Profile in courage

After winning a 12-year war with bone cancer, Swampscott’s Harry Bane’s golf game is soaring

By Chad Konecky

Harry Bane hit upon a notion in June as he reclined in the study of New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. Golf is everything to Bane. But it shall never be the only thing.

An invite to a graduation gathering for Belichick’s daughter Amanda, a Phillips Academy (Andover) senior, didn’t entirely shape the eureka moment for Bane. A person tends to gain pretty good perspective on life when his bones are gnawed upon by cancer for more than a decade. But Belichick’s study drove the point home further.

The leather. The woodwork. The bookshelves. The Vince Lombardi trophy. With one omission: No Belichick. The Coach was absent. On a Sunday night in June.

Harry Bane is a gutsy kid and a supremely gifted golfer. He would love nothing more than to play golf for a living. But not if it will someday require his absence, his study populated by wide-eyed high school kids, from a graduation get-together for his daughter.

?I’ll never forget I’m a team-sports guy at heart,? explained Bane, who turned 17 on May 7. ?I played baseball and basketball and only quit those because of my leg. Those relationships I formed with teammates and coaches are what I cherish most. I want those relationships in college.

“I’m not going to go to the SEC (Southeast Conference) or the ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) and walk-on and play golf 24-7,” continued Bane, who will enter his senior year at the Pingree School in South Hamilton this fall. “I understand golf isn’t everything. I want to balance the athletic, academic and social aspects of being a college student.”

That Bane possesses a workaday humility so thoroughly entangled with his golf ability is downright astonishing.

His ability could cloud the mind all on its own. For instance, in May Bane played his first round this year (and with less than three dozen under his belt over the past two-plus years) at the 94th Massachusetts Open Championship qualifier and shot a 6-over par 76, missing the cut by one in a playoff.

Add to that seduction the lure of heavy-hitting folks ceaselessly gushing about his high ceiling.

“Harry has tour ability as far as how he hits the ball,” said Frank Dully III, the 35-year-old Kernwood Country Club pro and a regular on the PGA Winter Tournament Series (Fla.) Tour. “He hits it as long and as straight as anybody. This isn’t a 17-year-old who’s played every day since he was 12. There have been summers he’s been limited to four or five rounds. His talent is so great, it overcomes that inexperience.”

It is Bane’s other experience – his cancer experience, so weighty and so elemental – that guards him from being overcome by his talent. And for that he feels blessed.

Just as he feels blessed for his withered, gnarled, punished right leg.

Days asunder

The bones of Bane’s lower right leg were nibbled on for 10 years by a rare form of cancer called adamantinoma (pronounced adda-man-te-noma). Actually, rare is only the best-available adjective.

Bane’s doctors, who have sawed diseased or infected bone from his leg on six different occasions, say there are between 200 and 250 recorded cases of the affliction worldwide. We’re talking about a one-in-25-million proposition.

Bane, whose cancer was discovered when a harmless playground tumble as a 4-year-old raised a ghastly shin bump, underwent his first surgery to address non-aggressive bone cell cancer in 1993 at the age of 7.

Massachusetts General Hospital orthopedic oncologist Dr. Mark Gebhardt performed an allograft that day, removing about four inches of Bane’s tibia (the large bone of the lower leg) and implanting a cadaver bone in its place, using a six-inch plate and screws to fuse it in position.

Bane suffered a recurrence of the cancer in 1996, requiring two surgeries. One procedure removed the 10-year-old’s cancerous fibula (the small bone of the lower leg). Later that year, a bone graft from his right hip was used to replace cancer re-growth in his tibia.

Bane was losing his leg, piece by piece.

Bucking medical predictions that he would never regain normal leg function or return to sports, Bane went on to become a Little League All-Star shortstop as an 11-year-old and led state-finalist Swampscott within a game of a Williamsport tournament bid a year later. He also excelled at point guard on the town’s Catholic Youth Organization traveling basketball squad.

Bane posted a top-10 finish in every New England PGA Junior Tour event he entered as a 12-year-old, including one tournament win. But in September of ’99, there was another cancer recurrence in the right tibia, which meant another hip graft.

Making matters worse, Bane’s increasing height and weight were testing the lone remaining bone in his lower leg.

In March of 2000, it buckled. Bane felt something give in a pick-up hoop game. Over the next few months, his shin, always a bit bowed, began to curve. Badly.

By the summer, he couldn’t run. Bane missed his 13-year-old hoop season, as well as summer baseball. An X-ray revealed two fractures. Surgery was unavoidable, but not immediately necessary. It was up to Bane’s pain tolerance.

He was resolute about playing the Pingree golf season as a freshman. By the time he was forced from varsity competition, with a 5-0 individual record, he was crutching from his golf cart to the fringe, and then hopping to each lie.

The screws from his ’93 surgery were snapping. Bane’s lower leg was bowed at a 58-degree angle. Like a boomerang.

“I’ve been [coaching] for a long time and I’ve seen athletes with loads of talent who skip practice with a hangnail,” recalled Pingree golf coach Jim MacLaughlin, who convinced Eastern Independent League coaches to let Bane use a cart that fall, though course conditions prompted the teen to self-caddie three times. “Here’s a guy who tried out for the varsity with a broken leg and didn’t tell me he had a medical condition or needed a cart. He makes everybody on the team appreciate how lucky they are to have their full faculties. If it takes someone like Harry to remind you that’s a gift, then so be it.”

He got game

Bane has played nine holes with PGA Senior Tour legend Chi Chi Rodriguez and LA Lakers’ forward Rick Fox. He has visited with more than a dozen admiring pro athletes ranging from Doug Flutie to Shaquille O’Neal. Personalized, autographed photos blanket his bedroom wall.

Celebrity golf partners are nothing new for Bane. When you’re sick for a decade, but drag yourself into multi-sport competition the entire time, folks tend to notice.

In the fall of 2001, Bane was the Junior Division honoree selected from a nationwide pool of nominations at Intersport’s 11th Annual Arete Awards for Courage in Sports, annually broadcast on ESPN (Arete is the Greek Godess of “virtue and excellence”). Presenter and perennial Major League All-Star pitcher Randy Johnson was so moved by Bane’s story and stamina, he is still in touch by phone. Disabled pro golfer Casey Martin has also been a long-distance buddy.

Intersport has asked Bane to serve as keynote speaker at a corporate conference in the Midwest this summer.

?It doesn’t surprise me one bit they’ve asked him to do that,? said Phil Sloan, president of Swampscott-based United Sports Associates, a relationship and event marketing firm that Bane interns for. ?I’ve spent 10 years of my life in the player representation business and event promotion. Personalities are so diverse in sports: You can’t control whether you win or lose, but you can control your temperament. For me to take Harry into my office as an intern is a reflection that I have full confidence in his deep understanding of responsibility, accountability and attention to detail. He can wear the different hats.

“I’m a salesman,” added Sloan, formerly associated with ProServe and Woolf Associates. “At 17, Harry clearly demonstrates the instincts for meeting peoples’ needs. Conversations with him are never about how great he is. He engages people. If he wanted to chart his future [as a sports agent/promoter], he has the skill sets to do it. I believe whatever he chooses to focus on, he’ll be successful. But not before taking a serious look at his passion for golf and becoming a pro player.”

Bane reaches people with his heart, not his hardship. He refused to use his crutches inside the auditorium at the ARETEs and requested they not appear in the video footage preceding his acceptance speech.

“Harry was meant to be the inspiration he is to the people around him,” said the teen’s father, Rich Bane, 47, past president of Kernwood CC, a director for Eastern Bank and operator of Bane Care Management, encompassing four skilled nursing facilities on the North Shore. “I’m convinced of that. It takes a certain kind of person to deal with what Harry has to deal with. To be the role model. To be the inspiration. I think that’s why he was put on this earth. He’s a special kid and he was meant to do something special. I’ll tell you this, I’m staggered he’s golfing as well as he is right now.”

Bane reaches greens with the greatest of ease. Earlier this summer at Kernwood’s 495-yard, par-5 opening hole, he ripped his drive 310-yards, center fairway, then plopped an 8-iron within 20 feet of the pin.

At 6-feet-3-inches, 185 pounds, Bane averages 280 yards off the tee. His 2-iron is good for 230 yards. His 5-iron regularly sails 200.

Pro ability, indeed.

“Finally, it’s just a matter of focusing and taking myself to the next level,” said Bane, whose mother, Tami, 42, is a 5-handicap and one of New England’s Top-30 amateur women’s golfers. She is also the 11-time defending women’s club champion at Kernwood. “There’s no longer a health component. I’m about to enjoy the longest stretch of play I’ve had in four years. My leg feels better than ever.”

In June’s World Junior Golf Cup, Bane, who has missed only a handful of school days throughout his medical travails, finished 18th in a field of 50, shooting 72 and 82 in torrential downpours at Disney World’s 7,200-yard Magnolia Golf Course. He narrowly missed the cut in the qualifying round of the USGA Junior Amateur Championship.

Harry isn’t the only star of the family, however. His sister Haley, a 16-year-old junior-to-be at Pingree, finished 23rd at the USGA Girl’s Junior Amateur Championship and won the Mother-Daughter State Championship in July at the Fall River Country Club with Tami.

Harry and his father will represent Kernwood as the club’s 2003 father-son champions at the MGA state father-son championships later this summer.

Standing tall

Many hurdles were cleared to get here.

In December of 2000, to make the boomerang straight again, Dr. John Herzenberg of Maryland’s Center for Limb Lengthening & Reconstruction used a procedure called the Illizarov Technique to insert 17 pins, anchored in a frame surrounding Bane’s leg, into his tibia.

Governed by four daily screw turns along the apparatus, Bane’s tibial curvature disappeared. The process endured eight agonizing months with his leg stiffly extended in bondage through the summer of 2001, impaled by a futuristic “external fixator.”

“I ask ‘why me?’ all the time, but you can’t pity yourself,” said Bane shortly after that surgery. “You can’t live like that. There was no option. I didn’t want to be different. This leg’s special. It’s mine and I want to keep it. I had a problem. I’m dealing with it and then I’ll be able to do what everybody else is doing.”

The all-clear siren had all but sounded by March of 2002, but Bane hadn’t yet turned his back on basketball. During a tryout for the North American JCC Maccabi Games, the largest organized sports event for Jewish teenagers in the world, Bane plunged into the abyss.

Along the sideline on the fast break, his right tibia sheared apart, piercing through his leg in a gruesome compound fracture.

“I was lying there looking at my leg and I’m thinking, ‘It’s over. My leg is gone,’” he recalled. “Everything I’d worked for was gone. To be able to put that behind me, keep my leg and get it to where it is right now is incredible to me.”

And to medical experts in Maryland. The fracture healed, but an aggressive bone-surface infection persisted for six months. This past New Year’s Eve, fully expecting to awake from surgery with yet another external fixator interning him, Bane finally caught a break. The good kind.

Surgeons discovered the bulk of his infection was clinging to the metal plate inserted that spring to repair the fracture. The plate was removed. The fixator stayed in its box.

“He’s had so many things happen that could have held him back, but the great thing about Harry is, you can never really call anything a setback,” Dully said. “I’ve never seen Harry fear a situation on the golf course. His will to succeed always takes over. I look forward to seeing his name become a household name around the state over the next couple years.”

For his part, Bane hasn’t drawn any conclusions about what the next couple years hold in store. He’ll play out his senior year at Pingree, having finally, grudgingly agreed to leave basketball and baseball in his rearview mirror. He’ll consider playing collegiate golf anywhere in the country, but his No. 1 criterion is finding a coach who emphasizes a team atmosphere and choosing a college community where he will feel at home.

Those choices are, at the moment, unpredictable. But nothing like the uncertainty of illness. After 12 years, Harry Bane is whole again.

“I’m exactly where I want to be,” Bane said. “I’m a 17-year-old kid and I’ve got my height and my health. I’m just going to give what I have to this sport with the ability I have. That’s all I ever asked for.”

At once, the only thing and everything.