Faith Healer : Butler Heads Into Today’s Surgery With a Powerful Force on His Side

DULUTH, Ga. — God must smile when he sees the traffic jams outside the Hebron Baptist Church. Late-arriving worshipers, however, did not appear to share His joy Sunday when the policeman directing traffic at the nearest intersection halted cars on all four sides while he rushed over to a familiar red Lexus sports coupe.

“Carlos,” Brett Butler said, lowering the window on the driver’s side.

“Hi, man,” Carlos said, “I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Thanks,” Butler said as Carlos hurried back to his post.

The Hebron Baptist Church in Dacula, Ga.--”Dracula without the R,” Butler said--has about 8,000 members. Before the morning ended, it seemed as if all of them had hugged Butler, his wife Eveline and their four children, ages 8-13. So many asked to pray with them that the family scheduled a service for that evening at home in Duluth, a 35-minute drive north of Atlanta.

Lowery Robinson, a close friend since he pitched batting practice for Butler’s first major league team, the Atlanta Braves, had another request.

“Let me see that mouth,” he said.

Butler opened wide.

“That looks a lot better than it did before,” Robinson said.

Only a few hours after his Dodger teammates have ended a game on the West Coast on Monday night against the New York Mets, Butler will undergo an operation early this morning at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital for cancer that began either in his tonsils or his nasopharyngeal region.

The surgeon, William Grist, said that it will take about 3 1/2 hours to remove about 50 lymph nodes on the right side of Butler’s neck and scar tissue at the back of his mouth perhaps as large as a quarter that is believed to be cancerous. One of the lymph nodes also is presumed to be cancerous. Pathologists should know by next Monday whether the cancer has spread. Not until then will they be able to offer Butler a more reliable prognosis.

When a plum-sized tumor removed during a tonsillectomy 18 days ago was found to be malignant, Butler, 38, was told that his chances of surviving five years were 70%. If the cancer has not returned in five years, he will be considered cured.

Wagering is not encouraged at the Hebron Baptist Church. But if it were, Butler said that he would bet on himself.

“That’s 70% for people in their 50s or older who have been smoking or chewing tobacco for a long time and are 20 pounds overweight,” he said. “I don’t drink much or smoke. I’m not overweight.”

Besides, he said, God had always been on his side.

“God took a 5-foot, 89-pound high school freshman and put him in the big leagues for 16 years,” he said. “In my opinion, I’m a modern-day miracle.”

Butler reached into his Bible and pulled out the bookmark, a pay stub dated Sept. 15, 1979. It had been attached to the first check he received in organized ball, one for $700.

“I keep it to remind me where I came from,” he said.

The pay stub had been marking the Old Testament’s Book of Job, one that Butler turns to often these days.

“I’m at the point where Job is in the wilderness, and he has pretty much lost everything at this point,” Butler said. “But he never cusses God, and he always trusts Him.”

When he spoke to his Sunday School class that morning, Butler recalled the hours when he found it impossible to summon Job’s strength.

“I feel like over the years that I have been a man of God,” he said. “But I had just been through the worst pain of my whole life after the tonsillectomy. I couldn’t sleep for eight days. Every time I swallowed, it was like I was swallowing razor blades. I hurt so bad I didn’t think I was going to die. That’s how bad it was.

“For those days, I failed miserably in my faith. I was really angry with my situation. Then my thoughts turned to Eveline and the kids. I was angry about what He was doing to them. I thought, ‘Is this it?’

“Then God said, ‘Who are you to question me? I love you, and I love your family more than you do. Trust me.’

“If I trust Him when I’m being my weakest, that’s when God is strongest. Cancer is very scary. Satan is trying to take away one of God’s soldiers. But God has put his arms around my family. He’s made Eveline strong. She says it’s like we’re in the valley of darkness without a flashlight. But God has a plan. Nobody knows what it is but God. But if you let Him, he’ll blow your socks off.”

*

Before the Butlers left for church, Eveline had warned a visitor that it would be hectic. “There’s never a dull moment,” she said.

When Brett gave the five-minute warning, Abbi, 13, was putting clothes in the dryer; Stefanie, 12, was beginning to pour her breakfast cereal and Katie, 11, and Blake, 8, were curled on the couch, watching a movie on television.

Eveline emerged from her bedroom, with miniature dachshunds Beanie and Cecil underfoot, to discover that Blake was wearing hiking boots.

“We have a problem,” she said, dispatching him to his room to put on his dress shoes, which he complained were too small, and comb his hair.

“What you’re looking at is normalcy,” Butler said. “Nothing changes just because I have cancer.”

That normalcy was interrupted on a morning two weeks ago when Dr. Bob Gadlage rang the Butler’s doorbell. A longtime friend and neighbor, Gadlage was one of two doctors who had performed Butler’s tonsillectomy.

Gadlage had told Butler that he would call him a few days later with results from the biopsy on the tumor removed at the same time. When Gadlage made a house call, Butler knew that he was not there to ask for tickets to the next Dodger-Brave series.

Butler and his wife heard the bad news, then called the children into the den to tell them.

“Is this like Grandma’s cancer?” one asked. “Is Dad going to die?”

Even while Butler played in Cleveland, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, he and Eveline kept their primary residence in Duluth--near the first house they shared together after he had come up with the Braves.

The 12,000-foot French Mediterranean house where they now live, Butler said, is their “dream home.” In a heavily wooded area next door to defensive end Clyde Simmons of the Arizona Cardinals and across the road from Terry Pendleton of the Florida Marlins, the Butlers have a tennis court and a hot tub with water that flows from the sides into a swimming pool. Inside the house, the first thing one notices is a dome over the foyer adorned with angels.

The inscription in Latin reads, “Serviamus Dominum In Hoc Domo Christus Regnat.” Translated loosely, Butler said, it means, “Me and my household serve the Lord.”

Butler said the house took 4 1/2 years to plan and 15 months to build. Part of the plan was the two-bedroom guest house for Butler’s mother. But she died last August, three months before the family moved in.

Gadlage explained to the children that their grandmother had died of lung cancer, a more serious form than Butler’s and that his chances of survival are better. Butler’s mother was a chain smoker. So was his father, who died of a heart attack at 49.

It is probable, Gadlage said Monday, that pathologists will never determine the source of Butler’s cancer. If it began in his tonsils, it is possible that he contracted it from secondhand smoke or from the two years early in his career that he chewed tobacco.

“The tobacco industry would prefer another explanation,” Gadlage said, and doctors have provided one by saying that it is more likely the cancer resulted from the Epstein-Barr virus that attacked Butler’s immune system in 1989.

In either case, Gadlage said, the treatment and prognosis are the same. Butler made it clear that he prefers the latter diagnosis, but he no longer is agitated by reports linking his cancer to tobacco.

“When that tobacco angle came out, I was upset,” he said. “I quit 15 years ago because I wanted to be a role model. But I see how God let it go that way in the media. Now there’s a campaign in major league baseball, and a lot of ballplayers have contacted me to say that they’ve quit. That’s the spirit of God.”

*

The last thing Butler did before going to bed Saturday night was check the Dodger score. With a $170 electronic device given to him by owner Peter O’Malley, all he has to do is press a button for a progress report on the team’s game. The Dodgers were leading the Philadelphia Phillies in the fifth inning, 3-1.

The first thing Butler did when he awoke Sunday morning was call up the final score, 7-2.

Butler talks often with the Dodgers. Coaches Joey Amalfitano and Reggie Smith called last week to ask him how the defense should play Phillie third baseman Todd Zeile. The fielding card on Zeile, they said, had been misplaced.

On June 4, Butler will begin radiation treatments--five days a week for six weeks. For the next three to four weeks, he has been told, he will have neither the energy nor the desire to exercise.

Then, he said, he would like to return to the Dodgers. As they have done before the season in recent years, the Butlers took a family vote on whether he should go back. Blake, as always, voted no because he wants his dad at home more. The others voted yes.

“My goal is to try to get back before the end of the season, even if it’s strictly for moral support,” Butler said. “I want to get back there and root the guys on.

“I know I’ve got to think of my health first. Cancer has its own schedule. I’ve always thought I might retire after this year anyway. But I don’t want to go out this way.”

Butler has considered remaining in baseball after retirement in every capacity from roving instructor to general manager. He said that he also has thought about entering a seminary to become a minister.

“God has given me the gift of evangelism,” he said. “I love to share about Jesus. Or maybe I’ll be Mr. Mom, let Eveline do what she wants to do. She said when we got married that I could have the first 10 years and that she gets the second 10. I’m in the fifth year of her reign.”

Eveline prayed that she would meet a Christian man. Three months later, she met Brett.

Less than two years after he was drafted by the Braves in the 23rd round in 1979, he was sent to their triple-A team in Richmond. Eveline, who is from Richmond, was employed by the team to help players find apartments.

“On our third date, I knew that she was the one,” Butler said.

They were married in 1982.

Brett is the optimist, Eveline the pessimist.

“Only, she calls it being realistic,” he said.

On the day that Butler learned he had cancer, his thoughts turned to death.

Eveline told him that he was being pessimistic.

“Realistic,” he said.

Then they laughed.

*

After church services, the Butlers were in the parking lot when Eveline ran her hand through Blake’s hair and discovered a wood tick embedded in his scalp.

“Never a dull moment,” she said, flagging down Lowery Robinson and his wife as they drove past in their car and asking for a cigarette lighter.

“Heat that sucker up.” Eveline said.

Placing Blake’s head on the hood of the car, Eveline lit a match from the cigarette lighter, blew out the flame and then placed it as close to the tick as possible without burning her son’s head. That, she knew from experience, would cause the tick to withdraw voluntarily. If the tick were pulled out with tweezers, the head would remain in the scalp and cause an infection.

As she operated, Brett and the other three children hovered.

“Ya’ll need to stand back,” Eveline said. “Give the doctor some room.”

Through surgeries large and small, the Butlers hang together.