TAMPA — At some point prior to kickoff, the defensive end morphs into Darth Vader.
Tucker Witte’s application of eye black spans well below his orbital sockets. The Jesuit High senior slathers it on his cheeks, near his nose, even to the fringe of his mouth. A game face steeped in goth.
“I love the eye black, love the war paint,” Witte said after a recent practice. “I think I picked up on it with a senior that just recently graduated (Peter Pesansky). ... He loved the eye paint, and I was like, ‘I need to have my own little thing, too, so let’s do this.’”
All in good Friday night fun, until one part of the blackness wouldn’t wipe off. The shiner near his right eye lingered, a swollen smudge on an otherwise glowing, gregarious 16-year-old countenance. Neither a cold compress nor time subdued it. The nuisance tarried.
Then it metastasized. The same seditious cells that had created that 5½-inch tumor between Witte’s brain and eye had spread to his spleen and even his ribs. Without warning, cancer had taken its own blackness and slathered it on Witte’s soul and psyche.
“Nobody thinks they’re going to get cancer, right?” he said. “You hear about your relatives getting it, you hear about your friends getting it. ... I maybe had one other big injury before this, and you never think it’s you. And then it’s you, and you’re just sitting in that moment like, ‘Well how is this going to turn out for me?’”
Here’s how it turned out: In the immediate wake of the most harrowing year of his life, Witte — a Tigers team captain — started Friday’s kickoff classic against Sumner and registered 1½ sacks in a 36-14 romp. The shiner, and shroud of uncertainty, are gone. So is the cancer and chemotherapy.
The only thing swelling these days is that unbridled zeal for football, Fridays and his fellow Tigers.
“He loves this game so much,” said Witte’s mother, India. “So, just watching him play and knowing how hard he fought, it’s kind of the culmination of the forging by fire — the iron sharpening iron last year.”
Compromised but not sidelined
By all accounts, Tucker David Witte is the quintessential Jesuit kid: servant leader, sublime disposition, honor student. He can be boisterous, funny, even a bit outlandish. In a mild nod to superstition, he has worn the same pair of game-day underwear since eighth grade.
“He’s loud,” Tigers senior receiver Trent Teeling said. “He speaks his mind. And every game day, he wears, like, a full face of eye black.”
Tigers quarterback Will Griffin calls him a “very motivational person.”
“He doesn’t let people slide on a lot of things, especially as we get deeper into the season,” said Griffin, who has committed to the University of Florida. “He knows that the team’s got to come together. ... He enforces that on the defense, and we try to enforce that on the offense.”
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Explore all your optionsThough hardly a blue-chip prospect, Witte appeared on a solid trajectory to a small-college scholarship when the shiner surfaced during spring practice in 2023.
“I let that sit for almost a month, because that happened right at the first week of spring,” he said. “And ultimately after that spring game, it didn’t go down for a week, so we were like, ‘All right, this is a little bit more serious.’”
The diagnosis at St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital: Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH). The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute describes it as a rare disorder that occurs when a child has an unusual buildup of Langerhans cells, which reside in the skin and help fight infection and destroy foreign substances in the body.
In LCH, extra Langerhans cells spread through the blood and build up in certain parts of the body, where they can damage tissue or form tumors.
“The easiest way to describe it to people who don’t know it is, it’s leukemia-like,” Witte said. “So it attaches on to those white blood cells.”
All of which made the shiner a blessing in disfigurement. Had it not lingered and prompted a visit to the doctor, who knows how ruthlessly the cells would’ve metastasized.
“It was all over his body,” India Witte said.
“He had it on his ribs. But it didn’t penetrate his brain; it didn’t get into his eyeball. What happened was, the tumor kind of jumped from the back and responded to the trauma and it started attacking the orbital socket, which caused a reaction. And it grew on the outside of his skull.”
The initial prognosis was bittersweet: The disease is rarely life-threatening, and Witte’s family was assured the chances of a full recovery were excellent. But a rigorous chemotherapy regimen would be required, and football in 2023 — that pivotal junior season when players typically pounce on the collective radar of college programs — appeared out of the question.
“And that was devastating to him,” India said.
More like a deal-breaker. Witte, then 16, refused to comply with fate. Chemo would have to adjust to his timetable.
Come weight loss or weakness, nausea or nervous doctors, he would play the 2023 season.
“Honestly, it’s the brotherhood here at Jesuit that really kept me going,” Witte said. “And my love for the game, too. I knew that I just loved this sport too much. I wasn’t going to give up the most valuable year — that junior year of football — just because I had to do battle with cancer.”
The first hurdle to negotiate was chemotherapy. In lieu of regular visits to an infusion center, Witte was prescribed a treatment that he could inject himself. The regimen included injections in a fatty part of the body (hips, thighs, buttocks) for five consecutive days. In total, Witte would require 12 cycles of the regimen (60 total injections), with cycles spaced out every three or four weeks.
“And then the sixth day is the sick day, like, the really sick day,” India said. “And then the seventh day he’d climb back out.”
The injections began in early June 2023. Witte still participated in summer workouts but struggled during his injections. In some cycles, he’d lose up to 15 pounds, deprived of appetite and energy. Yet he ran and lifted with teammates when possible, even attending a summer football camp at Webber International University in eastern Polk County.
“At Webber camp, we really had to keep an eye on him, how he was doing,” Jesuit coach Matt Thompson said. “It was pretty amazing that he got through it.”
No more amazing than the season itself.
Witte ultimatey missed 75 days of school his junior year but spaced out his cycles so he could maximize football season.
“There would be some times where we’d take a month off of chemo,” he said. “So, that was really risky and that came with a lot of weekly blood work, weekly scans, make sure I was fit to play.”
Three game weeks during the season (Leto, Treasure Coast, Tampa Catholic), Witte did the chemo cycle. After some games, when most teammates were hitting local eateries to celebrate, he’d drive straight to his Davis Islands home and jab himself to commence the arduous weeklong ritual of drowsiness, vomiting and a dreadfully dry mouth.
As each game day neared, he’d undergo bloodwork to see if his platelets were high enough to allow him to play that Friday.
“In a lot of the games, we wouldn’t know until that Thursday when he had his bloodwork done and the doctors gave the yea or nay on if he could go that week,” Thompson said. “It was just something he had to get through, and the kids all knew it, too, and they all knew what to expect of him. But when he did make it, it was just amazing that he could go.”
Witte played in nine of Jesuit’s 13 games, finishing with 22 tackles, four quarterback hurries and two fumble recoveries. With the assistance of Jesuit administrators and academic counselors, who enabled him to remain up to speed on classwork during his sick days, he made the school’s honor roll.
“I don’t think a lot of people really thought too much about what Tucker was going through, but ... that man was fighting,” Griffin said.
“Like, he was throwing up constantly, losing weight, and still out here fighting, doing what he loves, being with the guys. He’s an amazing person, amazing guy, loves the game of football, so you’ve got to give it to him.”
Chiming in a new season
Witte’s final injection was administered this past Easter Sunday. In mid-May, he rang the shiny, ceremonial gold bell at St. Joseph’s, signaling his conquest of cancer.
“I tell you, walking in, I was tearing up a little bit,” Witte said of the bell ceremony. “But as I came out of my final appointment with my doctor and I saw my friends, family, all the nurses that had helped me through, I just couldn’t help but smile. And I think it was a contagious smile throughout the room as well.”
Beat cancer, Lakeland’s next!#gotigers @JesuitTampaFL @JesuitTigers_FB @Andy_Villamarzo @PrepRedzoneFL @larryblustein @Dwight_XOS @coachjallday6 @Official_CoachA pic.twitter.com/7oZzn4WwF5
— Tucker Witte (@WitteTucker) May 17, 2024
His Aug. 6 checkup was “100% clear,” he said, paving the way for a senior year rife with possibilities and devoid of syringes. Thompson said Witte has set a bar of toughness for his teammates, who now can’t dare blow off a practice due to a cold or calf strain.
“For us, there’s no excuse, because he had an excuse and he didn’t let it affect him in any way,” Teeling said. “So for us to come out here and not battling what he was battling, we have no excuses. We have to put in the work.”
Now, in the spirit of garish grease paint, Witte wants to black out the old narrative. With cancer in his rearview, he wants to focus on victories instead of victimhood. He endeavors to elicit solidarity instead of sympathy. In Friday’s regular-season opener at Fort Myers Bishop Verot, he embarks on a fresh final chapter of his prep career.
His unswollen eyes see only opportunity.
“I can’t wait to see him play clean and healthy,” India said, her voice cracking. “He’s worked so hard this summer to build his body back, but also his craft. Like, to get even better than he was before, and he’s been very intentional.”
Contact Joey Knight at jknight@tampabay.com. Follow @TBTimes_Bulls
