"I was scared," admits the daredevil athlete of the months before his July 2000 operation. He was suffering the ravages of PSC (primary sclerosing cholangitis), the same rare degenerative liver disease that killed Chicago Bears football great Walter Payton in 1999. "With each week that passed, I got weaker and weaker," says Klug, who began wondering whether he'd end up as one of the 1,800 Americans who die annually waiting for a liver. "You didn't want to think about the .possibility of death," adds Klug's girlfriend of 12 years, Missy April, 29, a special education teacher at Aspen High School. "But it definitely flashed through both our minds."
The call Klug had anxiously awaited for three months finally came on July 27 of last year. But the transplant itself carried considerable risk: His body could have rejected the organ. As Klug was being wheeled into his six-hour surgery at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver, he asked his mother, "Am I ready for this?" Kathy Klug, 52, a literacy coordinator at Aspen High, assured him that he was: "I looked at him and I said, 'Your church, your family, your discipline and your heart have all prepared you for this. Your whole life has prepared you.' "
Indeed the middle of Kathy and Warren Klug's three children has been fighting for survival since birth. "We weren't sure he was going to make it," Warren, now 56 and general manager of the Aspen Square Hotel, says of Chris, a preemie who spent his first three weeks in the hospital with pneumonia. By the time Chris went home, he was already showing signs of the asthma that would send him back to the hospital on numerous occasions as a child.
Nevertheless, from early on, Chris "was always a great athlete," says his father, who gave him his first snowboard as a Christmas present in 1983. (Sister Hillary, now 19 and a freshman at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, is also a nationally ranked snowboarder.) Soon the 11-year-old Chris was whizzing down Mt. Bachelor, 22 miles from the family's home in Bend, Ore. "It was so exciting, I fell in love with it," he says.
Just four years later he became the North American Overall Junior Champion. Competing in his first World Cup in 1990, he took eighth in the slalom. At the same time, Chris was an All-State quarterback at Mountain View High School in Bend (his brother Jim, now 32, and foster brother Jason Gillam, 28, were also All-State players). Consequently, he faced a tough choice at the end of his senior year—accept a college football scholarship or keep snowboarding. Making a leap of faith, Klug opted to move with his family to Aspen and continue competing.
But during a routine physical before the 1993 World Cup season, doctors read some unusual results in Klug's blood work. After a year and a half of further tests, he was told he had PSC and that someday he would probably need a liver transplant to survive. Recalls Klug: "Here I was, a professional snowboarder in my early 20s, going, 'Yeah, whatever, buddy. I feel like a million bucks.' "
Over the next several years Klug remained largely asymptomatic and racked up three World Cup victories and three national titles. In May of last year he was preparing to take off to Maui for his annual spring surfing vacation when, he recalls, "it felt like somebody just jabbed a dagger in my side and twisted it." The next day he flew to University of Colorado Hospital, where he learned that his liver was failing.
A week after his transplant the athlete, whose Denver-based doctor, Gregory Everson, calls "the most fit patient of all time," was riding a stationary bike. Less than three months later he was racing again. Although the four boarders heading for Salt Lake City won't be selected until Jan. 13, Klug ranks as a heavy favorite to make the team—and medal.
His family's hopes are more modest. "I get choked up just thinking about it," confesses his father of the Olympics. "If he wins a medal, we'll be thrilled. But we'll be thrilled just that he's there."
Pam Lambert
Vickie Bane in Copper Mountain
- Contributors:
- Vickie Bane.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
