At the age of eighteen, he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma and for those of you who aren’t doctors, this means bone cancer. As a result his right leg had to be amputated to 15 inches above the knee in 1977. When he was in the hospital he saw cancer patients, many of them children and decided to run across Canada to raise $1 million for cancer research.
The idea for the Marathon of Hope came from Terry Fox alone. He trained secretly by running about four thousand kilometers. When he determined he was ready he announced that he would run across the country. He hadn’t even told his family. His original goal was to raise a dollar from every Canadian.
I have only ever seen the CBC version and it showed the human side of Terry including him being angry over a few different things. Things that I would also have been quite angry over, like being accused of not running all the way across Quebec. The man did something that was bigger than life, he deserves to be seen in the same way .
If I recall – He had one companion who drove an old beat up van – they would stop in some small town and no one knew about him – that was at the beginning. And the story grew – Just try an imagine the personal drive and commitment he had inside of him. The pain he endured, he had to have had more personal drive & commitment in one day of running than many people will have in a lifetime.
I think Terry Fox was about as good a human as it is “humanly” possible to be. There are two ways to view someone as a hero. One is the individual view of a hero, and the second is the societies vision of what constitutes a hero, and by individual merritt, both are correct in my view. As individuals, one might regard someone a bonafide hero if he saved your life, or someone in your family.
There are also people like Terry Fox, who created something bigger than himself, while not trying to create an annual event, all he was doing was drawing attention to a problem. Terry Fox also displayed the attributes of a genuine person. As Terry Fox created the Marathon of hope and he ran until his cancer came back and drove him out of that event and killed him.
Thereafter, Steve Fonyo is viewed as someone who took up Foxes’ run, but perception views him as an opportunist who’s actions did not display those of a role model. Steve Fonyo didn’t have the strong mental approach to life that Terry Fox had, he also tried to mimic what Terry Fox did, but unfortunately his poor character got in the way, he was not the first, and didn’t match up to the ‘first’.
Being the fact Steve Fonyo is a fellow Hungarian has nothing to do with the reasoning. Steve Fonyo on the other hand was both stupid and irresponsible. True he ran across the country, and he was given numerous chances to get around his drinking and his drug problems. He was even awarded the Order of Canada, but he persisted in drinking and driving and he ended up in jail.
Although, Steve Fonyo did finish the cross country run, he never caught the imagination of the people like Terry Fox. I really don’t think Terry Fox intended to be a hero. Thereby, heroism is coined in the reflection of events and also nominees usually get that title when their actions weren’t for self gratification. Steve Fonyo looked very much like someone in need of self gratification and promotion.
I can admire the ‘image’ that many sports and celebrity heroes put forward, however, as we have now realized in the Tiger Wood’s situation, the image is only an image, and sometimes the real person is someone else and when they fall, they fall hard. Terry Fox whom was a regular guy, not a celebrity, he is/was a ‘real’ hero and the kind we will never forget.