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VIDEO: Pavlik: Champion with a heart
Video
BOARDMAN— To the boxing nation, Kelly Pavlik is simply the middleweight champion of the world.
But to the Greg and Carrie DelSignore family of Boardman, he is known as the champion with a heart.
Pavlik is that rare breed of athlete who works as hard outside the ring as he does when in training, yet always seems to find the time to be there for those that need help.
To appreciate the softer, human side of Pavlik and exactly what he has meant to the DelSignore family, we need to go back to mid-March when a strapping, 6 foot, 180 pound eight-grader at St. Charles School, son Dante, was at the local YMCA.
While carrying a pizza box through the building, Dante bumped his left leg on a chair. Over the next month or so, he banged that same leg again on no less than four other occasions.
By Easter the leg ached all day and sported a knot the size of an egg where it had been repeatedly bumped.
When brother, Mark, hurt his back playing baseball last April, both sons were then taken for X-rays on their respective ailments.
Mark was cleared of any major injury, but Dante’s X-rays turned up a suspicious spot on the leg that doctor’s wanted to examine more closely.
A CAT scan would reveal a white mass in Dante’s bone. After an MRI, blood work and biopsy of the tumor at Akron Children’s Hospital, the diagnosis was osteosarcoma, a form of childhood bone cancer.
For more, see Friday’s Vindicator and Vindy.com