FORT MYERS, Fla. - Winning the deciding game of the World Series, the part everyone else remembers and celebrates, he doesn't dwell on, maybe because Jon Lester is determined to be known as something other than
But some of the tender mercies along the way, the improbable sweeteners to an arduous journey that took him from the blunt harshness of a doctor's diagnosis to the champagne-splattered embraces of his Red Sox teammates last October, Jon Lester is not liable to forget.
Here is one. The day before he was scheduled to undergo a chemotherapy treatment, he and his uncle arose at 4 a.m. and with a guide drove through the Olympic Mountains to the Humptulips River, a swath of white water that cuts through the mountains of his native Washington state. There, in the pouring rain, he landed the biggest salmon he'd ever caught, a 40-pound king. The next day, when he showed up at the hospital, his white blood count was so low they had to postpone the chemo treatment, and the nurses said they couldn't understand why he wasn't sick as a dog. Lester shrugged and said he felt fine.
"I smoked that fish," he said, "and we've been eating it for almost a year. My dad still has some."
Here is another. Lester came to Red Sox training camp a year ago, after completing his treatment for a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - six courses of chemotherapy, once every 21 days, the stuff dripping into his right (nonpitching arm) on a Thursday, knocking him back from normal activity until Sunday. Lester was intent on claiming a spot on the big-league team for Opening Day. Call it denial, call it stubbornness, but Lester was not happy when the club decided his health would not allow it, and sent him to start the season in Greenville, S.C., the kind of outpost in the lower minor leagues Lester thought he'd long since left behind.
"We were trying to keep in perspective what he needed to do from a baseball-calendar standpoint, factoring in the medical information, trying to set what a realistic goal was for him," pitching coach John Farrell said. "So I think at times that didn't mesh with what his time frame was. I don't think there was friction, but frustration. It wasn't happening as fast as he wanted it."
Lester remained in Greenville for just three starts, over the span of a couple of weeks. Waste of time? Hardly. Lester met a nursing student named Farrah Johnson, who has been his girlfriend ever since. They even go deer hunting together. Down in Georgia, where Lester just bought a house south of Atlanta, Lester saw Johnson shoot her first deer. Not everyone's idea of a love story, maybe, but it will do Lester just fine. "That made my year," he said.
