Jack Jabbour has lost track of how many people have reached out to him in the past few weeks.
Without a doubt, he appreciates the feedback. He just doesn’t like the reason for it.
The 74-year-old former teacher and longtime Colorado resident estimates there might be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who have sent him well wishes. Some of them he coached when they were children. Many of them he taught in class, and many more of them were viewed through his eyes as a color commentator with Ron Milhorn on Glenwood Springs-based KMTS-FM over more than two decades.
Of course, feedback — excuse the pun — is nothing new for the radio team of Jabbour and Milhorn. They’ve broadcast in high school gyms and on football bleachers in all kinds of weather with little to no chance of a clear broadcast reception, along with Colorado sports cathedrals like Ball Arena, Clune Arena and Empower Field at Mile High.
They’ve also gotten plenty of feedback in other ways, from parents and grandparents who listened in on their broadcast and took the time to say thank you for broadcasting their games on the radio.
The feedback Jabbour is getting this time, however, is different.
With this feedback, his friends and family are praying for a miracle.
Jabbour has been placed on hospice care due to complications he’s facing from COVID-19. He contracted the virus in November of 2020 prior to the release of vaccines and, more than one year later, has suffered from long-term effects that have scarred his lungs so badly that doctors have told him the time he has remaining could be very limited.
Still, he’s made the most of all the time he has had, with much of it being spent watching high school games as a broadcaster. Milhorn, who was visiting Jabbour on a recent weekend, said the pair over the past 22 years have driven more than 400,000 miles to cover more than 1,650 games while consuming no less than 350 pounds of French fries — give or take an onion ring or two.
“Sometimes, I think we spent more times sleeping in hotel rooms than our own,” Jabbour said with a laugh.
Those travels took them to every corner of the state, which isn’t bad considering they’d never met prior to going on the air together.
“Right from the beginning, we just clicked,” said Milhorn, who first broadcasted a game with Jabbour in 1999. “A couple hundred thousand miles later, we were still an incredible team.”
Smooth from the start
Milhorn, who has worked at KMTS since the late 1990s, started calling radio play-by-play at the urging of station manager Gabe Chenoweth, who knew Milhorn wouldn’t be able to call games by himself.
“He told me, ‘I have this guy in mind who could help out,'” said Milhorn, speaking of the first high school game he called at Rifle High School in 1999. “Jack showed up just a little bit before game time and came walking up the bleachers, Gabe introduced us, and that’s how we met. We were on the air a few minutes later.
“And after a few minutes of being on the air, Gabe looked up at me and mouthed the words ‘This is great!'”
Most of the games Milhorn and Jabbour called were of Glenwood Springs High School sports, but they never strayed from calling games for other teams in the Roaring Fork Valley during the postseason. They did it for the first time during that winter of 1999 when they followed the Aspen girls’ basketball team to the Class 3A state tournament, where the Skiers lost to Eaton in the state title game at Clune Arena on the Air Force Academy campus.
“We had people who were listening back at home and came down during the tournament who would tell us the games sounded so exciting on the radio that they had to come down and see it for themselves,” Milhorn said. “That’s when we knew we had something.”
It was more than something: Colorado’s Associated Press bureau at one point tabbed them as the state’s best play-by-play team for 10 consecutive years, Milhorn said.
Games Milhorn and Jabbour called were at venues like Spurgeon Stadium, Gerry Berry Stadium and the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs, along with Moby Arena in Fort Collins, Legacy Stadium in Aurora and the Denver Coliseum. And they didn’t hold back naming some of the more memorable sports figures they’ve come across, including Dick Katte, the former Denver Christian boys’ basketball coach and Colorado’s all-time leader in victories; Katrina and Sharaya Selsor, who led Glenwood Springs to the 2007 Class 4A girls’ semifinals (the Demons lost to Harrison) and Colorado Mesa’s women’s squad to the Division II Elite Eight in 2013; and the coaching staff of Aspen’s boys’ basketball team under Steve Ketchum, who Jabbour said looked like the “mafia coaching staff” wearing their trademark black suits and white shirts to every game.
Jabbour even pulled double duty at one point and wrote game stories for the Glenwood Springs Post Independent for whatever football game he and Milhorn were calling. He’d take the statistics he kept during the game as a color commentator and, by the light of a dome light in Milhorn’s car, punch out a game story on a laptop until a Wi-Fi hotspot was available so he could send the story to be printed in the next day’s paper.
“That was easy for me,” Jabbour said. “If it was a great game, I couldn’t wait to write that story.”
The COVID-19 pandemic eventually stopped all high school sports in Colorado, and across the United States, in March of 2020, effectively ending a 22-year sports broadcasting partnership between Jabbour and Milhorn. Jabbour said he had still hoped to call more games, and even extend his 40-plus year teaching career a little longer.
“There was one point where I was thinking, ‘You know, should I (teach) for another four years?'” Jabbour said. “Well, COVID took care of that.”
A long haul
Jabbour said he was exposed to COVID-19 during a church blessing being given to one of his former students. He said he had hesitancies about going, but he said he felt obligated to go since it was a former student he cared about.
He and his wife, Linda, tested positive in late November of 2020. On Dec. 7, close to two weeks after testing positive, Jabbour passed out at his home and was taken by ambulance from his home in New Castle to Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs.
Doctors told Jabbour his blood-oxygen level had fallen to 40%, well below the typical blood-oxygen level of 95 to 100% for healthy patients, according to the Mayo Clinic. He said he never had to go onto a ventilator during his stay, but said that “COVID just destroyed my lungs, and the scar tissue that was left by the virus made it impossible for my lungs to do what they’re supposed to be doing.”
In all, Jabbour spent 50 days hospitalized and said he counted as many as 80 different nurses and doctors who cared for him during his stay — using encouraging words toward his caretakers to help motivate him toward recovery in an environment where some COVID-19 patients showed little gratitude.
“I found myself caring more about the status of these workers than I was about myself,” Jabbour said. “I mean, these people were working their buns off and were getting yelled at. I got to talking to some of them, and with one I said, ‘You just saved that person’s life and they’re complaining? I just don’t get that.'”
Jabbour was released on Jan. 25, 2021 and was given a bed, supplemental oxygen and steroids to aide in his at-home recovery but was told the body would simply need time to heal itself.
He’s also one of millions around the globe who have suffered from the long-term effects of COVID-19, or “long COVID” as it’s termed by some. According to a study released Oct. 13 by the Penn State College School of Medicine, more than half of the 235 million people around the world who had been diagnosed at the time with COVID-19 experienced post-COVID symptoms up to six months after recovering.
“The SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent that causes COVID-19, can access, enter and live in the nervous system” and does not just affect the body’s lungs, the study said. “As a result, nervous system symptoms such as taste or smell disorders, memory impairment and decreased attention and concentration commonly occur in survivors.”
Early in the pandemic some health officials, like Dr. Bob Dannenhoffer, the executive director of the Douglas Public Health Network in Douglas County, Ore., originally included reports of COVID-19 recoveries in his agency’s daily press releases. The agency, however, stopped reporting recoveries in May of 2020 once lingering COVID-19 symptoms became more common for people who had been infected.
Jabbour’s long-term recovery needs took a toll on those around him. He needed 24-hour care, meaning his wife and neighbors were left to tend to the farm animals on his property and the piles of snow that were stacking up in the driveway of his New Castle home. It forced the Jabbours to sell their farm animals and, eventually, sell the home they’d built four decades ago to move to Topeka, Kan., this past summer. They would be near their daughter, Jennifer, in a place where New Castle’s elevation of 5,597 feet would no longer create breathing difficulties for Jack.
“Things were going pretty good for a while,” he said before trailing off.
In early January, Jabbour had a two-day stay in a Topeka hospital. There, he was told his lungs not only were no longer healing, but also were no longer exhaling carbon dioxide the way healthy lungs typically do. He said he had to be intubated and put on a ventilator — and was unconscious during his hospital stay — and was told he’d likely die if he needed to be intubated again.
Not long after he returned home, he was placed on hospice care.
“We were told if we had to intubate again, I would just have to stay on the machines. And no. I don’t want to just be kept alive,” he said. “But we have since learned in a month or two if it gets bad again, we could intubate again and pull it out again. Every case with this thing is different.”
Jabbour said the VA hospital and the Mayo Clinic were looking into possible donors for a lung transplant, but he admitted the chances of finding a match with someone his age are slim.
Precious time
Being close to Jabbour’s daughter, Jennifer, was a major incentive to make a move this past summer.
But with the recent news of his failing health and his daughter’s wedding scheduled for July 9, Jabbour resigned himself to knowing he wouldn’t be able to attend.
“The one thing I really wished,” he told his daughter, “was that I’d be able to walk you down the aisle at your wedding.”
Jennifer smiled. “Well,” she said, “about that. We’re working on moving up the date.”
Jabbour didn’t think to ask about what that meant until later in the day when he saw Jennifer and her fiancé David Porter again. “Hey,” Jabbour said. “So what day are you thinking about getting married now?”
“Tomorrow,” Jennifer replied.
“What?”
Jennifer, Jabbour said, already had the dress, venue, and most everything else picked out and set up for her July 9 wedding. But to quickly move up the wedding date, she and the family, to Jabbour’s surprise, got a loaner dress that fit, got flowers on the fly and quickly found a minister to officiate the ceremony. Meanwhile, family from Denver and Southern California — where Jabbour grew up — also made the impromptu trip to eastern Kansas.
Jabbour walked — rolled in his scooter, actually — Jennifer down the aisle, then kept an insistent Jennifer and David from leaving to go get the food.
“I didn’t get my daddy-daughter dance yet,” Jabbour said, smiling.
They danced. They smiled. They posed for pictures.
They all got the day they wanted.
“When you go through what I’ve gone through and you don’t know if you’re going to have another breath, all you do is hope for things to go right,” Jabbour said. “I just kept saying, ‘Lord, just give me one good day here where I don’t have to worry about feeling terrible. After that, everything else is gravy and it’s all in your hands.'”
Jon Mitchell is the Lead Editor and Content Manager of The Gazette’s eEdition. Phone: 719-636-0108. Twitter: @byJonMitchell.
