Meeting your heroes can be a tricky thing. Letdowns are common, and disappointment lurks. For Scott Gleeson ’11, basketball icon Dick Vitale has exceeded every expectation, so much so that the two men—who are nearly 50 years apart in age—are friends. With the release last month of Vitale’s new book, Until My Last Breath: Fighting Cancer With My Young Heroes, co-written by Gleeson, they are now collaborators.
This is not Vitale’s first book, and like his others, all proceeds from the book go to the V Foundation to fight cancer. It’s a cause near to Vitale’s heart since he has faced the disease himself over the past few years in three forms: melanoma, lymphoma, and vocal cord cancer.
For years Vitale, 84, has been inspired by his late friend Jim Valvano’s early passing from cancer in 1993 and by his spirit. More recently, Gleeson said, Vitale’s inspiration comes from his own healthy grandchildren and from some young cancer survivors he loves like family. Cancer is a subject Gleeson knows about personally, so he was eager to join the fight.
“I lost my dad to cancer in 2012,” said Gleeson, now 35 and living in Chicago. “We loved the tournament (NCAA Tournament). My dad and I loved Dick (Vitale). So, I was drawn to this project.”
Gleeson, a former Vidette sports editor and a Vidette Hall of Famer, studied print journalism at Illinois State. During an internship at USA TODAY, he got the assignment to interview Vitale for the first time. That internship turned into a 12-year run at the newspaper, where most of his time was spent on the college basketball beat.
“I grew up loving and watching Dick and loving his enthusiasm; he was synonymous with college basketball,” Gleeson said. “So, I developed a relationship with him at USA TODAY, and he would reach out to me about writing about these kids he knew who were fighting cancer.”
During Gleeson’s last year at USA TODAY in 2022, his editors wanted him to do a full profile of Vitale. At that time, Vitale had denied similar requests from competitors like The Washington Post and others.
“He trusted me,” Gleeson said. “There was a kindness he showed that was very powerful, and in that moment, I really got to know him.”
“He’s a compassionate, loving man, and what he’s putting out into the world is so special. The book captures who he really is. People ask if he’s really the same in person. He’s even more passionate in person.”
—Scott Gleeson on Dick Vitale
Gleeson recalls when Vitale talked about the kids he knew who were battling cancer that he would passionately rattle off six or seven of their names.
“He was like preaching scripture but without a Bible,” Gleeson said.
Eventually, Vitale floated the idea to Gleeson about doing a book about fighting cancer. The idea evolved, at Gleeson’s suggestion, to include Vitale’s young friends who’d had the bad luck to be diagnosed with childhood cancer.
“He said he wanted to write a book about fighting cancer,” Gleeson said. “He said: ‘You could write it.’”
That’s how Dick Vitale, lovingly “Dickie V” to fans around the world, came to choose Gleeson, a native of Cullom, a small town in Livingston County, population about 500, as his co-writer. It’s an honor Gleeson appreciates.
“It was a tremendous privilege, but there was a lot of weight to it because I wanted to do right for him,” he said. “I knew his heart. I knew Dick, and he was my North Star the entire time.”
The book has 16 chapters, 13 of which are dedicated to Vitale’s “young heroes” referred to in the book’s title. Only two chapters are about Vitale and his cancer battle. The last chapter is devoted to his grandkids who are similar ages to the other kids in the book.
“That last chapter really punches home who Dick is,” Gleeson said. “He’s a family man at his core. I deeply admire him and aspire to be half the man he is.”
The center of Vitale’s world is his wife Lorraine, daughters, Terri and Sherri, and their families. Lorraine, he said, is Vitale’s rock, and they have a special relationship. She contributed an important piece to the book.
“She wrote the epilogue, and it’s my favorite part of the book,” Gleeson said.
The biggest challenge in writing the book came right after Gleeson signed on in 2023. A month later Vitale got vocal cord cancer and couldn’t talk.
“It was a unique ghost-writing experience, not that I’d done any before, but here’s a guy whose voice can grab you and look at you in your heart and soul—and he can’t speak,” Gleeson said. “So, I played old recordings of him to get his voice, which is very nuanced. I was channeling Dick’s voice.”
What Vitale didn’t know was that Gleeson had been pulling slowly away from his successful journalism career to follow another calling. In 2016, he began studying psychology at Northwestern University part-time while keeping journalism pushed to the side. After graduating in 2019 and getting some interning experience, he left USA TODAY in 2022. He called it a slow breakup with the profession he’d loved since high school. Things changed after his father, Tom, his biggest fan, died.
“He was my favorite reader, and something was missing without him,” Gleeson said.
His writing changed too. He began exploring deeper enterprise stories outside of his regular beat. He wrote stories about the LGBTQ community in sports, fantasy football in maximum-security prisons, and he wrote about Michael Phelps’s mental health struggles.
“It got to the point where my purpose in life was to help people,” he said. “As ego-satisfying as being a national writer at USA TODAY was, and I was helping people on a macro level, but I wanted to help people on a micro level.
“I loved journalism, but my purpose in life is to help people.”
For the better part of the past two years, Gleeson has worked as a mental health therapist in the Chicago area, and he continues to write. He’s written a science fiction novel that’s being shopped to publishers right now. And he writes about mental health issues. He said he called on all his skills as a journalist and a therapist to write the book with Vitale.
“I think it’s why Dick might have trusted me because I could hold this trauma, pain, and suffering and put it into words,” Gleeson said. “It was a blend of both worlds.”
Gleeson said he owes a lot to the experience he got working as sports editor at The Vidette. He’s also grateful for his time at Illinois State, something that might not have happened without an assist from his mom, Lynne.
“I have to give a shoutout to my mom,” he said. “When I applied to Illinois State my senior year in high school I originally didn’t get admitted. But she called Judy Peppers in the School of Comm to plead my case and my love of journalism. I got an acceptance letter, thanks to my mom, the next week, and the rest is history.”
Gleeson wants people to read the book so that they get to know Vitale in a way that’s separate from college basketball.
“He’s a compassionate, loving man, and what he’s putting out into the world is so special,” Gleeson said. “The book captures who he really is. People ask if he’s really the same in person. He’s even more passionate in person. He probably has to tone it down when he’s on TV.”
Gleeson said Vitale’s voice is manageable now, but radiation treatments took their toll. He does want to come back and do games again. And he really wants to get back out doing public speaking at galas where he’s raised nearly $70 million for pediatric cancer.
Gleeson said writing the book helped him too.
“The afterword I wrote was a tribute to my dad,” he said. “It’s all my voice, and the rest of the book is Dick Vitale’s voice. I watched the Sweet 16 games with Dick in 2022. It was 10 years after my dad passed after we had watched the tournament together. He died at home two days later.
“I was still holding on to that grief. Writing this book with Dick was cathartic. It let me grieve.”
All proceeds from Until My Last Breath: Fighting Cancer With My Young Heroes benefit the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund at the V Foundation for Cancer Research.
The book is available for purchase now at Dick Vitale’s website or at Amazon.
