2003-07-14
By Jenni Carlson
The Oklahoman
PURCELL -- Sunday night service at the First Baptist Church, and Aaron Adair is in the zone.
He works the stage, the microphone, the congregation. Arms gesture. Eyes lock. Words tumble out of his mouth, sometimes so fast that they run together, sometimes so clear that they cut to the core.
"I looked death in the face," he says, "and I laughed."
And laugh, he does. His cackle bounces off the baby blue walls and the bleached wood pews.
Aaron Adair has always dreamed of performing to crowds. For years, the platform was baseball.
Now, it's evangelism.
The former Oklahoma baseball player is on a crusade to tell his story. How cancer turned his world upside down. How baseball took a tumble on his list of priorities. How faith restored his life. Adair, 23, hopes to take his testimony to every corner of the state and beyond.
"My life really started when all this brain stuff happened," he said. "Life was so shallow and so meaningless.
"All it was was baseball."
Sports celebrate such single- mindedness. Call it drive. Deem it necessary.
Adair had it. Growing up in Dallas, he only wanted to play baseball. His folks owned Adair Baseball World, an indoor facility with batting cages and individual instruction. His dad coached baseball at Trinity Christian Academy. Baseball was life, and life was baseball.
And it showed. Adair never played with kids his own age but rather those two and three years older. The summer before eighth grade, he led his league in hitting and his team to a title.
"Then fall came," Adair said, "and it all just fell apart."
Adair began experiencing problems with his vision. He saw two of everything.
"I'd be trying to hit a baseball," he said, "and there'd be two balls coming at me."
But Adair didn't say anything. Not to his parents. Not to his coaches. Not to his friends. He just kept practicing, hitting, drilling, trying to will it away.
"All I wanted to do was play," Adair said. "That's all I cared about. That was my life."
But after about four months, Adair couldn't deny he had a problem. Four days after Christmas 1994, doctors discovered the worst -- brain cancer.
"I thought my life was over," Adair said.
There were times during the next few months when he was sure it was. When he fainted getting out of the shower one morning after surgery to remove the tumor. When he had a seizure while in the hospital during his six weeks of radiation.
But six months after doctors sliced open his skull, Adair was back on the baseball field.
He spent the next three years trying to recapture what he had before the surgery, and by his senior year at Trinity, he showed flashes, enough of them, in fact, for the Sooners to offer him a spot on the team.
Even though he didn't try to hide his past -- "Listen," he told the guys, "I've had cancer" -- he wasn't asking for pity or attention or even favoritism.
"He wanted to be just like all of the rest of the guys," said Scott Bird, then the team's strength and conditioning coach. "He didn't want to be treated any differently. If we had eight sprints to run, he was going to run eight sprints."
But rare were the times during the next few years that Adair was healthy. Playing became a struggle again in 2002. He felt weak and tired. What he thought was just part of getting back into shape ended up being another problem. This time, polyps infested his stomach.
Doctors forbid Adair from playing while they tried to determine what to do.
"It seemed like one thing after another," said Clark Pearson, medical trainer for the baseball team. "It was like, 'How much can one person take?' "
Folks around Adair felt bad. Teammates. Coaches. Doctors.
Not Adair.
"There wasn't one day that he was here that I saw a give- up attitude," Pearson said. "Now, there were days he didn't feel good. But even in the worst of conditions, he's bopping around here, cutting up."
Sitting out yet another season, however, put a strain on Adair.
One night, he woke up and went to his computer. He felt compelled to write about what he'd endured. About how he coped. About where his strength came from. He believed God wanted him to do it.
Adair had grown up in the church, been raised by Christian parents and attended a Christian school.
"But it didn't mean jack squat to me," he said.
Something, however, clicked that night. Adair's troubles hadn't driven him away from God but rather closer, and as he sat as his computer, keys clicking, thoughts flowing, he knew that his future wasn't baseball.
Six months later, he finished writing "You Don't Know Where I've Been." Five months later, he found a publisher. And when NCAA regulations prohibited him from being an athlete while profiting from a commercial venture, Adair walked away from baseball.
"This is where the Lord wants me," Adair said, "so this is what I'm going to do."
His testimony almost complete, Aaron Adair tells the folks gathered at First Baptist in Purcell that he wouldn't change a bit of what happened.
"My life has been so blessed the last eight and a half years," Adair will say later. "Life is good. Life is great.
"It's hard for you to fathom."
He is right, of course. He could've had baseball, fun and games, the stuff of childhood. Instead, he got cancer.
But, he tells the congregation, he also got a higher calling.
"He's not on the outside," Adair says. "He's my focus."