9/27/13: Stan Bowman talks about having Patrick Kane in his household while going through cancer treatment
Interviewer: That was a heck of a rookie year for Patrick Kane, ‘cause he was staying with you at the time, right?
Interviewer: Seeing you day-to-day go through all this. But I’m sure he helped with the kids a little bit, too.
Stan: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting story. So I’d gone through the treatments, and I finished up right around the draft. And we drafted Patrick, and I remember talking to him over the summertime. We were trying to figure out where he was going to live when he got to Chicago, and we said “We’ll figure that out when you get here.”
Training camp rolls around, and once again he didn’t really want to talk about it; he just wanted to try to make the team. It was this big question - is he even going to be on the team or not? It’s funny looking back at it now, they were talking about him going back to London for the next year. So we got ourselves into October, and he still is in the hotel for like 5 weeks, and I remember talking to his mom, and saying, “Well, why doesn’t he just come over to our house? He can spend the weekend.”
And he was there, and he fit right in with us, and with the boys; he was like a big brother to them.
So then fast forward to about 3 or 4 months later, it’s mid-January, and we realized that the cancer had come back and I was going to have to go through more treatment.
And I was worried - Patrick had a great first half of the season there; he’s, y’know, the best rookie in the league, things were going well, and more so for my kids’ sake, I was hoping he didn’t want to leave.
But it was a tough time, obviously - like I said, there were a lot of tears, people were calling, and they wanted to know what they could do to help, and it was a difficult time to be part of, and I figured he would want to maybe go somewhere less chaotic.
And i remember having a conversation with him, and he almost looked at me confused, like “Do you want me to leave…?” And I said, “No, I just - I didn’t know if maybe this was too much for you.” And he said, “I’d rather stay, if I could.”
And that’s just the kind of person that he is. He didn’t want to bail out. You know, I’ll never forget that. He really helped us through a hard time. My kids to this day remember - I think at the time, they had no idea what was really happening there, really; they didn’t realize who he was, what a high-profile person he was, to be living in their basement. But yeah, he’s a special kid.
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