PBA Xtra But Mark Roth knows as well as anyone
that there is more than one way to look at a lousy break. That is one thing 34 titles on the PBA Tour will teach you. You can let a bad break beat you, or you can dare it to try. In Roth’s case, the stroke he suffered
proved to be a particularly cruel break. Doctors told the Roths that had the blood clot responsible for the stroke been locat- ed any higher or lower by just a fraction of an inch, its effects would have been far less severe. “All kinds of bad news there,” Denise
said. “That didn’t really help at the time.” From the moment doctors tried to tell him he would be defeated by the cruelest break of his life, Roth chose instead to dare it — and the doctors who told him he could not. That may sound like the stuff of some cheap Hollywood plot; but when you are Mark Roth, you know there is nothing cheap about it. You know that your father died at age
42. You know that your sister died at age 53, and your mother at age 62. Now 63, you know that despite suf-
fering genetically inherited ailments like coronary heart disease and diabetes—to say nothing of the stroke that paralyzed the left side of your body—you still have outlived your father by more than two de- cades, and your sister by 10 years. “We have been told by many heart spe- cialists that the reason Mark is still here today is that he was an athlete and he was so active,” Denise explained.
There also may be another, even sim-
pler reason why he is still here: because he is Mark Roth. “The doctor told me I never would walk
again. I told him where to go,” Roth said in a phone interview with Bowlers Journal. “That’s being nice. You could imagine what I really told him. “Then I got a quad cane and I was us-
ing that to walk around,” he added. “I still use it; it helps a lot. And, you know, it’s basically just about trying to do as much physical therapy as you can.” The doctors who told Roth about the things he never would do reminded him of some other things people used to tell him. “When I first went out on tour, they said I would not last three years,” Roth recalled.
MARK ROTH
“I lasted 38. Don’t tell me I can’t do some- thing. I will do it anyway.” Stroke may not have recognized Mark
Roth the day it struck him, but maybe it recognizes him now. He is the guy who de- fies it while others relent to its humiliations. Some of those who might have relent-
ed now find in Roth a reason not to. They see him fight his battle at physical
therapy sessions in hospitals and stroke centers, or at the annual “Strikes Against Strokes” fundraisers in which he partici- pates in upstate New York, where he re- sides in Fulton. They see him get back out on the lanes
working his way up from a six-pound ball to the 15-pound ball he uses now. They see him still daring the bad breaks
to beat him. In many ways, they see the same guy
they saw on TV for so many years. That immortal’s body may make him look a lot more like a man these days, but to fellow stroke victims trying to reclaim their lives, that man still looks a lot like the Mark Roth they know. “It’s fun, and you get to see people
come in who have had strokes but are very inspiring,” Denise says of the Strikes Against Strokes events. “And Mark is in- spiring. We’ve had people contact us from all over the world. Mark has inspired so many people because of what he did in bowling, of course. But then it kind of trick- les down to, OK, now you’ve had a stroke, and you have to get back up and live some kind of life.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////// November 2014 38
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40