Source: Allen Berezovsky / Getty
NBA Insider earlier this year, but now he’s come forward to share some personal news.
In an interview with
Sports Illustrated, Wojnarowski revealed that he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He said it was discovered when he went to get a physical and routine blood work, which revealed that his prostate-specific antigen (or PSA) was abnormally high, so his doctor sent him for an MRI.
Nothing alarming was on the MRI, so he did another PSA test, and it was still high, so they took a biopsy, which revealed in March that he had cancer, but it was in the early stages. He remembers getting the news just minutes before he was scheduled to appear on NBA Countdown.
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“When you hear
cancer, you think about it going through your body like Pac-Man,” Woj says. “Prostate cancer, it generally stays confined to your prostate and is typically slow growing.”
For now, his doctors are just keeping an eye on it with quarterly checkups and some lifestyle changes like eating cleaner, exercising, and better quality sleep. He’s got the option to get the surgery now, but only if it’s really affecting his mental health because it’s “pretty limited in scope,” and he’s got no symptoms.
His cancer diagnosis came months before he left ESPN, but he urges that that wasn’t the reason he left the sports journalism world after several decades.
It did, however, put things into perspective, paired with the death of ESPN NFL insider Chris Mortensen. Woj remembers after Mortensen lost his battle with throat cancer, traveling to Arkansas to his memorial and being dismayed that a lot of his ESPN co-workers didn’t show up to pay their respects.
“It made me remember that the job isn’t everything,” Woj says. “In the end it’s just going to be your family and close friends. And it’s also, like, nobody gives a s—. Nobody remembers [breaking stories] in the end. It’s just vapor.”
See the well wishes Woj has been getting since announcing his diagnosis below.
