Mario Lemieux

  b. 1965 | American hockey player

At The Bottom

— 1993

His personal life and his season seemed over, his career threatened, and his life in the balance.

In early January 1993, Mario Lemieux received devastating news from his doctors:  he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.  Driving home from Allegheny General Hospital, Lemieux could hardly pay attention to the road. He was scheduled to be married in five months, but now his personal life and his season seemed over, his career threatened, and his life in the balance.  He’d lost a cousin to Hodgkin’s fifteen years earlier, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d suffer the same fate. Lemieux, one of the most gifted scorers ever to play hockey, had noticed a small, rubbery lump in his neck in 1992 but thought nothing of it, even as it grew in size.  His team, The Pittsburgh Penguins, was marching toward a second consecutive Stanley Cup, and while Lemieux would spend much of the season dealing with injuries of one kind or another, he would eventually play a key role in bringing the Cup back to the Steel City.  When the 1992-93 season began, Lemieux and the Pens had their sights fixed on a third title, and Lemieux himself set a pace to break some of the greatest scoring records in the history of the sport.