NLL Insider

Pat Campbell’s story is pretty amazing. The Roughnecks goalie missed half the 2007 season after dealing with a mystery illness. Now he’s leading the NLL’s top-ranked squad into the playoffs, which start the first weekend of May.

NLLInsider.com contributor Ty Pilson originally wrote this story for the April issue of Inside Lacrosse Magazine. It’s appearing here updated to include his season stats.

PAT CAMPBELL DESCRIBES THE ORDEAL he went through as being similar to an episode of House.

For those not familiar with the Fox TV series, it stars Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House, a medical savant of sorts who spends each week trying to diagnose strange maladies suffered by ordinary people.

The Calgary Roughnecks goalie can empathize with the imaginary ill each week, and the pretend patients who simply want to know what’s wrong with them.

After all, he’s lived it.

Back in 2007, during his second season with the Edmonton Rush, the then 29-year-old Campbell first got sick during training camp in November and had to miss a few on-floor sessions and spend the day in the hospital with fatigue, nausea and dehydration. Nothing serious he figured; just worn down. The doctors seemed to agree and sent him on his way.

Campbell admits he didn’t “feel himself” after that and in the course of a little over two months — from January to mid-Februrary – the physically fit and buff netminder dropped down from his normal playing weight of 210 to somewhere in the 170s. Still, he soldiered on.

Then came the night of April 5, 2007, when Campbell’s quickly detiorating health went over the cliff. He was on a flight to Calgary where the Rush were scheduled to play the Roughnecks the following night. He flew out with Rush GM/coach Paul Day, and the rest of the team’s Ontario-based players.

Campbell started to feel sick during the flight and bolted off the plane for the nearest bathroom when the doors opened.

When he got to the team hotel, things went from bad to worse. Campbell was in a lot of physical pain in his abdomen. “More or less, I was bleeding out of every orifice,” he says.
In bad shape, to put it mildly, he went to the hospital in Calgary. He was desperate for the doctors to give him some answers. They had none.

The word on game night at the Pengrowth Saddledome was that Campbell was suffering from food poisoning, which led to former Rigger Curtis Paldiwor — who had been acquired in a trade with the New York Titans as insurance — starting between the pipes. After that night, the job became Palidwor’s for the rest of the season after Campbell was placed on the physically unable to perform list.

The next week was hell, Campbell says, as he waited for a colinoscopy and more tests back home in Ontario. There were several gastrointestinal conditions that could cause the symptoms that Campbell was manifesting. It made the diagnosis tricky, he was told by doctors.

Finally, he was informed he had Crohn’s Disease. However, he ended up getting three diagnoses in total before, finally, the doctors told him he had Lymphatic Colitis. It was tough to hear, but at least he finally knew what was wrong and why his body had seemingly turned against him.

“To make a long story short. I learned I have a disaster of a digestive system,” laughs Campbell, who hasn’t lost his sense of humor despite his ordeal. “Once I got the diagnosis, it was a major learning curve figuring out what’s right and wrong for me. In life, in work, in lacrosse . . . I’m still learning every week what I’m capable of and what, sometimes,I fall short in.”

*****

Campbell was a self-described late bloomer in lacrosse. He played competitive hockey growing
up in Burlington, Ont., (just west of Toronto) and it wasn’t until he was 10 that his hockey coach recommended he try lacrosse. He played the first season as a runner before switching to goalie.

He always wanted to be a hockey goalie but his parents weren’t into that idea. They didn’t want to drive all over Ontario to watch their son play every second game (in minor hockey, a team’s two goalies alternate starts for fairness sake).

Campbell’s first NLL season came in 1999 with Toronto. He spent a couple of seasons there before a year in Columbus and then four in Rochester backing up Pat O’Toole.

His big break came when he was acquired by the expansion Rush in 2006, led by one of his mentors Paul Day. It was his first chance to be a legitimate NLL starter and he flourished, keeping the Rush in many games they shouldn’t have been in. He was named the team’s MVP at season’s end.

However, Campbell was still maturing as a goaltender. His biggest flaw was a strange one: He wanted to fight too often, felt some observers. An unusual problem for a goalie, to be sure.

When asked about Campbell’s pugilistic penchant during the Rush’s first season, Day was frank.

“He’s a tough individual,” said Day. “Sometimes you have to reel him in because you don’t want him to get into the Billy Dee Smith, Ron Hextall action, but some games he’s close to it.”

Campbell was no stranger to fighting in summer ball during his OLA career. He even dressed as a runner to drop the mitts with Tim O’Brien some five seasons ago.

“He and I are best friends and we always [used to] fight at the bar, and whatever, and I always thought I was tougher than him,” Campbell says of O’Brien. “We figured we’d fight each other for once. We’re usually on the same side when we fight. It started off well and then I think he remembered where he was, in his ring where he’s the king, and he was the king that night.”

O’Brien, for one, didn’t feel Campbell’s urge for the occasional scrap was a bad thing.

“He’s always been on the aggressive side, always looking to stick up for his teammates,” says O’Brien. “I don’t think it took away from his game, in terms of having that on the back of his mind while  stopping the ball [was] on the front of his mind.”

Campbell doesn’t even think of fighting during a game anymore. He simply can’t afford to do it if he wants to make it the full 60 minutes.

“A lot of it has to do with my energy level, to be honest,” Campbell says. “Getting sick like I did was quite a wakeup call for conserving energy. More importantly, conserving emotions. When you expel that type of emotion on being an aggressor and looking to start fights where you have no business, it takes your focus away from stopping the ball. I think in Edmonton was when my real right of passage occurred and I realized how important a goalie is to a game. There are guys who the fighting thing is their entire role. You’re better off to let them take care of it.”

Campbell also had a reputation as a party boy. He liked to live the rock-star lifestyle and enjoy his time away from the rink, especially after games. That, too, had to stop.

“First thing I try to do is get back from the game, get a meal in me and a nap,” Campbell says of his postgame ritual now. “And then my favorite pastime is walking down to the lobby and watching the fellas come in at 3 a.m. after the bar.

“Comparatively, it’s night and day. From rock star, to none.”

****

Following his diagnosis, Campbell took the summer off from work (running his parents electronic manufacturing company in Niagara Falls, Ont.) and lacrosse. He bought a beach house and turned his full-time job into gaining back the weight he had lost and getting healthy. He wanted to be ready for the 2008 NLL season, and his single focus was getting healthy enough to achieve that goal.

When the Calgary Roughnecks brought him in as insurance to back up the oft-injured Steve Dietrich last season, Campbell was ecstatic to be on a Champion’s Cup contender. When Dietrich went down early in the season with a concussion, Campbell became the starter and continued the solid play of his Rush years.

This summer, Calgary dealt Dietrich to Edmonton for Matt King and officially anointed Campbell the No. 1 in net.

All the sacrifice, both personal and professional, has paid off for Campbell, who leads the No. 1-seeded Roughnecks into the NLL playoffs the first weekend of May after he finished the regular season Top 5 in the league with a 10.51 GAA and a .764 save percentage.

The pregame IVs, the electrolyte drinks throughout the game, the carbo-loading early in the week, the limited warmups and practices to conserve energy —  it’s all paid off, by his estimation.

“A lot of guys must wonder when they look at me if it’s worth it,” says Campbell. “I invest a lot of time, and essentially pain, into being here. But when 15,000 people are screaming your name and don’t want anything other than for you to do well it’s a pretty tricky drug to give up.”

Traveling cross-country from his home in Niagara Falls while balancing his illness — as well as a girlfriend and his obligations with the family business — isn’t easy now, admits Campbell, and may get tougher in the future. However, he chooses to live in the moment — one he’s more than earned.

“Every day is a blessing, not to sound cheesy,” he says. “Every day, every season, every game I can get in is a blessing. I wouldn’t say I’m on borrowed time quite yet. I’m still pretty young. I’m learning more and more about my illness and my limitations and how to combat that and increase what I’m capable of. So, I do look at it like I want to be here long-term. I want to be on the Dwight Maetche plan and be around another 10 years. But, I’d be crazy to tell you I’m not realistic. I wish the clock would stop and I could play every season with the way I feel now and not get any worse. But, who knows what the future has in store for me. I’m just going to prepare the best I can and try to keep going.”

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