Here’s a Really Uplifting Story About Craig Sager and Charles Barkley

Charles Barkley flew from Phoenix to Houston against his doctor’s orders to be with Craig Sager this week.

Craig Sager delivers a speech at the 2016 ESPY Awards.
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Image via Getty Images/Kevin Winter

Craig Sager delivers a speech at the 2016 ESPY Awards.

TNT basketball analyst—ahem, legendary TNT basketball analyst—Craig Sager sounds like he’s going through absolute hell right now. On Wednesday, the 65-year-old received his third bone marrow transplant in the last three years, which is pretty much unheard of in the medical world, and he continues to fight acute myeloid leukemia with everything he's got. He spoke with the Associated Press late Wednesday and revealed that he doesn’t have plans to stop fighting anytime soon, having already endured nearly 100 medical procedures.

"I like to gamble," he said. "I like to bet on horses, I like to bet on dogs, I like to bet on a lot of things. I’ve bet on a lot of things with a lot higher odds than this."

But one thing Sager couldn’t fight right before he underwent his most recent bone marrow transplant was his doctors who told him that his wife Stacy wouldn’t be able to stay with him because of a bad cold she had. The doctors were worried that she might pass the cold along to her husband, so they told her that she needed to go home, which would have meant that Sager would have been alone for a few days in the hospital during what ended up being a particularly intense time.

That’s when Charles Barkley, who has worked closely with Sager at TNT over the years, sprung into action. Barkley has spent the last month at home in Phoenix recovering from hip replacement surgery, and technically, he’s not supposed to be traveling. But when he heard that doctors had asked Stacy to leave Sager’s side, Barkley decided to fly to Houston to spend time with him at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. According to Barkley, his own doctor was "livid" when he heard that he had hopped on a flight from Phoenix to Houston, but Barkley told his doctor that he had to be there for Sager.

"Craig Sager is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met," Barkley told the AP. "We go to see Sager to cheer him up and by the time you leave you’re like, 'Is anything wrong with him?' He has the most positive attitude…When you go to try and cheer him up, his attitude is so upbeat he cheers you up."

Judging by the AP story, Sager still has a lot of fighting to do if he wants to beat the disease that has ravaged his body. But it sounds like he’s got plenty of fight left in him.

"Man, life is too beautiful, too wonderful," he said when talking about those who quit while fighting a disease like leukemia. "There’s just too many things."

You can read the entire AP piece here.

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