The Pink Stink: How professional and amateur sport profits from cancer awareness month

The over-marketing of the most accessibly awful of all first-world diseases has basically done more harm than good for cancer awareness – namely, it makes the disease look as friendly as a pair of fuzzy dice.

While ranting on this recently, a coworker stopped me and asked, “What’s the matter? Do you have a problem with cancer?”

As a matter of fact, I do. I do have a problem with cancer.

My father was diagnosed in February with lung cancer. Aggressive lung cancer. Stage four-because-there-is-no-stage-five lung cancer.

His brand of cancer is the BASE jumper of this deadly disease; a sort of devil-may-care/all-in kind of attitude that quickly marched through his other vital organs as a tiny Napoleonic army of drunken plebes who, like Gremlins in a pool, didn’t stop multiplying till they had taken over his very marrow.

My father, in spite of being given a four-month expiration date…