ST. LOUIS, Missouri: When it’s time to start the engines on Saturday night’s Love Moto, Stop Cancer Supercross race benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at The Dome at America’s Center, three very special voices will call for the riders to start their engines.
Two of those voices will belong to recent patients of St. Jude, Knox (7) and Abraham (11). The other will have just finished singing the National Anthem, and he will be noticeably older. Darren Warren is a former patient at St. Jude, having underwent treatment from 1999 through 2001. That experience is one he will never forget and one that shaped the remainder of his life.
Warren is a cancer survivor and rising country star, who’s time at St. Jude left an indelible mark on his soul and career. One of his songs, “Cowboy Up, Party Down,” reached the top 25 on country charts and the Top 50 Billboard. He’s recently released another soon-to-be hit called “She Don’t.”
The Journey Begins
Living in Paducah, Kentucky, his brother noticed a lump under Warren’s jawline. Warren joked that he was too young to develop a double chin, but when the growth was brought to the attention of their parents, they immediately took him to the doctor’s office.
The most likely diagnosis was a thyroglossal cyst or inflamed lymph node. Had that been the case, the story would have ended there.
After the growth was biopsied, Warren and his parents returned to the doctor’s office. There was no reason to expect a specific diagnosis, but his father lost a friend to cancer when he was about Warren’s age, so the car may have held another rider.
“They called me about a week or two later, called me back in and man, this is the stuff that I’ll never forget,” Warren told NBC Sports. “Walking in, [the doctor] asked me to have a seat in front of his desk and he told me, he said, you got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and you got less than a 40 percent chance to live. And I remember, man, all the thoughts of just like, I can’t believe this dude. I’m 16 years old. I feel great. This can’t be true.”
His doctor recommended St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as the next step. Warren’s life would never be the same.
“I remember saying this in my heart: ‘God, why are you putting me in this,’ ” Warren said. “ ‘Hell man, why am I here? Why are you putting me through this?’ But little did I know that that hell on earth would become a heaven on earth for me and would be something that would mold and change the direction of my life for the rest of my life.
“And I definitely don’t ever want to go through the experience of cancer again. But I would not take nothing for that experience. It changed my life in a lot of ways.”
Sitting With Angels
Warren wrote his first song at the age of eleven. His parents were Pentecostal ministers, and so it will come as no surprise that his debut effort was a gospel lyric.
It started that way, anyhow.
Excited over his creation, Warren ran down the dirt road that led to his house and played the song for his mother. Darren tells that after hearing it, “she looked at me, put her head down, and looked up and said, honey, we kind of went from Jesus to the jukebox, didn’t we?”
Today, Warren’s music includes country standards like the rural party anthem “Kentucky Friday Night,” but at its most vulnerable, the songs are slices of life. One recent song tells the story of an elderly gentleman who survived both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
But an older song is perhaps one of the most personal stories he’s ever told.
“All the children are sick down there, but some are sicker than others, obviously,” Warren said.
While undergoing treatment, he often saw a little girl sitting alone with her family in a corner of the room. Her cancer had reached a critical stage and isolation was required.
“This little girl would come in the waiting room, but they would set her kind of off to herself,” Warren said, pausing occasionally to allow the crack in his voice to repair. “She had a little mask on, and I never got to meet her. Normally I would go sit down, but out of respect, that was something you don’t do at St. Jude when somebody’s counts are down, you don’t go get close to them and risk them catching something.
“So I’d just always wave across the room and she’d wave real big back. She’d come in about the same time I would each week to get our therapies.
“And I noticed that she didn’t show up for two or three weeks.”
One day soon after, when Warren went to a bank of phones to call his father and give him an update, he learned why.
“I walked up to those phones one day and called Dad back home because Mom stayed with me quite a bit while Dad worked,” Warren said. “I picked up the phone, and when I picked up the phone, I noticed a lady was buried inside kind of the phone booth type thing, you know how it come out with sides on it, and her whole body was just shaking and she was crying, and she finally got where she could talk a little bit. She said, ‘I’m just calling to let you know our baby just got her wings.’
“And she turned and looked at me. It was that little girl’s mom and I never got to know her, didn’t know her name, but that’s where I wrote that song, actually, at 17 years old.”
Warren sat down and wrote “Go Get My Angel” from that experience.
Life Ain’t Perfect, But it Could be Worse
“I want to write stuff that is real, that’s effective, and just be who I am,” Warren said. “That’s all I can be.”
St. Jude provided him that opportunity. Today, he has two adopted girls and two adopted boys. The boys ride dirt bikes around their property.
In the 1950s, actor Danny Thomas made a promise to St. Jude Thaddeus that if he was successful in his career, he would build a hospital to take care of children in need. The hospital opened its doors February 4, 1962. Thomas was well-established as the star of the iconic television show, “Make Room For Daddy” and was a successful singer.
Warren is following in his footsteps. He built a business with locations in more than 25 states called StorMor Outdoor Products that manufactures storage sheds. The business has given him the wherewithal to travel and perform—and spread the gospel of St. Jude. One song he often sings is “Miracle in Memphis” that tells the story of Thomas’ founding of St. Jude.
“St. Jude is just a place of hope,” Warren said. “I know it’s a lot of sadness that goes on there, but if you can’t be happy at St. Jude, you can’t be happy no where on the earth because of the people that they have down there.”
The healing is not only for the patient. Warren notes that the treatment is for the entire family.
Supported by donations and charitable events such as Ken Roczen’s Kickstart for a Cause bike giveaway, families at St. Jude never receive a bill for treatment, housing, travel, or food in the belief that their only concern should be helping their children live.
Treatments at St. Jude have helped push the overall cancer survival rate from 20 percent to 80 percent since it opened 50 years ago. Recall that Warren was given a less than 40 percent chance to live.
St. Jude leads the way in how the world understands, treats, and ultimately defeats childhood cancer and they freely share their discoveries so other doctors and scientists can use that knowledge to save children who are not in the St. Jude program.
If Warren’s voice cracks a little as he gives the command to start engines, supercross fans will undoubtedly forgive him.
As Warren would be quick to remind them, “Life ain’t perfect, but it could be a whole lot worse, right?”
