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

Even if he wasn’t telling the whole truth, Modell wasn’t exactly lying. Then, as now, AML was one of the more rare cancers, affecting only a couple of people out of every 100,000 Americans each year. And Davis’ subtype, acute monocytic leukemia, accounts for only 10 percent of AML cases.
In 1962, a diagnosis of AML was tantamount to a death sentence. Overall, a leukemia patient had only a 14 percent chance of being alive in five years. The prognosis for Davis’ leukemia was even worse: A National Institutes of Health study, begun a year after his diagnosis, found that just 12 of 212 acute monocytic leukemia patients survived for five years or longer. That meant Davis had only about a 5 percent chance of being alive in five years.

Since the time of Davis’ diagnosis, “the basic steps in treatment haven’t changed much,” says Kamen. Then, as now, oncologists took a two-step approach. First doctors try to induce a remission—that is, they try to kill all of the cancer cells visible in a patient’s blood and bone marrow. But while a patient nearly always feels much better after remission, without additional therapy the improvement is usually fleeting. That’s because it’s nearly impossible to destroy every cancer cell in that first effort. A second “consolidation” step of treatment, aimed at rooting out those last cells with ongoing chemotherapy, is needed to prevent the disease from resurging.

These steps may not have changed since Davis’ time, but the drugs certainly have. Today doctors use a combination of drugs like cytarabine and anthracyclines to induce remission. While these drugs, which attack rapidly dividing cells, are successful in helping up to 80 percent of AML patients go into remission now, neither was available for at least a decade after Davis’ diagnosis. In the early 1960s, only about 20 percent or 30 percent of AML patients made it into even an initial remission.

Davis had made a career out of triumphing over seemingly impossible odds on the football field, so when he went into remission in the fall of 1962, there seemed reason to hope. Shortly after Davis’ professional debut at Municipal Stadium, Modell and a team of doctors decided the time was right to tell him about his diagnosis.

In a memoir for the Saturday Evening Post, Davis explained what it felt like to hear the word leukemia: “It’s a word that jumps out at you, a frightening word. … Someplace along the line you have to come to an understanding with yourself, and I had reached mine a long time before, when I was still in the hospital. Either you fight or you give up. For a time, I was so despondent I would just lie there, not even wanting to move. One day I got hold of myself. I decided I would face up to whatever I had and try to beat it.”