By Jocelyn Selim

Ernie Davis’ Last Down

The Heisman Trophy winner broke professional and racial barriers before dying of cancer at 23

By Jocelyn Selim

But when Davis walked onto the field in that preseason game against the Steelers, it would be the only time Browns fans would be able to cheer him in a professional game. It was not just the first, but the last time he would ever wear the team uniform on the field. Davis had spent nearly all of his life using his legendary work ethic to hone his natural athleticism with one goal in mind—to make it to the pros. Now he was finally under the lights where he belonged, but although he was allowed to suit up, he would spend the entire game on the bench because of doctor’s orders.

Davis was sick. He didn’t yet know exactly what was wrong with him, but he knew it was bad enough that Brown, his coach, wasn’t going to let him play. Davis had first gone to the doctor a month earlier, while he was at a training camp with the rest of the team in Illinois. At first he was just tired, and then his gums had started bleeding—not just bleeding a little, but angrily, becoming painful enough that there were days when the usually ravenous 22-year-old didn’t want to eat. Then the left side of his neck started to swell and he began to run a slight fever. Assuming Davis had the mumps or mononucleosis, the team doctor sent him to the hospital for routine blood tests. He had leukemia.

“In the early 1960s, any diagnosis of adult leukemia was bad news,” says medical oncologist Barton A. Kamen, the chief medical officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. “But how bad it was depended a lot on the type of leukemia you had.” Leukemia is actually four different types of blood cancers: It can be either chronic or acute, and it can be either lymphocytic (meaning that it affects the kind of bone marrow cells that give rise to specialized white blood cells, like B and T lymphocytes) or it can be myelogenous (meaning that it affects the bone marrow cells that grow into red blood cells, platelets and a few types of white blood cells).

Davis’ leukemia was acute, and it was myelogenous. Oncologists further divide acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) into eight subtypes, based on the exact type of cells it affects. The biopsy showed that Davis’ bone marrow was filled with dysfunctional, stunted monoblasts—a type of young blood cell that should have become monocytes, white blood cells that circulate in the blood and tissue, engulfing and destroying bacteria and debris. Instead, the immature monoblasts were dividing with dizzying speed, crowding out all other types of blood cells. Davis had the AML subtype known as acute monocytic leukemia.

Because Davis’ monocytes didn’t work and because the monoblast cells crowded out other types of functioning white blood cells, his fever was probably the result of an infection that his immune system would have otherwise fought off. His bleeding gums could have been ascribed to his lack of normal platelets, a type of cell that helps blood clot, and his general tiredness to anemia from not having enough red blood cells. The swelling in his neck was likely due to the accumulation of the dysfunctional monoblasts in his lymph nodes.

Modell, the Browns owner, flew Davis to specialists at hospitals around the country. On advice from doctors, Modell opted to tell him only that he had a rare blood disorder.