Kevin Graber sits in class – pencils, pens and notebook neatly placed upon his desk – and he’s nervous, yet excited, for one of his first English classes, Modern American Drama, at the University of Massachusetts.

Everyone around him looks fresh-faced and youthful, and their talking about the weekend they hardly remember because they spent most of it intoxicated, floating from party to party on campus.

The professor pairs him up with a sophomore bubble-gum chewing girl and asks the class to perform a mini interview of their partners so that each pair can introduce the other student.

While most of the students are a bit nervous because they are positive the class will think they are just another generic college student who watches Comedy Central to get the news, spends most of the time hanging out with friends and works a minimum wage job in Amherst, Graber has an entirely different story.

Graber and his partner politely exchange the key points about their lives to each other, and the introduction begins. ‘

”Um, this is like Kevin. He’s like 40 or something. He like has all these kids, and they like live in Washington Tower,” Graber recalls his partner saying.

Thirty-seven year old Graber, who will graduate from UMass this spring with a master’s degree in education with a concentration in English, has lived a lifetime of stories that are far from the generic life of most college students.

Why UMass?

Before Graber decided to apply to UMass as a full-time graduate student, he had to convince his wife first.

At the time, Graber was living in a modest Amherst apartment with his wife Tina and their three young children.

It had been almost two decades since he had been a student in a classroom, and he had secured a job at Amherst College as the sports information director. But, while he focused a great deal on sports, he also found the time to branch off into other Amherst College activities by helping plan commencement, attending senior staff meetings, and further developing a love of writing that he had discovered in his 20s.

‘I liked the sense of importance working at Amherst gave me,’ said Graber. ‘Doing things for the greater school community was really fulfilling.’

The administration at Amherst College felt Graber was just as important to the school community, because a year later, he was appointed director of alumni and parent programs.

Graber began coaching baseball at Amherst College, and that summer he also helped with a program called Amherst Mickey Mantle Baseball.

‘The kids I helped teach baseball were 15 and 16 years old. That’s when I really started to feel like I liked working with kids that age,’ said Graber. ‘They’re just so smart and eager to learn. They soak everything up. I guess mentoring really appealed to me. I thought maybe I should start thinking about taking some courses in education.’

And so began the trial run. When Graber had moved to Amherst, he had known absolutely nothing about UMass-Amherst. Having lived in Amherst, he knew the area surrounding UMass, Antonio’s pizza and the elementary school district, but nothing about the school’s reputation for protests, drinking and great dining common food.

Graber took one class at UMass called ‘the work of the high school and middle school teacher.’

‘I was totally into it. I started to get the feeling that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree,’ said Graber.

Soon Graber was completely obsessed with his goal of gaining a teaching certificate.

‘I get restless, and I get these crazy ideas. I wanted to get going on getting my graduate degree, and I definitely could not do that just taking one class a semester,’ said Graber. ‘I was poking around online and saw this position for [an Associate Resident Director (ARD) ]. So I
went home and said ‘Tina, I really want to get my Masters degree.’ Then, I had to pitch to her the idea of moving into a dorm. She looked at me like I was insane.’

As Tina had often done during their marriage, she finally gave in to Kevin’s begging, understanding that it is important to support her husband’s dreams. While their lifestyle would certainly change dramatically, their children were still able to attend Amherst public schools and Tina was still able to do her freelance graphic design work.

Graber applied and was selected for the 30-hour a week ARD position in Washington Tower in UMass’ Southwest Resident Area. Kevin, Tina and their three children, Katie, 10, Kyle, 8, and Kelly, 6 moved into an apartment on the fifth floor of Washington.

Had Graber known that he was going to ultimately end up going to graduate school, he probably would saved himself the troubles of having to take English classes with freshmen and sophomores 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate communications major at the College of Saint Rose in Albany.

However, there were a lot of things distracting Graber from being incredibly studious at that point in his life.

Twenty-one year old Graber had an entirely different focus from the man who became obsessed with his dreams of teaching other students. His life revolved entirely around America‘s pastime: baseball.

For almost his entire life, Graber knew exactly who he was and wanted to be for the rest of his life. An up-an-coming shortstop, he loved and needed baseball like baseball loves and needs the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees.

It was Graber’s senior year and final undergraduate baseball season in 1992. He and his colleagues felt confident that Graber would be selected for the Major League baseball draft. ‘ Completely unexpectedly, Graber’s 185-pound, weight-trained body turned against him.

He began to experience shortness of breath and swelling in his head, neck and chest. He experienced trouble sleeping, and explained that it felt as though someone was holding him upside down.

After weeks with little to no sleep, Graber still played through the pain. In a playoff game, Graber hit a ground ball to the pitcher, and the intensity of the pain made him clutch his hands around his knees.

‘I felt like I was going to pass out, and I told my coach I had to come out of the game,’ said Graber. ‘I knew there was definitely something wrong.’

His older brother Michael was in medical school at the time, and when Graber went home, Michael believed he knew the awful truth of his brother’s ailments.

At the hospital, doctors performed a chest X-ray. Immediately after the results were found, Graber was rushed into surgery. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma.

According to the National Library of Medicine, lymphoma, or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, is a cancer that begins when a type of white blood cell becomes abnormal and then rapidly begins to divide, multiply, and spread throughout the body.

He spent weeks in the hospitals’ intensive care unit before he was able to begin chemotherapy.

‘I was terrified when I woke up in intensive care, and I spoke for the first time and realized my voice sounded weird. It sounded like the noise you make when you suck helium. I was like ‘hey, what the hell?”

Because of Graber’s large tumor in his chest, the doctors had kept him on an oxygen feed after the surgery, and often times, oxygen feeds have a bit of helium mixed in to help expand a patient’s lungs.

Despite cancer treatments notoriety for being extremely painful, Graber remained optimistic.

‘When I got the diagnosis, I was sort of relieved. I was just in agony before, and even though it was a grim diagnosis, I had some kind of place to go from there,’ said Graber. ‘It was a way for me to get better. But I won’t lie, the treatments were tough.’

Six months of chemotherapy, three months of radiation, and a bunch of surgeries including two biopsies of his chest and lower back bone marrow examinations later, and Graber had lost nearly 40 pounds.

‘I didn’t look very good. I think I looked like I was on my deathbed,’ said Graber.

His doctors congratulated him on beating the cancer and going into remissi
on. They told him that it was OK to resume all normal activity.

However, Graber and his doctor’s definitions of ‘normal activity’ were not at all the same.

‘I jumped back into baseball and went at it like Rocky Balboa. I was throwing baseballs all the time and playing in a local town league in Albany.’

It was not long before Graber found his body begging him to take it easier. Blood clots appeared in his neck and shoulder. His head swelled to scary proportions.

‘You’re doing a lot really soon,’ explained Graber’s doctors. They maintained that Graber needed to gradually get back into things.

As Graber started to feel better he proved once again, and not for the last time, that apathy has not consumed the youth.

He took a volunteer job coaching a legion baseball team in Scotia, New York. Even though at 23, he was a young coach, he felt as though coaching was definitely something he enjoyed doing.

His next venture would be to west coast, where he took a job as assistant coach for a baseball team at Lassen Community College in California. He packed up what little belongings he had and drove cross country to be a part of the ballgame.

But for young Graber, coaching was not the same as playing the game he so passionately had devoted most his life towards mastering.

‘I was on the field with these players everyday, and as I was coaching them, I was doing a lot of the things they were doing,’ said Graber. ‘Just being in the California sunshine and having time to do baseball stuff, workout, and exercise, I really started to feel healthier. I felt as though I was as good as or even better than these players I was coaching.’

‘I felt like I was ready to play.’

Can’t take me out of the ballgame

Baseball does not halt its rosters for players who are sick at baseball if they’re sick. Graber understood this. But even cancer could not keep Graber from playing. So when his future best man, Doug Kimbler, told him about an opportunity to play for a professional team in Australia, Graber jumped on it.

‘I pack up and go anywhere for baseball,’ said Graber. ‘I called the team managers and told them that I wanted to play shortstop for them, and they said there were no guarantees and that I would have to pay my own way. I said, ‘that’s fine. I’ll be there in a week.”

Basically, the moment Graber walked off the plane he tried out for the Pine Rivers Rapids and the Brisbane Rapids jet-lagged and on very little sleep. Graber had not flown across the world to not deliver. The team kept him on as shortstop.

After playing for the Australian teams, in 1996 Graber played in the Chicago Cubs spring training in Arizona, and after that, he signed his first minor league contract in the United States.

‘I was the guy making 900 bucks living in an apartment with a Murphy bed,’ said Graber. But he was living his dream. Playing for the Southern Minny Stars, Graber was in the line up every day, and he believed things were really clicking for him.

A blemish on his career

In the off-season, Graber started feeling severe pain in his rib cage.

‘It felt like someone was stabbing me in the side,’ he said.

It was back to the hospital to visit his oncologist, and there he would find out that he had to be placed under surgery once more. A byproduct of the chemotherapy, Graber explained, was that there was a ‘mushy spot’ on his ribs. The doctor’s had to remove a portion of two of his ribs.

When Graber went back to play, he was in terrible pain again, having difficult raising his right arm.

‘I just played through the pain, I absolutely did,’ said Graber. ‘But not as successfully. My coach and my team knew, but they were pretty generous about keeping me on.’

There’s an old adage that goes: ‘when it rains, it pours,’ and there is nothing baseball players hate more than having a game get rained out. That’s pretty much what happened next to Graber.

During a routine check-up of his chest, the doctor’s discovered a large mass inside his chest. It was his thymus gland attempting to regenerate itself. Graber was hospitalized for over a week after the surgeons cut the mass, which thankfully was not cancerous this time, out of his chest.

At age 27, Graber was playing for the Adirondack Lumberjacks in Glensfalls New York, and it got to a point in time where he just knew he could not play anymore.

Remembering his other love of coaching, Graber was offered a position to coach and manage his former team, the Southern Minny Stars. He became the youngest manager in all of professional baseball.

Graber recalls a lot of fun times with the Southern Minny Stars ‘- traveling in beautiful weather, to towns with weird names, staying in sketchy hotels that were really secret strip clubs.

One time when Graber and the team were on the road, the management had apparently not paid the bus company in quite some time. The bus driver pulls over to the side of the road, refusing to drive another inch until someone showed up with a check.

Graber’s story of trumping cancer, playing in the minor league and being the youngest professional baseball manager ever was catching attention from the media as well.

At this time, Graber was married to his hometown sweetheart Tina, and once they had their first child, Katie, he realized that ‘the whole minor league baseball life was not conducive to having a family.’

Graber spotted a job as sports information director at the University of West Alabama, and he promised his wife the job would be temporary, as just a two-year occupation so that he could use his experience as a baseline to seek out future jobs of that nature located closer to her family in Albany. Tina agreed, and they moved to the rural south.

‘It was a great place,’ said Graber. ‘There is something to be said for southern hospitality. Everyone was so nice to us. It really was the rural south though. We had to drive into Mississippi, about 35 minutes to go grocery shopping.’

This brings us to Amherst

And this is where Graber’s story comes full circle.

He applied for the sports information director job at Amherst College, and then found a new passion, getting his master’s degree in education, to roll with alongside of baseball.

‘I was very persistent that Tina and I could do this,’ said Graber. ‘I swore I could make it happen. I was just consumed with it. Even though our kids come first, I knew our kids would have a neat experience. I mean, who gets to grow up in a college dorm?’

His children loved living at UMass. Although Tina and Kevin recognized that it was unsafe to simply tell their kids ‘to just go out and play,’ their kids did not feel at all deprived. They enjoyed the sense of freedom to choose whatever food they wanted and run around within the Berkshire Dining Common.

A door in the Graber’s girls’ room connected to a medium-sized classroom, where his children frequently played ‘school,’ leaving notes for UMass students on the chalkboard.

Kevin and Tina were extremely impressed with the way students at UMass helped them with their kids, and how they were very aware of how not to swear or say anything derogatory around the children.

Katie Graber liked having free air hockey in the recreation centers, where the children spent a great deal of their time going to dances and other UMass events. Kelly Graber’s only complaint about living at UMass was that college students litter, and Kyle Graber did not like that college students are ‘kind of loud,’ and he misses the Berkshire‘s cheeseburgers.

At UMass, the stipend for ARD’s was about $14,000, which was not enough money to raise a family of five.

Graber worked as an ARD, but remained coaching baseball for Amherst. He also taught English 98, a small class on special topics sports writing for Amherst College. He used to teach his class in the So
uthwest Grill one night a week.