SmashMouth

The other day, spring exploding with the 18,000 flowering plantings on his 200-acre property of rolling hills and classic stone buildings, Matt Millen took the controls of his John Deere backhoe and began moving 12 huge logs. One after the other, chaining them up, pulling them off the pile, and moving them to where most of this wood is going to be part of the construction of a storage building on the Millen estate here in the northeast corner of the state he loves.

Millen finished after maybe an hour. He climbed slowly off the huge machine, and gave his Rottweilers, Ranger and Bench, a couple of scratches around the ears.

This is a sick man?

Take a closer look. Millen, 60, has that pale-faced look you sometimes see in people deep into chemotherapy. The four-time Super Bowl-winning linebacker was noted for playing with intelligent abandon for the Raiders, Niners and Washington, but he doesn’t do much with abandon these days. He just had his weekly chemo treatment the previous day, and he’s surprised he’s feeling up to doing as much as he’s done on one of the first warm mornings of the year here. Millen’s down around 50 pounds in the past year, chasing a cure for a disease called amyloidosis that is particularly evil: He needs debilitating chemotherapy now to fight amyloid, a rogue protein that attacks organs (his heart, in this case). Because the amyloid is attacking his heart, he’ll eventually need a heart transplant to have a chance to live many more years.

“We’re in the fourth quarter of a big football game,” Millen said. “We’re down 13. Playing defense. It’s getting late.”

Millen thought, and he laughed. He does a lot of laughing. He is not impressed with his own mortality, nor does he have the slightest problem discussing it.

“We need a stop,” he said. “We need a big stop.”

read more on SI

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