High school basketball player doesn't quit, despite cancer

ATHENS -- During an Athens High School basketball game, on the end of the bench you'll find Kevin Till, the most well-known player on the team.

"I drive down the highways and I'll just hear people honking at me," he says, "and I was like, 'I don't know who it is.'"

"Ran into a lady today," his mother, Yvonne Till, says, "and she's like, 'I didn't realize you were Kevin's mom. I love him' and I'm like, 'really, and who are you.'"

Kevin is well known in Athens because he has cancer.

But he's well liked because of the way he handles it.

"You walk around, someone with that situation you feel like they would feel sorry for themselves, they want other people to feel sorry for them, but he doesn't do that," says teammate Deliance Moore. "So sometimes I forget he has that condition. I forget it sometimes. He acts like a regular kid."

"I go 100 mph every weekend," Kevin says. "My mom gets on me all the time about going and not doing stuff, I just, I like to go and I don't like to be sitting at home or doing nothing like that. I like to be active."

"His whole philosophy is he doesn't have time for this," his mother says. "He said 'I don't have time for this. I have things to do, I'm a busy man.' That's what he says."

Kevin had surgery in December to remove a cancerous tumor from his brainstem. Because of its location, doctors removed as much they could and they're hoping chemotherapy will get the rest.

"Everybody's like 'why don't you cut it out,'" says his father, Dean Till, "wish it was that easy, but I mean, brainstem is pretty much your whole being as human being on this planet."

"They cut me open from one side all the way over here, like a horseshoe, all the way over the back of my head, they cut me open," Kevin says. "Got what they needed to get."

Because of the surgery, Kevin didn't join the basketball team until January. He doesn't play much, although head coach Tracy Carter did start him in Athens' final game of the regular season.

But team sports are about so much more than playing time and statistics, something that Kevin's place on the team reinforces.

"You can't go through life by yourself," says Carter. "You have someone who cares for you and that's what we try to instill is the team atmosphere and I think that's what Kevin is getting out of it, he has fellow young men who are there for him."

"There's other parts to being on a team," Dean Till says. "Even if it's like Kevin, just suiting up, that meant the world to him. And the coaches there will never truly understand what that meant to us, but he was a part of the team."

Kevin's most recent tumor was diagnosed as a grade four, which is the worst kind.

He and his family don't know what the future holds, but they know that the future is not today and today is all that matters.

"That's the way we should all live our lives is we should all live each day as it comes because we're not guaranteed tomorrow, no one is," Yvonne Till says.

"You can't live life just dwelling on that fact," his father says, "if you do it will consume you it will destroy you."

"There's been times throughout this year where something's been going wrong with me and I'll think about Till and he'll just keep me going," says teammate Brady Lick. "I've never told him that, but I'm sure he does for a lot of people."

"Kevin's not special because he has cancer or a brain tumor, or whatever," his mother says. "It's because he's Kevin and everybody likes him."