I owe Jim Valvano an apology. When I was young, and while Jim Valvano was still the head basketball coach of North Carolina State, I thought he was a weasel. I believed all the hype about NCAA allegations and the cloud hanging over the NCSU program, and I pointed the finger at Valvano. He was to blame for everything that was wrong in college basketball, and I thought our world would be better without his influence on our youth.

I was barely 10 then, much too young to understand never to judge a book by its cover or to not believe everything you hear. But my youth was no excuse. I still owe Jim an apology.

Jim Valvano broke into college basketball as Rutgers’ coach in the late 1960s. After stops at Johns Hopkins, Bucknell and Iona he landed the premier job at North Carolina State.

There, Valvano first shocked the world. In 1983, his upstart Wolfpack team defeated a much-heralded Houston squad for the national title in one of the most memorable college basketball games in history.

In 1989, amid allegations of impropriety and rumored scandals, Valvano left N.C. State to become a commentator/analyst for ESPN. Three years later he won the ACE Cable Television award.

It was around the same time he developed cancer.

If Jim Valvano never coached a day of basketball, if he had never won the national championship, if he had never become an ESPN commentator, Jim would still have lived a life deserving of the accolades he receives today. His biography would still be one of courage, struggle, enthusiasm and his dream to help people in the fight against cancer.

In 1993, Jim Valvano was awarded the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage for his own personal fight against the disease. It was at that ceremony, and on national television, that Valvano announced that with ESPN’s assistance he would start the Jimmy V. Foundation for Cancer Research. “Its motto will be ‘Don’t give up, don’t ever give up,'” Valvano announced. “We need your help. I need your help. We need money for research. It may not save my life. It may save my children’s lives. It may save someone you love . . . try if you can to support, whether it’s AIDS or the cancer foundation, so that someone else might survive, might prosper and might actually be cured of this dreaded disease.

“I’m going to work as hard as I can for cancer research,” Jim proclaimed to a captive audience. “And hopefully, maybe, we’ll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I’d like to think I’m going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year.”

Jim lost his battle to cancer less than two months later.

This year marks basketball’s fifth year with just the memory of Jim Valvano, but the Jimmy V. Foundation lives on. The V. Foundation funds the Jim Valvano Day Hospital located at the Duke Children’s Hospital, which will assist 9,000 children per year, starting by 2000. The foundation allocates millions of dollars for cancer research and aid, with his name and the people he reached behind every grant and donation.

Jim Valvano has made a name for himself, but not as the cocky, brash coach of the Wolfpack. Not as an announcer at all. And certainly not as I once saw him. Valvano’s history and achievements in his professional career are far exceeded by his efforts in the fight against cancer.

“Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”

And indeed they do.

Aaron Senneff is a senior in computer engineering from Bettendorf.