BOSTON -- The picture hangs in Marty Walsh’s office in Toronto. It’s of Bobby Orr, clad in his Boston Bruins uniform, No. 4s on his gloves, staring straight at the camera with his stick out in front of him.
On the photo are two signatures. There is an obvious one, the ink black and sure, traveling a slightly sloped path below Orr’s right skate. Behind that one, there is a ghostly scrawl, faded and worn away by time. It’s harder to make out, but it’s there.
The first time the defenseman autographed the photograph, it was the mid-1970s, with Orr nearing the end of what would be an all-time, Hall of Fame career. He was idolized by tiny and not-so-tiny hockey players across the Boston area and across the continent, including Walsh, then a 7-year-old Dorchester, Massachusetts kid, who would grow up to be mayor of Boston, Secretary of Labor, and now, the director of the National Hockey League Players' Association.
Then, though, back in November 1974, Walsh was just a scared kid with cancer.
As Walsh talks now, at Boston Children’s Hospital, the site of his diagnosis of Burkitt’s lymphoma, his chemotherapy, his radiation, the exploratory treatments that were so new and untested back in the 1970s, he keeps his emotions tucked inside. It is only when he mentions the picture, the fact of a hockey hero stopping by a hospital, of giving time and an autograph to a sick boy, that his throat gets thick.
He pauses.
“He came to visit the kids,” Walsh said. “This was in the ‘70s. He was larger than life. He still is.”
Orr’s visits have given way to the NHL stars of today, the players around the League who take the time to visit hospital rooms, to see sick kids, to interact for a few minutes, creating memories that they will carry for a lifetime.
It’s why being here, thinking about those days 50 years ago, when his parents chose exploratory medicine instead of letting their little boy head to Ireland to see family and prepare for death, is so visceral for Walsh.
He knows what this place means.
He’s not the only one.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, both of whose parents died early from cancer and who is on the Boston Children’s Hospital Trust Board, also knows. His grandchild is being treated for a unique condition at Children’s.
“The fact that the V Foundation and Hockey Fights Cancer are making a donation to continue the work at Boston Children’s is just another wonderful statement on behalf of both organizations and the impact we’re trying to have to raise awareness and do cutting-edge research and hopefully bring us closer to the point in time when we can successfully treat all cancers, particularly in children,” Bettman said.
On this day, Walsh is at Boston Children’s in mid-January, to talk about the grant being awarded to Dr. Yana Pikman, who will receive $600,000 from the NHL, NHLPA and the V Foundation for her research on T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a subtype of acute lymphoblastic leukemia that is more difficult to cure, especially in patients where the disease is resistant to existing therapies.
“In my lab, we found that a large percentage of TLL has a deletion in a certain gene that makes it sensitive to a targeted therapy, so we are studying this particular therapy in TLL,” Pikman said. “It’s a drug that’s been tested in some solid tumors but has never been tested in leukemia.”
Walsh knows what any advancement means, knows the impact, so very personally.
“It makes a difference,” Walsh said. “And Hockey Fights Cancer, it’s a perfect tie-in for the sport of hockey, for the players. They’re humble, they’re great. They visit kids and they give of themselves. Having Hockey Fights Cancer part of the PA and part of the NHL is really important.”
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Walsh was sick. He was tired. He had pains.
His parents took him to Boston Children’s Hospital, searching for answers. He was sent home from that emergency room visit with the assumption it might be his appendix. He didn’t get better, his energy waning and his body off.
Blood work followed, and exploratory surgery. He had cancer. There were two paths forward.
“The doctors gave my parents a couple options,” Walsh said. “One is they could maybe send me home and have me go visit my grandparents in Ireland and spend some time with my family or try exploratory medicine.”
His parents opted for the exploratory medicine, including chemotherapy, radiation, and a cocktail of other drugs. It was, in some ways, a shot in the dark, given how low the survival rates were for Burkitt’s lymphoma at the time.
Fifty years later, Walsh can still remember the treatments, can still recall how they made him feel, the sickness he endured in the name of getting better.
“I spent a lot of nights here in this hospital as a kid,” Walsh said. “I was treated at the Dana Farber and Jimmy Fund across the street. So all my world was kind of in this area. It was tough.
“But as a 7-year-old and an 8-year-old, you don’t really know how serious it was, or I didn’t know how serious it was. I knew there was lots of poking with needles and things like that.”
He got better. He was one of the fortunate ones.
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For Pikman, the hope is that more kids can be the fortunate ones.
Pikman, a pediatric oncologist, arrived at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2007 as a resident and stayed, working with kids with leukemia and lymphoma with hematologic malignancies, though she spends the bulk of her time in research.
“I study acute leukemia, trying to find ways in the lab that we can improve treatment for kids with cancer,” she said. “Acute leukemia is the most common pediatric cancer and we’ve come a really long way in being able to treat it. Actually, most of our patients these days can be cured, thanks to the years of research that have gone on.”
She estimated that it’s as high as 85 to 90 percent that can be cured. But it’s not everyone.
She thinks they can do better. She thinks that they can get to 100 percent, with better and more targeted therapies.
“My lab is really focused on understanding the genetics of the disease that’s more difficult to cure and trying to find new ways to actually treat that cancer,” Pikman said.
She came to it through the science, becoming interested in DNA in high school, before moving on to work in various labs in high school and college. She wanted to know why cells divide, why that goes wrong, what can be done.
But she didn’t want to just be in the lab. The patient care called to her too, marrying her “love of science and discovery with the patient care.”
“My driving force is my patients,” Pikman said. “It’s the kids with leukemia, it’s the kids with hematologic malignancies. It’s the kids who we are treating and really trying to think about, what are the ways that we can improve their therapy for kids who will be cured and what are ways we can reduce the intensity of their therapy to really try to reduce some of the side effects. Because if we’re going to cure our patients, we want to make sure that they survive without some of the long-term side effects of the chemotherapy that we did.”
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This is not the first time Walsh has been to a hospital to help give a grant, to talk to doctors involved in cancer research on behalf of the NHLPA and the V Foundation. But last year’s trip to Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto at the 2024 NHL All-Star Game wasn’t nearly so close to home.
This was different. It’s a place near to him, to his heart. A place to which he feels a measure of responsibility.
“Absolutely,” Walsh said. “There’s no question about it.”
Among Walsh’s achievements as mayor of the city of Boston was a bridge, but not across a waterway or a highway. It was, instead, a pedestrian bridge, the Fazzalari Sky Bridge, a 250-foot-long span across the intersection of Longwood Avenue and Blackfan Street in Boston, a bridge that allows patients to travel from the parking garage to the hospital.
Having made that walk many times as a patient, Walsh knew what it meant when the bridge opened in September 2019. He knew it meant not having to walk through a snow or ice, not having to wait at a busy crossing endlessly. It meant being dry and warm when treatment started.
“Those are little things that make a big difference for a lot of families,” he said. “The average person probably doesn’t realize how important that is, but I remember how important that was.”
He walked along the bridge during his visit last month, stopping every few steps as patients and their families shook his hand, said a word or two. From there, he went across the street to the research laboratory, a place where he got to learn about some of the researchers and their work, stepping with them into the Sankaran Lab, tissue culture room 07024 with Vijay Sankaran, Carmen Oleaga-Quintas and Alexis Caulier.
He met Grant Rowe, the recipient of a V Foundation grant two years earlier, who studies why certain forms of leukemia are treatable and certain forms are not.
Walsh’s presence at Boston Children’s, his ability to walk over the bridge he helped create, to shake those hands and share those words is, said Boston Children’s Hospital CEO and president Kevin Churchwell, a triumph.
“It tells our patients that there is hope, that there is a future, that what we do here makes a difference, that will make a difference in their lives, a positive difference in their lives,” Churchwell said. “And he just brings that to bear, as he talks about his experience.”
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Though Walsh’s office, with that photo, is in Toronto, he still lives in Dorchester, where he grew up in a working-class neighborhood, in family of immigrants, both his parents coming from Ireland, speaking Gaelic in his house.
Even though it’s been 50 years since those days, since his days of coming to this hospital, getting his treatments, wondering what the future would hold, it feels current, as he walks the halls of a place he has left behind in some ways -- but not entirely.
It is why Hockey Fights Cancer, why these grants, why this research means so much.
“Being at the NHLPA and knowing what Hockey Fights Cancer was all about before I took this job, it was important,” Walsh said. “But being a cancer survivor and seeing the connection to hockey is amazing.”
Asked what he would say to the doctors, the nurses, the researchers, that made him into a survivor rather than a statistic, Walsh said simply, “Just, thank you.”
“Thank you to the doctors and the scientists that I never met, the nurses that helped me, the support staff, the support staff that helped my family,” Walsh said. “Thank you for everything you did for us. Our story ended positive. Not every family gets that story, that fairytale, if you will, but they still treat every single person the same.”
He is here because of them.
“I’m blessed today,” Walsh said. “I’ve had an amazing life and I wouldn’t have had it if it weren’t for the science and research here at Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber. Quite honestly, I’m here because of that, and it’s amazing.”
