By David Borges
Register Staff
STORRS --- Jim Calhoun is in the midst of another bout with cancer.

Calhoun announced at a press conference today that he recently had a golf ball-sized cancerous mass removed from the right side of his neck, just underneath his jaw.
A fine needle aspiration biopsy of the mass had shown that the mass was squamous cell cancer, which Calhoun had had removed from his right cheek in 2007.

The mass was removed on May 6 by Jeffrey Spiro, M.D., at the UConn Health Center.

"To the best of my knowledge, Coach is cancer-free now," Spiro said.

However, Calhoun will undergo six weeks of Tomotherapy radiation treatments to his right neck as a precaution, beginning on June 24. The treatments are expected to cause some fatigue, particularly towards the end, and should affect Calhoun's summer schedule. But he has absolutely no plans on retiring as UConn's head men's basketball coach.

"I want to coach basketball at UConn," he said. "I look forward to coaching for an awful long time. I've had a little bit of a setback, but I will fight through this."

Calhoun, of course, had prostate cancer back in 2003 but missed only five games before returning to the sidelines. This cancer is completely unrelated to his prior bout with prostate cancer.

Calhoun said he started feeling "very tired" towards the end of this past season ("more so than normal") and, coincidentally, was suffering through an upper respiratory illness. He noticed a small lump in his neck that he thought was simply a boil. When the season was over and he went out to recruit, he became even more fatigued, and the mass and grown to the size of a marble.

About three weeks later, it was near the size of a golf ball, and Calhoun sought medical advice. At first, all doctors thought it was a cyst, a result of his upper respiratory infection, but Dr. Spiro's biopsy soon revealed otherwise.

Read much more in tomorrow's Register