Dinner to benefit Dante and others

Despite demands on his time, the champ met with the young man,
staying nearly two hours.

By GREG GULAS

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

BOARDMAN— To the boxing nation, Kelly Pavlik is simply the world middleweight champ.

But to the Greg and Carrie DelSignore family of Boardman, he is the champ with a heart.

To appreciate what Pavlik has meant to the DelSignores, we need to go back to mid-March when son Dante — a strapping, 6 foot, 180-pound eighth-grader at St. Charles School —  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.

Dante’s X-rays turned up a suspicious spot on the leg that doctors wanted to examine more closely.

A CAT scan revealed a white mass in Dante’s bone. After more tests at Akron Children’s Hospital, the diagnosis was osteosarcoma, a form of childhood bone cancer.

Greg turned to his good friend and former baseball teammate at Boardman High School, Dave Dravecky. He helped secure a second opinion at the highly renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Dravecky, a Major League All-Star pitcher who starred with both the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants, is a cancer survivor.

“After meeting with the hospital staff at the center and finding that they would not do anything different than what was being recommended by the specialists at Akron Children’s Hospital, the decision to have everything done in Akron was an easy one for us as a family,” Greg said.

The treatment prescribed for Dante included three rounds of chemotherapy in both May and June, and a round in both July and August.

Later in August came surgery that included cutting out seven inches of his left tibia bone and 13 inches of his right fibula bone. Good bone from his right leg was transferred into his left leg, and a cadaver bone replaced what was taken out of his right leg.

The procedure had been performed only three times previously at Akron.

It was during Dante’s chemotherapy in the summer that family friend Andrea Trgovcich and her sister, Lisa Jones, ran into Greg and Carrie.

Their sons are friends with Dante, and they were both hoping to hear good news about his progress.

They learned all was progressing rather well, but Dante’s spirits were challenged more than anything else.

Jones, through the help of Nikki Ripple and local boxing enthusiast Mike Cefalde, helped arrange for Pavlik to visit the DelSignores, who live on Kiwana Drive in Boardman.

For nearly two hours, Dante and the champ talked sports, especially boxing and how to train and stay hydrated.

Pavlik brought pictures, boxing gloves and shirts for Dante, and by the time Pavlik had to leave, the bond between the two had been forged.

After Dante’s successful surgery Aug. 29, Team Pavlik invited him to be the guest at one of his training sessions before he left for his title bout with Jermaine Taylor in September.

Still weak from surgery and in a wheelchair, Dante made it to trainer Jack Loew’s South Side Boxing Gym on Sept. 12, along with his dad, to watch Pavlik train. 

“It sounded like bombs going off the way Kelly hit the bag. He sparred against three fresh fighters, took a break for some water and then sat on the stoop to talk to Dante,” Greg said.

Dante’s treatments will continue until a total of 12 chemotherapy sessions (each lasting four to five days) are completed over 27 weeks.

His last projected chemotherapy session mid-January .

“Carrie and I, our family and friends, have cried buckets of tears since this all started, but Dante has never shed a tear. He has a remarkable inner strength and while he has his down days, he always seems to brighten up a room whenever he enters,” Greg stated.

“Our faith in God has kept us going, and we’d like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone for all of their prayers and well-wishes.”