Penn State's Shrive Lifts Weights, Spirits

The easy way to start this story is to say Eric Shrive already has made a difference at Penn State.  Of course, you'll respond that he hasn't played a down for the Nittany Lions. You might even point out that, in the grand scheme of a college football player's career, he hasn't even exhausted a single snap of his eligibility yet.

Both fair points.

But as he stood inside Holuba Hall on Friday afternoon, drenched in sweat, his face awash with fatigue, his breath still trying to catch up to him after he finally overcame the grueling course laid before him, Shrive had already set an example few Penn State players ever had.

No, he didn't participate on the winning team in Friday's eighth annual Lift For Life competition, which pits teams of Penn State football players against each other in a physically trying labyrinth of leg presses and weight lifts and flips of an infamously heavy giant tire to raise money in the fight against kidney cancer.

He just won an even more important battle.

As of the event's kickoff, Shrive had raised an event-record $7,310 for the Kidney Cancer Association, more than $1,000 more than the second-highest total and nearly $5,000 more than third.

"My goal from the beginning," Shrive said, "was to win the donations."

Now, "win" is an interesting word there. Because there is no prize, no recognition that dwarfs anything these players will get if they succeed in the fall. There's no lasting glory, other than the feeling that he helped - truly helped - people battling a rare disease that afflicted about 60,000 people in the United States last year.

In so many ways though, this was a win for Shrive.

Once he set a lofty fund-raising goal for himself, his teammates did, too. One day, he'd be in the lead. Another, he'd lose it to fellow lineman Mike Farrell. The next, he'd have it back. It went that way for a while.

It's worth nothing that, in the end, eight individual players who competed Friday raised more than $1,000. Three of them - Shrive, former West Scranton star and hopeful starting quarterback Matt McGloin and Valley View walk-on J.R. Refice - are from Lackawanna County.

"To be honest, and I've been the president here three of my four years now, I've never seen anybody as relentless as Shrive," Penn State receiver and Lift For Life event president Brett Brackett said. "From making the calls, to going downtown to try to get donations. Nobody has ever single-handedly raised as much money for this event as Shrive did."

Now, it's worth noting Shrive said he has never been touched personally by cancer. Which makes him a very fortunate young man.

But he knew about people like the Willies. The Oregon family had two members diagnosed with kidney cancer and discovered that Lift For Life is one of the only events in the nation dedicated to raising money for the disease.

Now, they travel every year to State College, to steamy Holuba Hall in the middle of summer, to cheer on the players as they lift those tires and drag the sleds.

"You get e-mails from someone diagnosed with kidney cancer, and they find out there's not much help. They feel alone," Brackett said. "Then they find out Penn State football is involved, and they have 101 people who have their backs."

Nobody had their backs like Shrive this year.

Shrive tried to downplay what he accomplished. He has a large family, he smiled. Send out one e-mail to each of them, and they'll get their friends involved. And then it snowballs into a full on assault of support.

Brackett points out, though, that it's never that easy.

Gathering $7,000 worth of donations isn't as easy as sending out a few e-mails, posting a link to a donations page on Facebook every once in a while or soliciting cash from family members.

It's pounding the pavement. It's knocking on the doors at businesses to ask for anything they may be able to part with. It's pitching a cause that affects so few and hoping the urgency resonates.

It's also a lot of rejection - phone calls to people who say the economy just isn't strong enough to part with any cash, promises from those who say they will help and are never heard from again.

"I just wanted to give back," he said. "It means a lot to me to use my position as a Penn State football player as a way to give back. It means so much."

The work was worth it, though. It probably won't net him an ounce of playing time - he'll get what he can in that department once summer practice starts Aug. 9. It won't make his transition from tackle to guard any easier. It probably won't make him any more famous than anybody else on the Penn State roster that will storm through the Beaver Stadium tunnel Sept. 4.

At least on the last of those, though, it should.