ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale says he is cancer free after battling four different types of the disease over the last four years.<\/p>\n
Vitale, 86, shared the news Wednesday on X after speaking with his doctor following a PET scan.<\/p>\n
“He said to me 4 words that cancer patients LOVE to hear “YOU ARE CANCER FREE,” Vitale wrote.<\/p>\n
Vitale announced<\/a> in August 2021 that he had undergone surgery to treat melanoma, and then said<\/a> two months later he had been diagnosed with lymphoma.<\/p>\n The broadcaster shared<\/a> news in July 2023 of his diagnosis of vocal cord cancer. A year later, doctors found a cancerous lymph node in his neck, which he completed radiation treatment<\/a> on in September 2024.<\/p>\n Vitale returned to ESPN in January after almost two years away from the booth. He later announced<\/a> in May that his charitable fund had raised a total of more than $105 million for pediatric cancer research.<\/p>\n ESPN announced<\/a> in June that Vitale had signed a contract extension that would keep him with the network through the 2027-28 season.<\/p>\n The network also announced the launch of the Dick Vitale Invitational, an annual event held in the broadcaster’s honor. The inaugural tournament will tip off Nov. 4 with a game between Texas and Duke in Charlotte.<\/p>\n Vitale, formerly a head coach for the Detroit Pistons, joined ESPN during the company’s first year in 1979. He made his NCAA basketball broadcasting debut on Dec. 5, 1979 and has since called more than 1,000 games for the network, according to ESPN<\/a>. He was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale says he is cancer free after battling four different types of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99],"class_list":["post-178763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}