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Saginaw Spirit Support Midland Teen’s Cancer Fight By Mike Thompson
Midland’s Eric Tien is a 16-year-old junior hockey player with the Tri-City Ice Hawks who was diagnosed at Thanksgiving with cancer. When the Saginaw Spirit invited Eric to come to TheDow Event Center, he knew he would have a chance to meet the team. He didn’t realize, however, that he would be invited to give a speech. “I said to myself, ‘whoa,’ and then decided to talk about myself and what I’m going through,” Eric says. “I told them that at Thanksgiving I was diagnosed, but that it’s still my dream one day to play OHL hockey and then pro hockey, the same as them. I told them that it’s been the hardest thing not to be able to lace up skates with my team, my family (the Ice Hawks). I said that for them to invite me into their locker room was fantastic, that they had helped to make hard times seem quite easy.” Todd Watson, Saginaw Spirit coach and general manager, sent a ‘thank you’ back to Eric. “We are the ones who are being honored by Eric,” Watson said. “For a kid to be battling like he is, Eric has the kind of attitude that it takes to be a champion.” Eric’s locker room visit with Spirit players wasn’t a one-shot deal. This stretch of days (Jan. 13-15) took place in an alternate week when Eric wasn’t lodged at University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor for five-day chemotherapy regimens. The Spirit gave Eric an escort to a Red Wings game at Joe Louis Arena, where the stars he met included his favorite player, Todd Bertuzzi. The next night, Eric donned a Spirit uniform and joined the team bench as honorary captain. The Red Wings and the Spirit both won their games. Eric’s rare form of cancer is rhabdomyosarcoma (raab-doe-my-sar-koma), found in the skeletal and muscular structures of roughly 300 children and adolescents per year in North America. His parents are Erwin and Mary Tien of Sarnia, Ontario, home of the Ontario Hockey League’s Sarnia Sting. He was a toddler when the family moved from Sarnia to Midland because of a change in his father’s job duties with Dow Chemical. His father taught him how to skate even before he entered kindergarten, and coached his childhood teams. “I used to play defense until four years ago, when a coach saw how fast I was and put me up at center,” says Eric, a compact but powerful 5-foot-10. “That was a good move, because even on defense I would chase the puck in and rush up and score anyway, so I was pretty much made to play center.” Eric describes his game: “I’m physical because I like to hit a lot, and I have good vision on the ice. I’m a playmaker and somebody who will make the sacrifice no matter what it takes.” Eric’s appearance at the Spirit’s Jan. 15 contest drew a sellout crowd of 5,527 at Wendler Arena, reflecting community support. “It was really great to be on the Saginaw Spirit team bench and to see how pumped up they get when they score,” Eric Tien says. “I need to get used to that feeling for when I get healthy again. It’s just so fantastic.”
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