Reusse: Cancer battle can’t stop Carleton quarterback

NORTHFIELD – Ardrey Kell High School opened in the booming Ballantyne area south of Charlotte, N.C., in 2006, and now is among the state’s largest high schools with nearly 4,000 students. The Knights play stout football opposition and Jack Curtis was the starting quarterback for two seasons.

Both of those were played in 2021 — an eight-game spring season because of pandemic restrictions the previous fall, and then a full season with playoffs included in the fall.

The 6-foot-4 Curtis earned his reputation for toughness in the spring, when the 5-1 Knights were playing unbeaten Providence. Curtis had suffered a knee sprain in the previous game. The team’s training staff fitted him with a brace and he went into the Providence game with limited mobility.

No matter. Curtis threw for 327 yards and the Knights won a 41-10 blowout.

In a call on Thursday, Ardrey Kell coach Greg Jachym said: “He’s a super tough kid and never wanted to come out of a game. When I saw him a couple of weeks ago, I said, ‘Jack, there’s no doubt you’re going to beat this, too.’”

Which in Curtis’ senior season at Carleton College, and the third as the starting quarterback, has him facing a bit more of an obstacle than a sprained knee:

There’s that port in his chest where he takes chemo to defeat late Stage 2, unfavorable Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he was diagnosed with in June when he was back home in Charlotte. The pain struck him so badly one day that he was lying on the floor in agony.

“Except it was on the wrong side,” Curtis said Wednesday, in a meeting room underneath Carleton’s historic Laird Stadium.

Jack’s mother, Amy, works in the medical field. She took him after that episode to a Novant Health facility in Charlotte and the diagnosis was made.

It was suggested to Curtis in our conversation that the term “unfavorable” had to be somewhat disconcerting.

“Unfavorable … that just means it was spread throughout my chest cavity," he said. “And starting to surround my heart.”

Just?

“They took a PET scan after my second cycle in North Carolina and they couldn’t find any active lymphoma cells. I’m in the 99-percentile to beat this, but the doctors can’t say 100 percent.”

Which brought up this question from Curtis to the lead doctor: Could he play football? Can that make it worse?

“The doctor told me, ‘You’re not going to induce more cancer because you’re playing football, but it’s going to be very hard for you,’ ” Curtis said.

If you’re a Carleton football player, you can handle hard — starting with getting into school with those beyond-rigorous academic standards that considerably limit the talent pool.

Watching practice Wednesday, it didn’t appear a quarterback would be receiving protection from an abundance of beastly sized Knights linemen.

Final: Whitewater 45, Carleton 14.

“I got back here a couple of weeks after the start of fall practice,” Curtis said. “I hadn’t done any throwing in North Carolina. I had a big gash under my throwing arm from the biopsy. They took an egg-sized piece of tumor out a mango-sized tumor.

“And they placed the portal in my chest. It’s there, with a lot of gauze over it when I’m playing football.

“No practice, no film; I was a little behind. I had to come out of the Whitewater game, but it was unrelated to the cancer. I got hit and my head snapped back.

“Other than that, it’s only the week that I get chemo that there’s an effect.”

He was named MIAC offensive player of the week.

Then came Monday: Curtis was at the Mayo Clinic for his biweekly chemo treatment through that portal in his chest. “It is very fortunate for my family and me to have Mayo so close to Northfield,” he said. “They are world-class, as everyone knows.”

Journell made the drive with Curtis for the Monday treatment recently. “Like so many of our students, Jack is brilliant,” Journell said. “He’s a physics major and wants that to lead to the aerospace industry. He has huge goals, and I would never bet against him.

“Jack is the most organized, detailed person I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of those people in eight years at Carleton.”

Since this was a Monday chemo week, and he also has to get a shot at Mayo the next day, Curtis still was watching practice on Wednesday. But you won’t keep him out of Saturday’s game at Laird Stadium.

“We beat them late two years ago,” Curtis said. “Then, I couldn’t make the play at the end and they beat us last year. The games we’ve had with them … this year it means everything to our senior class to beat the Oles."

One more note here: The senior quarterback on a very competitive Ardrey Kell High team in Charlotte this season is Jared Curtis, Jack’s kid brother.

“He’s not quite as big as his brother, but he’s big enough and throws well,” Journell said. “And smart, too, of course. We’d love to have Jared up here and create a family tree for quarterbacks.