Duquesne head coach Jim Ferry took a few minutes during Saturday’s postgame conference to move the discussion away from his team’s 83-73 win over the Dayton Flyers. He instead focused on one of his assistant coaches John Rhodes.
Ferry announced that Rhodes had been diagnosed with cancer three weeks ago and was set to begin treatment this week but he was also hit by a car during the team’s road trip to La Salle earlier this week, suffering two broken bones in his leg and a slight fracture of the neck.
Here is the full statement given by Coach Ferry about John Rhodes.
“I do want to talk about another subject. A lot of people have been asking about John Rhodes. Big John’s a big part of our family and I feel comfortable speaking about it because I’ve talked to him and his wife.
John was diagnosed with cancer about three weeks ago and is set to start treatment this week. Then, on top of that, we had an extremely unfortunate, unbelievable event. When we got to Philadelphia the other day, John was struck by a car. He had emergency surgery on Tuesday night. He’s doing better and he’s out of the ICU. He’s scheduled to have surgery again on Monday.
He’s pretty banged up, but as everybody in this room knows, Big John is probably the most positive person that’s out there. He’s been more positive about it to us than we have been to him. For everybody, keep your thoughts and prayers with John. He’s going to beat it all. We’ve experienced this with DC (Derrick Colter).
Our kids are our family and everybody’s a family in our program. We’ve done a great job of supporting John and his family. I do ask that you please give them respect and if there’s any questions or anything, please come to me about that. Let’s not bother the family.
We’re in constant contact with his wife. He’s still in Philadelphia and will be there probably for a little while. We’re going to heal him up and then we’re going to fight this battle.”
