Sager embraced in return to beloved Wrigley

CHICAGO — As tall as normal, but maybe a little thinner, Craig Sager strode to the mound to throw the ceremonial first pitch at Wrigley Field.

He was dressed to the nines, as usual.

Sager arrived in a white-on-white suit on top of his blue Nikes, and beneath the jacket, he wore a blue shirt and red, white and blue tie. He exchanged the jacket for a Cubs jersey bearing No. 14, but there was no mistaking that this was the iconic sideline reporter, a fixture who may be the most beloved man in the NBA as he continues a determined, highly visible battle with leukemia.

The crowd gave Sager a hearty ovation, no doubt like he dreamed they would one day when he was a Cub-struck kid growing up in nearby Batavia, in the magical decade of the 1960s. He would never have pictured it under these circumstances. Who would? Sager was asked to sing Take Me Out to the Ball Game on “Conquer Cancer Night.”

“I realize it’s not about me,” Sager said shortly after he arrived at Wrigley, before the gates opened. “It’s about what I represent — somebody fighting cancer, somebody fighting through it. Everybody can relate to that, through their family, their friends. They know the hardships. They don’t want to give up. They want to fight through it. We’ve made so much progress in fighting cancer the last 20 years. We really have. … My goal is to fight through it, and let’s find a medical breakthrough and people won’t have to do what I’ve had to do.”

Sager had made an uncountable number of visits to Wrigley Field in his 64 years, but this was the granddaddy of them all. He was leading a party of 31 that included family members and old friends, some his brothers from the Delta Tau Delta house at Northwestern.

When they bumped into each other at lunch on Wednesday, Cubs manager Joe Maddon told him to be sure to come to the ballpark early. Sager was greeted by old Cubs Billy Williams (a childhood idol, and Sager showed him a picture he’d had taken with him as a boy) and Bill Madlock and spent time with coaches and team officials from the Cubs and Dodgers.

“I’ve been here a lot of times, but I’ve never been treated like this,” said Sager, who was surrounded by his wife, Stacy, and five children.

It’s doubtful that any cancer patient has ever kept the schedule that Sager has in recent days, either.

He handled his sideline reporting duties for TBS on Monday night’s NBA Western Conference Game 7 — won by Golden State over Oklahoma State, in Oakland, Calif. — and then took a red-eye flight to Atlanta so he could receive a transfusion of platelets on Tuesday. Once that business was done, he flew halfway back across the country to Chicago for the event at Wrigley Field.

So where was Sager before the game? He was out walking alongside Lake Michigan with his family, throwing around a baseball and considering himself one of the luckiest men in the world.

“Just to be alive,” Sager said. “To live every day. It’s a blessing to be alive. I’ve never been one to want to miss anything, even as a kid. If something’s going on, I want to be there. … It’s …

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