zulater
05-15-2011, 06:38 AM
Steelers' Heyward wants to continue father's legacy
Sunday, May 15, 2011
By Gerry Dulac
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/images/201105/20110515steelers_330.jpg
Only several days after the last National Football League game he would ever play, life began to rumble downhill for Craig "Ironhead" Heyward, a large man who impacted people in a big way.
After admitting to his wife, Charlotte, that he had lost vision in one eye a day earlier in the Nov. 1, 1998, game against the New England Patriots, Heyward went to see an ophthalmologist for what he thought might be a routine examination of his problem. Instead, the visit alarmingly triggered a rapid series of CAT scans and magnetic resonance imaging exams which discovered that the former Pitt running back, who always joked about the size of his head, had malignant bone cancer in his skull.
"It happened pretty quickly," Charlotte Heyward said. "They wanted to do surgery as soon as possible."
Less than two weeks after playing for the Indianapolis Colts, his fifth and final team in an 11-year NFL career, Craig Heyward had surgery in Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, the beginning of what was a slow and tragic decline for a man who always seemed larger than life. The date was Nov. 12, a day Charlotte Heyward remembers not just because she was pregnant at the time with their third son, Connor, but because that was when she witnessed her oldest son, Cameron, grow up in a hurry, even though he was 9 at the time.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11135/1146501-66.stm#ixzz1MQ7NCSJs
Sunday, May 15, 2011
By Gerry Dulac
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/images/201105/20110515steelers_330.jpg
Only several days after the last National Football League game he would ever play, life began to rumble downhill for Craig "Ironhead" Heyward, a large man who impacted people in a big way.
After admitting to his wife, Charlotte, that he had lost vision in one eye a day earlier in the Nov. 1, 1998, game against the New England Patriots, Heyward went to see an ophthalmologist for what he thought might be a routine examination of his problem. Instead, the visit alarmingly triggered a rapid series of CAT scans and magnetic resonance imaging exams which discovered that the former Pitt running back, who always joked about the size of his head, had malignant bone cancer in his skull.
"It happened pretty quickly," Charlotte Heyward said. "They wanted to do surgery as soon as possible."
Less than two weeks after playing for the Indianapolis Colts, his fifth and final team in an 11-year NFL career, Craig Heyward had surgery in Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, the beginning of what was a slow and tragic decline for a man who always seemed larger than life. The date was Nov. 12, a day Charlotte Heyward remembers not just because she was pregnant at the time with their third son, Connor, but because that was when she witnessed her oldest son, Cameron, grow up in a hurry, even though he was 9 at the time.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11135/1146501-66.stm#ixzz1MQ7NCSJs