What if he couldn't talk? What if on that first day back, three weeks removed from the worst day of his life, he appeared before the microphone and said ... nothing?

        Lance McAlister stands when he does his talk show, 3-6 afternoon drive, 1360 AM, a station nicknamed, goofily, HOMER. He talks sports, with occasional babe chatter thrown in to jack the testosterone. You should see him standing there, rocking side to side like a football player on a December sideline, waving his arms like an Italian arguing World Cup, speaking into a metal cylinder in a room without windows.

        Little guy Lance McAlister, 5 feet 8, 150, left-handed shortstop on his Knothole teams until the coaches pulled the plug on that. Almost 36 years old, eyewitness to the Freezer Bowl and 4,192, long-ago neighbor of Marty Brennaman, formerly named Lance Gose, until a news director at his first job told him Gose wouldn't cut it with TV viewers.

        Lance got McAlister from — where else? — The Sporting News. He opened it one week and started looking at names. Almost chose Armstrong. Lance ... Armstrong. Instead, he borrowed the Michigan State quarterback's name.

        What if Lance Gose McAlister couldn't talk?

Casey McAlister, 2 1/2, shown with dad Lance, is battling Acute Myelogenous Leukemia at Childrenšs Hospital Medical Center. (Gary Landers photo) | ZOOM |

        Not all jobs require passion. Some are a clock-punching means to an end.

        Not so talking on the radio. Radio needs a daily performance, three revved hours, because it is live and you are interacting. If you aren't up for what you're doing, everyone knows.

        What if ...

        “I asked myself that question 81,000 times,” McAlister says. It is last Tuesday, 2:30, 36 minutes until he returns to the air, to face his listeners and his doubts. “I've had a lot of thoughts run through my head, including doing the show, having no fun and walking in and resigning.”

        The clock on the wall moves resolutely. Two-thirty-five, 2:36....

        “I sat up last night at 3 o'clock and thought, "What if I go on the air, the music starts, I say, All right, here we go, and I start crying?' I've never opened my mouth before to say, "Three weeks ago today, my son was diagnosed with leukemia,”' McAlister says.

        He has never been at a loss for words, but he has none for this. “If I can just get through this first segment,” McAlister says.

        A little after 3 on Tuesday afternoon, three weeks to the day his son was diagnosed, McAlister steps to the microphone wondering what to say.

        “All right here we go 3:06, 1360 HOMER the Sports Animal, I'm Lance McAlister, welcome aboard. And let's get back to it. As you may or may not know, this is my first time back in three weeks, and I will admit up front I have no idea what I'm going to say over the next three hours.”

        At Children's Hospital, Casey McAlister, age 2, cries softly and vomits into a bucket. His mother squeezes the rubber bulb attached to Casey's bed rail, and extra morphine courses from a line into Casey's stomach. The chemotherapy killing his white blood cells irritates his gastro-intestinal tract, from his chest to his belly. The morphine eases his pain. “It'll be OK, Case,” Kelly McAlister says.

        The chemo is taking his blond hair, even as Lance and Kelly prepared him by giving him a Chris Sabo-model buzz cut. He gets sores in his mouth and fevers that require 4a.m. wake-ups and doses of Tylenol. He has to be careful moving around the room, lest one of his tubes catch on a chair rail or a table corner. Treatment is likely to last nine months, almost half his life to this point.

        Casey was named for Reds first baseman Sean Casey. He is bright and smiling most of the time. He watches lots of TV. He has seen The Flintstones recently, so now he's saying “yabba-dabba-do” a lot. He reminds the nurses to wear their gloves; he instructs them on removing and installing his IV lines. He waves hello to strangers in the hall. When he gets wheeled out for tests, he says “adios” from his gurney. After he throws up from the medicine, he announces, “I OK now” and offers a high-five.

        Casey's world has shrunk to the proportions of a hospital bed. He is 2 years old, 26 pounds, 35 inches, blond, with blue eyes big as cereal bowls. A few nights ago, Channel 19 did a feature on him. He saw it that night. “Me on TV, Daddy,” he said. Yabba-dabba-do. Lucky is the man whose biggest concern is the Bengals' starting quarterback.

        That was Lance McAlister, whose life for 35 years was a cavort in the fun house. “I used to see devastating things as being Pete Rose banned from the Hall of Fame or Kenyon Martin breaking his leg,” he says.

        To talk sports for 15 hours a week — to take repeated calls from people wondering why the Reds haven't brought up Brandon Larson — requires a passion beyond even some ardent sports fans. You have to love it.

        You have to, at age 2, be able to tell everyone your favorite Red is Tony Perez. At age 6, you attend the 1972 World Series, then go again three years later. You have to make the 250-mile round trip from Carmel, Ind. — where the family moved for a time — three nights in a row, just to see Pete Rose get the hit that broke Ty Cobb's record.

        It helps that your father, Dick Gose, attended Woodward High and played high school baseball against The Hit King. It also helps that dad is as big a sports nut as you.

        Early in the '85 season, Dick guessed when Rose might break the record, then bought tickets for 14 Reds home games. Three nights straight, he and Lance drove from Carmel to Riverfront Stadium.

        Dick has a trunk of sports memorabilia that weighs “about 400 pounds,” he says. He has a pennant from the 1953 All-Star Game held at Crosley Field. He recently gave a buddy from Cleveland stricken with cancer a pennant featuring the '54 Indians.

        Dick insisted Lance and his sister remain for the entire Freezer Bowl. “We stayed and counted down the last 20 seconds,” he says. “My daughter about froze to death. Lance loved it.”

        At age 13, Lance was doing radio play-by-play for the Carmel High football team. He hasn't shut up since.

        Only, what happens when the carousel stops and a life of cotton candy falls from your hand? When sports plays against life seething with nasty perspective and ugly truths, sports loses. Sports comes in for the big three-game series in September and gets swept — every time.

        McAlister was in the middle of a Monday show at Bengals training camp when Kelly told him to come home. Casey's allergies were bad; his eyes were swelling nearly shut. The bump he had over one eye was becoming too obvious.

        That was the day the funhouse life stopped for McAlister.

        His wife calls him “my sports geek.” Tom Gamble, a morning host on 1360, calls him The Goober. McAlister spent all his waking life watching, talking or thinking sports. Also, some of his non-waking life. “I've gotten up at 3a.m. and written ideas down,” he says.

        When builders in the lot next door chopped his cable line for the second time, causing him to miss a Bengals preseason game, McAlister went on a radio rant. You'd have thought the IRS had repossessed his house. McAlister bought a large piece of neon-orange cardboard, scribbled “Cable line, don't cut,” and stuck it in the ground by the line.

        When the family is on vacation, Lance reads sports pages on the beach. He says the best thing about Casey's hospital room is “it has ESPN.”

        Lance met Kelly while she was a sports intern at a Chicago cable sports channel. It's a wonder he didn't make her pass a Reds trivia test on their wedding day.

        They spent 24 hours at Children's Hospital before they knew what was wrong with Casey. A battalion of doctors came and went — oncologists, hematologists, pediatricians. When a hematologist told them Casey had AML leukemia, “my knees buckled,” McAlister says.

        In the nearly four weeks since, Lance's emotions have been a kite in the wind. Moving from the funhouse is harder when it's also where you work. “My thought is, I can come close to matching how I was before,” he says. “But the show will become different. My hope is it doesn't become worse.”

        If you are a good radio host, you create a bond with your audience. They trust you enough to invite you into their homes five days a week. They love you, they hate you, they adopt you. They let you know when you please them, and when you let them down. They become accustomed to your voice. They get acquainted with what you have to say. They don't like it when you change.

        Radio talking is a performance. That's why they call it a show. The show must go on. This is what McAlister came to realize, and embrace. As Kelly told him: “You have to do this, not just financially, for your family, but for you. Life has to go on.”

        “OK. Let's get back to it....”

        Lance stood trance-straight, hands clasped behind his head, no swaying. At one point, an index finger found its way to the corner of his eye. Then they came through — the callers. They weren't overly sympathetic. They simply offered their support and started ripping Bob Boone. You could see the energy flood back to McAlister. The juice flowed like electricity.

        And it occurred to him: Each well-wish, every prayer, validated the purpose he serves. Sports isn't inconsequential; neither is talking about it. Not when you can create with your voice on the radio an extended family that gives you the energy you need to reunite with a love you feared you'd lost.

        Several Reds players visited Casey. The Indianapolis Colts sent a Peyton Manning jersey. (McAlister's 9-week-old daughter is named Peyton.) Writers and broadcasters called and sent encouragement. Casey's room looks like Toys R Us.

        “I'm taking the strength I get from the show to the hospital,” McAlister says. “It's working out.”

        Here is what the doctor says:

        Casey McAlister has AML, a form of leukemia usually contracted by adults.

        It requires more intense therapy than ALL, which is more common in kids. He will need nine months of treatment. At least half of that time, he will be hospitalized. He will get fevers. He had one Thursday, 102 degrees.

        There is an 80 percent chance his severely weakened immune system will let him down. He will get an infection.

        At some point, all the leukemia cells will be eliminated. If Casey goes five years without a recurrence, he will be pronounced cured. He has a 50 percent chance of that happening. If there is a recurrence, other drugs can be tried. Everyone hopes for the best.

        “Three weeks ago, we were at the point where we thought, "My gosh, we have it all,”' Kelly says. “We bought a house; we have two beautiful kids; my husband loves his job. We've settled down.

        “Then you realize, the house doesn't matter, the cars don't matter. What matters is your kids are healthy.”

        Last Saturday, the McAlisters sprayed disinfectant in their car. Casey slipped a mask over his porcelain-fine face. They went for a drive — through the fast-food drive-through, around Fountain Square, through a car wash (Casey likes car washes) and into a lot filled with dump trucks, another Casey favorite.

        It took four hours. By then, Casey was asleep, in a beautiful, little kid's dream.

        By 5 Tuesday afternoon, Lance Gose McAlister was talking again, full-throat. What had changed? Everything and nothing. “Out to the phones,” Lance said. Let's get back to it.

        Xavier Frank was on Line 1. He wanted to talk about Akili Smith.

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