If you want to understand why Dabo Swinney was so disappointed Tuesday to be asked a certain question at the Coaches for Charity event in Greenville, S.C., you have to know the whole story.
Just before going into Fisher DeBerry’s fundraiser at the TD Convention Center, Swinney was asked if he had any comments on a video of Christian Wilkins from last weekend’s annual Ladies Football Clinic in Clemson. The video shed bad light on a day in which Clemson did so much good for the local community and Kathleen Swinney’s fight against breast cancer.
“It was an unbelievable day,” Dabo Swinney said. “We raised a little over $400,000 dollars and we were able to give $350,000 dollars away and it is a shame that is not the story.”
Swinney said $250,000 will be used to buy a new mobile mammography bus for St. Francis Hospital in Greenville that will go into the low income areas and give free mammograms. Another $100,000 will go to Oconee County Hospital.
“But somehow that is not the story,” Swinney said. “That is kind of the world we live in. Even when you do good and you try to do good, you get accused of doing bad. That is just the way it is, but you do good anyway.
“It’s too bad it was fifteen seconds of the whole day people focus on that really don’t know the concept.”
To know the whole story and one of the reasons why the Swinneys’ All In Foundation host its Annual All In Ball and its Ladies Football Clinic, you have to know what Swinney’s wife and their family have gone through.
Lisa Lamb’s fight
It’s five o’clock in the evening back in the fall of 2013, and after driving a little more than four hours to a Birmingham, Ala., hospital Kathleen Swinney does not even take a break to stretch her legs. She gets out of her car and immediately heads toward the cancer wing.
Though tired and a little bit hungry, too, Swinney does not complain because she knows her four-hour drive from Clemson is trivial compared to what her sister, Lisa Lamb, is going through on a daily basis. As she opens the door and sees her older sister, a smile comes to her face. It is the same smile Lamb has when she sees her younger sister walk through the door.
“When she sees Kathleen, it just lights up her world,” Dabo Swinney said at the time. “It means everything to Lisa. Kathleen lifts her up. She has gone through so much so Kathleen likes to go up there as often as she can to see her and let her know how much she loves her and that we all love her and are praying for her.”
Lamb is one of the inspirations behind the Swinney’s All In Foundation, an organization that the family started as a way to give back after Dabo Swinney was blessed to become the head coach of the Clemson Tigers in December of 2008. Part of the proceeds goes to Breast Cancer Awareness for research among other things.
After another two-year fight, Lamb lost her battle with breast cancer. She passed away in April of 2014 after the disease spread to her brain and her lungs. She had been in remission for eight years prior to the second bout thanks to a double mastectomy, but she was taken off her oral medications and that caused the breast cancer cells that were dormant in her body to spread to her lungs and her brain.
“The medicine kept her cancer free for eight years,” Kathleen Swinney said. “The doctors at Duke felt like she never should have gone off her oral medication. If just saying that can help one woman question her doctor and get more research and information that can go a long way.”
Swinney says her older sister is her hero because of all she has endured and never once complained. Also, Lamb’s motivation to know and research all she can about her own breast cancer saved Swinney’s and their younger sister, Ann’s, life.
Lamb ultimately had a double mastectomy and went through an intense chemotherapy treatment which included the loss of her hair. Then the following year through more research she, and her cousin, Michelle Hansen—who also had breast cancer—discovered they had the breast cancer gene mutation and immediately Lamb called Swinney.
“She told me she was a carrier of this and that’s why she got breast cancer so young,” Swinney said. “She told me that her doctor recommended that our younger sister and I both get tested because we each had a fifty percent chance of having it.”
There is not a day that doesn’t go by that Lamb isn’t on her mind. She has her sister to thank for her own life.
“I was ignorant. I wasn’t informed and because of what she has gone through, it not only motivated me to get myself tested, but to also inform others,” Swinney said. “Watching her and all that she has gone through; to see her make it through, to see her walking around and seeing she is okay (when she was in remission), that helped me from being fearful and that helped my little sister, too.
“Was it a vacation or easy? No, it is painful and difficult. But I was not fearful at all. We drew strength in watching her.”
That strength has given Swinney and her younger sister less than a one percent chance of developing breast cancer. Hopefully, trough the All In Foundation and the Ladies Football Clinic, Lamb’s story has saved thousands of other women as well.
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