Lance was kind enough to tell my story in many pages in his original book, Livestrong: Stories of Survival. I met Lance at a CDC cancer meeting a decade ago, and he showed me a silly little yellow wrist band that someone at Nike wanted him to use to raise money. Neither one of us thought this young marketing guy had a winning idea. Man were we wrong. Millions of them have been sold, and it started a phenomenon. I was later asked by LAF/Lance to serve on their Grant Review Committee for LAF, which I did for a couple of years, but OCF just took too much of my time to work with them at the same time, and I had to move on. Plus about that time things were changing at LAF and I had serious disagreements with their direction (like I know so F$%^&king much that I know better than them), but the idea of starting a commercial site with ads ( which is now Livestrong.com and has an ad between every paragraph, and material written by people with little knowledge) meant that I had to be true to my inner self. Hey I'm not throwing stones, I've just learned that it's best not to get too close to your heros.

In rereading that part of his book or listening to this video, which was highly edited, I also realize how much I've learned since then, and how far I've personally come. As to the goatee, it's a funny thing. I've always hated them. But the edges of mine I do not trim - that is the exact line where the radiation ended. And about the time that I decided to start sporting it, to help hide that the right side of my mouth doesn't quite work right, Brad Pitt was sporting one and they were kinda in style... Now there's a laugh, me thinking that I could be anything like Brad. While he's got nothing to worry about from me and the TV time that I've got under my belt, for those of you that are unaware, we all do owe him, as Brad has been a generous donor to OCF in the past. (You have to remember that he used to date Gwyneth back in the day, so there was one of those 6 degrees of separation thing going on, that OCF benefited from.)