All of the Angels

In the beginning, he wanted no pictures and only the most general of words. In the end, he let journalists catch him sweeping tears from his face. Over the months of that transformation, Hall of Fame baseball player Rod Carew helped his daughter Michelle create a legacy of evocative images, both photographic and word painted.

Rod had long been protective of his family's privacy, creating a cocoon in reaction to the physical abuse meted out decades earlier by his father. Like many athletes in the public eye, he had always had an uneasy relationship with the media and sometimes--by his own admission--was less than pleasant to journalists. He figured that his life on the field was the press's to record; his life off the field was his to shield. The Angels hitting instructor and former Minnesota Twins and Angels player had always let his batting statistics speak for themselves: seven American League batting titles and more than 3,000hits.

So, late in 1995, a month after Michelle was diagnosed with cancer and taken to Children's Hospital of Orange County, California, Rod and his wife, Marilynn, gave directives to the pair of us in the hospital's public relations department. One was to get this message out to the public: call the National Marrow Donor Program at 1-800-MARROW and have your bone marrow tested to see if you are a match for Michelle or another cancer patient. Be sure to emphasize the low numbers of minorities in the registry, the transplant coordinators told us, because it is more difficult to find matches for Michelle--with a black father and a white mother--and others of mixed ancestry.

The Carews, though, did not want family members photographed. If members of the press needed a picture, they could use a file shot of Rod. Even after Andrea Pronk, my assistant, and I counseled him that "art" often determines the "play" of a story, Rod refused to budge. So, because columns usually stand without artwork, I arranged Rod's first interview with Orange County Register columnist Bill Johnson, an African-American, who wrote:

In a tiny conference room on the third floor of Children's Hospital of Orange County, the Hall of Famer is talking. Only his lips move. His wife, seated next to him, is still except for the tears falling from her cheeks. A visitor listens, barely breathing. A sensor, detecting the lack of movements, trips the light and plunges the room into darkness.

A strange, chilling coincidence, perhaps. Rod Carew, his face tired and expressionless, had been recounting the moment he and his wife, Marilynn, were told by doctors that their youngest daughter, 17-year-old Michelle, had been diagnosed with acute non-lymphocytic leukemia.

"I just stood there, you know," he recalls, a sad far-away look in his eyes. "All I could think about was death." And then the room went dark.

I remembered watching games from a seat high in the stands of the Anaheim stadium and pumping my fists and cheering when Rod stroked an outfield fly to score a winning run. But now, after this column circulated through television news departments, he was going to make a more substantial sacrifice: his privacy. From her hospital bed, Michelle told Rod, "Daddy, I want you to be my voice." So, when Los Angeles television sportscasters Jim Hill and Rick Lozano asked for interviews, Rod--aware that tv is a medium that demands pictures--knew what he had to do if Michelle's message was to spread into millions of Southern California households.

Rick's cameraperson showed the family--including sisters Stephanie and Charryse--nestled beside Michelle's bed in the hospital's oncology intensive care unit. Michelle, her hair braided and gathered at the top, grinned and wept and said she hoped she could find a bone marrow match. She talked about her favorite Disney videos, giving...