship drought.
Lue wished that his mother and grandmother were with him at Oracle Arena in Oakland.
Instead, mother Kim Lue was home in Houston, grandmother Olivia George in Mexico, Mo., both battling cancer.
“For me it was just sad because they couldn’t be there. That’s why I was so emotional after the game,” he said.
Diagnosed in July, 2015, Kim Lue was fighting breast cancer for the second time in eight years. Her family history of the disease goes back three generations on the Lue side. Caring for Kim in Texas, George wasn’t feeling well and went for tests, which discovered lung cancer. She’s also a breast cancer survivor.
Both underwent surgery and needed chemotherapy and radiation. Kim Lue had a double mastectomy, a suggestion she’d rejected the first time, a suggestion doctors said would have likely prevented the cancer’s return.
Lue kept his family’s struggles private until they were revealed in a story by Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins in early August. Lue discussed what he went through last season on Thursday after practice at the Cleveland Clinic Courts, as the Cavs are preparing to open defense of their title on Oct. 25.
Lue said he never considered telling the players, even though they would have been sympathetic.
“I didn’t want any sympathy, you guys getting hold of it,” he said in reference to the media. “I handled it internally. My family, my friends, they knew about it. Until the season was over I didn’t want the team to go through the distraction. I didn’t think it was fair to those guys, so I kind of kept it to myself. Constantly talked to the doctor, talked to my mom, making sure I’m up to date on everything that’s going on.”
On game days, even during the playoffs, Lue called his mother on the way into the arena.
“That was like our time,” he said.
Sharing her son’s penchant for confidentiality, Kim Lue, 59, also kept her illness private for a while.
She learned her breast cancer had returned in July, 2015. But Lue was coming home to Mexico for the dedication of Tyronn Lue Boulevard in August and Kim Lue didn’t want to spoil the festivities. She began phoning family members with the news when she returned to Houston.
“Everybody took it hard,” Lue said. “Initially, she wasn’t going to do the chemo because she’d been through it before. But our family was like, ‘You have to do the chemo.’ The doctor said she would die if she didn’t do it, but she didn’t want to go through it again. It took her awhile [to decide].”
Chemotherapy ran though the end of the Cavs’ regular season, then came the double mastectomy and reconstruction. All were completed early in the playoff run, but Kim Lue was too weak to travel.
So, too, was George, 75. But Kim Lue rode on her son’s float during the June 22 parade along with Lue’s brother, sister and nephew.
“That was a great feeling,” Lue said.
Kim Lue left the next day, stopping for treatment in Kansas City on the way back to Houston, where she sees a specialist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Lue said both his mother and grandmother are doing well now. Kim Lue plans to attend the opener, when the Cavs will raise the banner and receive their championship rings, and the Christmas Day home game against the Warriors.
Lue said the women’s cancer is always in the back of his mind, along with a tinge of regret.
“The craziest part for me, hopefully she would have gotten her breasts removed the first time, but she didn’t want to do it,” he said of his mother. “You can’t tell someone what to do with their own body. When she told me, it hurt me because she had to go through the same process and the first time it really beat her up. I can’t imagine having to go through it the second time when you already know what the first time was like.”
But Lue managed to bury those feelings during games, just as he had pushed away other personal issues during his 11-year NBA playing career.
“I’ve been through things my whole life,” said Lue, 39. “Once you get inside these lines, now outside the lines, that’s your job, that’s your livelihood. It kind of removes you from all the outside things you have going on.”
Near the end of the interview, Lue might have given a hint of how hard his mother’s and grandmother’s crises were on him.
“People see us on TV, we make a lot of money, but we still have the same day-to-day problems that everybody else has and it’s kind of forgotten,” he said. “We still go through the same things everybody else goes through.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read her blog at www.ohio.com/marla. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.