SEPTEMBER 27, 1999
Sid Duckman
There is a senior counterpart to Lance Armstrong, who overcame testicular cancer to win the Tour de France bicycle championship this year. He is Sid Duckman, 80, who has traveled a long road of medical catastrophe: a 1 1/2-ft. section of his colon was removed in the early ’80s because of cancer. A decade later, he underwent 35 radium treatments for prostate cancer. This summer his spleen and left kidney, also cancerous, were taken out.
Duckman, a high jumper, long jumper and javelin thrower, has been slowed down from time to time but never stopped. As a young man growing up in Bayonne, N.J., he could toss a football 65 yds. He briefly hoped for a career in professional baseball, but he didn’t perform well under big-time pressure. Instead he worked days in the local General Motors plant, studied for a bachelor’s degree at night and became a schoolteacher.
After retiring in 1985 to Daytona Beach, Fla., he focused his attention again on sports, concentrating first on the long jump and the high jump. His arm remained as strong as his legs. “I can still throw a softball 35 yds.,” he says. So five years ago, he decided to test his arm with the javelin. “I was terrible,” he says. “Accurate, but no length.” He trained for jumping at a local high school, but for understandable liability reasons, the school did not offer javelin instruction. So Duckman watched videotapes of the best javelin throwers in the world and slowed the action to study their style. He won a bronze medal in the ’95 Games with a toss of 81 ft. 7 in.
The comeback from his most recent surgery has been frustrating. Against his urologist’s advice, Duckman began exercising as soon as he could get to the track. “You don’t know me,” he told the doctor. As it turned out, the doctor did. Duckman was too weak for his presurgical routine. So now he is building up slowly as he gets ready for the October competition. He started with short, quarter-mile walks around his condominium, mixing that routine with both swimming and running in the pool. He can once again pump out 16 push-ups, more than, he notes, young recruits must do when they join the Army. “You can imagine how long it takes an 80-year-old to get into shape,” says Duckman. Yes. What is unimaginable would be Duckman’s not wanting to.
Alice Sanchez
For Alice Chambers Sanchez, 66, life rarely strays far from the volleyball court. There was the time 32 years ago when a big guy named Jess started horsing around on the court when she wanted to get serious about the game. “If you don’t want to play volleyball,” she told him, “get your ass off the court.” He did, but he returned a few days later, intrigued by the focused lady with a low tolerance for nonsense and an inclination for direct expression. They chatted, they batted the ball, they fell in love—and they got married.
Alice has been standing up to boys—and girls—since she was 12. She played softball and football with the guys and was president of the girls’ athletic association. She dreamed of being an Olympian, going to college and then teaching or coaching. The dream ended when she married for the first time at 18 and had four children in four years. By age 32, she was divorced and getting no help from her ex-husband. With the grit she showed on the sports field, she refused to accept welfare and took a job, working for 25 years at an aluminum plant, handling the mail and switchboard, and writing the company newspaper.
Through the toughest times, she stuck with sports and in 1963 began playing competitive volleyball. She has taken part in 36 U.S. national tournaments and, on the beaches and in the gyms of southern California, is known as a relentless opponent who can take on and outwit women much younger than she is. “I can read them,” she says. “When they put up their hands to hit, I know just about where the ball is going to go.” Sanchez remains fearless about pursuing shots that are about to hit the ground and does so without the benefit of protective kneepads, pluck that has earned her the nickname “the Digging Machine.”
She is as tough on her five teammates as she is on her opponents. “I’m not tolerant of many mistakes,” she says, “and I don’t play for fun. I play to win.” Over the years she has fired a dozen or so teammates, mostly for having outsize egos. The Pasadena Mavericks, a team on which she is both the oldest player and the captain, went undefeated in winning the Games championship in both ’95 and ’97.
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