Eddie Olczyk goes from cancer to busiest man in showbiz

Erik Brady | USA TODAY

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WASHINGTON — Eddie Olczyk is sitting in a nearly empty Capital One Arena last week, eight hours before Game 1 of the Washington Capitals-Pittsburgh Penguins playoff series. Olczyk loves the quiet of hockey in the mornings, calm before the storm. Same goes for the racetrack, where horses and hot walkers are up before dawn.

“There’s a lot of tranquility there,” Olczyk says. “There’s peace. And for me, when I go to the track or the rink and you’re around good people – before the thundering hooves and all that – there’s something about it all that makes me feel good.”

And feeling good is what it’s all about for Olczyk these days. He found out last summer that he had colon cancer. Surgery and six months of chemotherapy led to good news in mid-March, when doctors told him he’s cancer-free. And that means he is ready, with renewed vigor, for his favorite time of year.

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Olczyk is the busiest man in showbiz when Stanley Cup intersects with Triple Crown. He’ll be an NBC analyst on Saturday at the Kentucky Derby and again on Sunday for the Boston Bruins at Tampa Bay Lightning, not much more than 20 hours betwixt post time and puck drop.

“This time of year, with the playoffs and the Derby, it’s just good to be back on my feet and have some normalcy in my life,” he says. “The last seven months have been pretty rough.”

Olczyk is a sort of human cross-promotion for NBC’s hockey-and-jockey programming. He worked Game 1 of the Caps-Penguins series last Thursday on NBCSN, then he was off to Las Vegas for the Golden Knights vs. San Jose Sharks on Saturday on NBC. He flew home to Chicago on Sunday – “to reload,” he says – and Monday it was on to Louisville for Derby week.

“Gets the blood flowing this time of year,” he says.

Olczyk, 51, started skating at age 6 and soon fell in love with hockey. He started going to the track at age 12, thanks to the father of one of his youth-league hockey pals, and soon fell in love with horse racing. Later he’d play 16 NHL seasons while playing the ponies whenever he could, living in two worlds predicated on speed.

“I just kind of fell in love with the animals,” Olczyk says. “You’ve got these 118-pound human beings riding atop 1,200-pound animals, running 35 miles per hour down the lane, trying to get to the wire first.”

When his New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, Olczyk took the Cup to Meadowlands Racetrack. The next fall, during a work stoppage, the track offered a modest proposal: “They said, ‘Look, you like to play the horses, you’re not working. Why don’t you do our in-house race analysis?’ … And that was the first TV I ever did.”

Now he feels lucky to broadcast the sport of kings — and the sport of (L.A.) Kings — on NBC and its affiliated cable channels. He feels luckier still — infinitely so — that his cancer was caught early.

Doctors removed a fist-sized tumor and 14 inches of his colon. They told him they thought they’d gotten everything but recommended 12 rounds of chemo to make sure.

“I said, ‘So I’m signing up for six months of hell for 50 more years?’ ” Olczyk says. “I must be a pretty good general manager and a pretty good handicapper if I can make that deal, so I said OK.”

The 48-hour chemo sessions were grueling. He’d be hooked up at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Mondays and unhooked at home on Wednesdays – and wouldn’t begin to feel human again until Sundays.

“When you are diagnosed with cancer, you feel weak, you feel less, you feel like you’re a burden,” Olczyk says. “But what people need to know, and what I needed to learn about myself, is that you are really the opposite of what you feel.”

And by that he means finding a well of toughness that he never knew he had, even as an NHL player. He says the toughest people he knows — “pound for pound, toughness for toughness” — sit in waiting rooms, not locker rooms.

“I had side effects,” Olczyk says. “For me it was nosebleeds and neuropathy and bathroom issues, all that kind of stuff. It just takes over your body. You think, ‘How am I going to get through this? How am I going to get through tomorrow, let alone six months?’ ”

The answer – and isn’t this just like a hockey guy? – was goals.

“I’m a goal-oriented person,” Olczyk says. “I went to Office Max and bought an old-fashioned calendar and I wrote out a schedule. End of October, I think I can do a couple of games (Chicago Blackhawks broadcasts). Then in November it’s the Breeders’ Cup. Then Thanksgiving. Then my daughter is graduating from Alabama at the beginning of December. And then it’s Christmas. Then it’s the Pegasus in Florida. Then Super Bowl Sunday and that’s two weeks from my last treatment.”

He’d broken his life into poles, those mileage fractions at the track. That way the finish line didn’t seem so far away.

The support of his wife and four children, he says, was the jet fuel that got him through it all. Support came, too, from friends and from people he’d never met: “Phone calls, texts, emails, prayers, Mass cards, everyone wishing me well. And people from hockey and horse racing were right at the front of that line.”

He thinks the people in those sports are a lot alike, sharing common traits of humility and hard work.

“Most people in both games defer the credit,” Olczyk says. “It’s always, ‘My line mates made a great play.’ Or, ‘My jockey gave a great ride.’ And what really makes the games go are the people behind the scenes. The hot walkers and the exercise riders. The training staff in the locker room who tape the players together, literally. Hockey people and horse people have a lot of the same beliefs in process and how they go about their business.”

These are his people, the ones he sees rink side or backside on those tranquil mornings when he feels fully alive again.