Cancer, COVID-19 and one North Carolina sports nerd’s 30 days in the sports desert
Jacey Zembal is the kind of fan who keeps old high school games on his DVR just in case he ever wants to go back and watch them. A self-described “sports nerd,” he has been watching, thinking about and writing about sports for as long as he can remember.
And when he really needed sports, they were ... gone.
Zembal spent a month in the hospital this spring undergoing treatment for leukemia, and because of the coronavirus pandemic, he couldn’t have visitors. Normally, that would be fine. Zembal, who lives in Raleigh and has written about basketball and football and recruiting for The Wolfpacker magazine and website for the past 14 years, would normally spend most of his evenings watching whatever live sports were on TV.
How he spent his time instead is one story of a pandemic, of how a sports fan spent 30 days without sports when he needed them most.
The story starts with a twist: COVID-19 might have saved his life.
Good news, bad news
Zembal, 45, had been feeling run down for months and kept working through it: ACC tournament, a big project on 40 years of N.C. State basketball recruiting. By mid-April, he couldn’t mow his lawn without having to stop to catch his breath. He had the same thought anyone else would: Coronavirus.
He went to urgent care and got tested, but before he even got his results back, his bloodwork was off. They sent him to Duke Hospital for more tests. A week later, he went back for a bone-marrow biopsy. Acute myeloid leukemia.
The good news: It appeared treatable. The bad news: He would have to spend the next month at the hospital, confined to the 9100 floor at Duke for chemotherapy treatments, with no visitors.
Zembal, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of high school basketball players, is the kind of guy who marks important dates in his life with how they line up with the sporting calendar: He got his first chemo treatment on the day N.C. State basketball recruit Josh Hall turned pro. Under normal circumstances, there would be more than enough sports to fill up his long days and longer nights. Under these circumstances, he let his sporting mind wander.
Thus began a 30-day YouTube and NBA League Pass odyssey that took him back to his childhood and right up to the present day, covering everything from wrestling and the USFL to the Chicago Bulls.
“One, it kind of rekindled my love for sports during a time when I hadn’t seen any sports for a month and a half,” Zembal said. “Two, I felt like I was learning a lot. I wouldn’t want to draft against me in an NBA fantasy draft next year, anyone who wants to challenge me.”
He started with Jeff Pearlman’s book about the USFL, “Football for a Buck,” but the chemo made it hard to focus on reading. When he finished that one — and he plans to reward himself with a vintage USFL jersey when his treatments are complete — he fired up his laptop.
“That was kind of the first sportsy thing I did to make the days go by,” Zembal said. “Next I did a lot of deep-diving on YouTube. A lot of rabbit holes. Lot of WWE, WCW stuff. That was entertaining. I’d watched it some in the past, but didn’t really know a lot about when CM Punk was on top of the world. There were a lot of rabbit holes with that. But then you branch off. The anchor each week was The Last Dance. No doubt about that. You always knew when it was Sunday. You always planned your weeks around that.”
But it wasn’t long before things started to get obscure. Ben Wilson was a Chicago high school star in the 1980s and one of the best players in the country before he was tragically gunned down on the street the fall of his senior year. Zembal, who grew up just outside Chicago, knew the legend. Everyone of that generation did. But Zembal, now a college basketball recruiting expert, had never actually seen Wilson play. He found three of his games on YouTube.
He moved onto the high school and college games saved on his DVR. At one point during an old NBA game, the ticker at the bottom of the screen reported the death of sideline reporter Craig Sager. That was chilling: Sager died of the same kind of leukemia in 2016.
Zembal watched old mid-80’s ACC games, wondering how Len Bias would have looked in the NBA, then or now, or marveling at the untapped potential of the Charles Shackleford-Chris Washburn team at N.C. State in 1986.
A League Pass lifeline
Then Zembal took advantage of the NBA making its League Pass package free during the pandemic and decided to watch this past Bulls’ season from Game 1, focusing on games against former Triangle players like T.J. Warren and R.J. Barrett, and tracking their improvement from college, but at that point just about anything was viewing fodder.
“When you’re in the hospital for 30 days, you suddenly have time to watch the Utah Jazz,” Zembal said.
And then, in May, his 30 days were up. He said his farewells to the nurses and hospital staff who made his stay so pleasant — many with sports allegiances of their own — and went home. Even then, his mobility is limited, essentially without an immune system during a pandemic.
Later this summer, he’ll probably have to spend another month in isolation after a bone-marrow transplant. (An N.C. State fan and frequent audience member at Zembal’s podcast set up a gofundme that has so far raised more than $16,000 to help cover his medical bills.) He still has half a Bulls season left to watch. There might even be a live game to watch by then.
“It’s really phenomenal what is out there for the sporting fan,” Zembal said. “I didn’t even need a lot of the podcasts I thought I would listen to. I figured I’d find a way. I didn’t know what way it was. I didn’t know it would be through NBA League Pass.”
This story was originally published June 9, 2020 at 2:39 PM with the headline "Cancer, COVID-19 and one North Carolina sports nerd’s 30 days in the sports desert."
