The Hockey Hall of Famer is now racking up assists for families fighting cancer.

by Braynt Urstadt

For Cam Neely, 1987 was the best of years and the worst of years. Neely was 22 years old and playing right wing for the Boston Bruins, just breaking out as a player who would go on to the hockey Hall of Fame. He scored 36 goals in the 1986-1987 season and 42 in 1987-1988. It was the beginning of a great era for a great player, but it was also the year his mother Marlene would die of colon cancer.

But in that tragedy was the seed of something meaningful: the Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care, which for 11 years has run The Neely House, providing apartments for families of patients visiting the Tufts-New England Medical Center in downtown Boston.

It might not have happened had it not been for a second tragedy. Six years later, in 1993, while Neely was still playing for the Bruins, his father, Michael, would die of brain cancer, cementing Neely’s determination to do something not just for the victims of cancer, but for their families, who often suffered as much or more. He incorporated the Cam Neely Foundation as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization the next year.

“I thought about what I could do, and I didn’t feel like there was much I could do for the patients,” says Neely, now 43. “But I knew I could do something for the families. And sometimes, you know, it’s the patients who are coping the best. Being family of patients with both parents, we all saw a lot of things that you don’t really see unless you’re going through it.”

Neely thought about funding cancer research, but in the end decided he could help the most by trying to help those families more directly. “I thought, ‘We could really do something here,’” Neely says.

So with help of his brother Scott, who has been the executive director of the Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care since “day one,” Neely founded The Neely House, a complex of apartments for families staying with patients. The Neely House is in downtown Boston, just blocks from the celebrated Boston Common. It opened in 1997.

Originally from British Columbia, Cam played for 13 years in the NHL, in a career famously cut short by injuries to his hip and knee. He started with the Vancouver Canucks, but spent the bulk of his career in Boston with the Bruins after an early career trade. He was known for a game that combined finesse and ferocity, the willingness to take and give checks…. and to fight. His nickname was “Bam-Bam Cam.”

A dubious check in 1991 damaged his right thigh, causing the muscle to ossify, or turn to bone, and he did not return to the game until 1993. But he came back with a vengeance, recording 50 goals in 44 games, putting him in the select company of Mike Bossy, Wayne Gretzky, Brett Hull and Mario Lemieux, who have also scored 50 goals in fewer than 50 games. A hip condition cut his career short and he retired at 31 in 1996, years before a player of his caliber usually retires. He was inducted in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2005.

In Boston, it is fair to say that he walks on water.

“Because I was a member of the Boston Bruins, I was in a unique position to make this happen,” Neely wrote on the 10th anniversary of The Neely House. “I had the luxury of a media following, and the support of hockey fans and sports fans from all over New England.”

The Neely House contained eight apartments in 1997, and expanded to 16 in 2000. Described as “bed-and-breakfast style” accommodation, it has two common kitchens and two common living rooms. And much like a small-town inn, the facility offers laundry service, Internet access and all the other useful and pleasant things one might want away from home. The families are mostly from New England, although many come from around the country to stay with patients who live locally. The Neely House has hosted more than 4,400 families so far, and there’s no minimum or maximum visit time, although the average is about three weeks.

The Neely House is managed by Patricia Rowe, who has been living there since it opened. Her background was oddly perfect for the job: She’s worked as both a nurse and an innkeeper. As an intensive-care-unit nurse, Rowe saw plenty of families who were working without the kind of support The Neely House offers. She saw “mothers or fathers huddled in chairs in the corner,” as she puts it, and was excited to help change that paradigm.

“The house is beautiful,” Rowe says. “Cam was very involved, down to the moldings around the doors and the colors of the walls.”

And it’s more than convenient. The other wings of the hospital are reachable without going outside.

“I had a gal here not too long ago whose husband was being treated,” Rowe says. “She got a call in the middle of the night saying that he was anxious and that it might be a good idea for her to come to his room. She got up and started to put her clothes on and then realized that everyone else was walking around in johnnies, so she pulled a bathrobe over her pajamas and was down at his room in five minutes.”

Not surprisingly, Rowe has boxes of thank-you notes, many of which mention the cookies she’s always baking.

Neely has been expanding the Cancer Care Foundation as it succeeds. In September of 2003, the Neely Cell Therapy and Collection Center opened. It’s a 4,000-square-foot facility where potential donors can be tested for and undergo the stem-cell-donation process. Stem cells are the cells in the marrow of the bone that produce new blood cells. They are harvested for bone marrow transplants in cancers, like leukemia, that have spread to the marrow.

The Therapy and Collection Center was followed by the Neely Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, which is slated to open this fall. It’s a wing within the children’s hospital at Tufts specifically for children undergoing bone marrow transplants. It is a difficult treatment, though increasingly common and increasingly successful.

A bone marrow transplant is typically followed by six or eight weeks of isolation in a sterile room, in order to prevent infections while the body accepts the new marrow. It is a lonely experience, and draining to family members, who often must travel to see their children. The Neely Center, like the Neely House, will focus on the experience of the family, providing sleeping rooms for parents just down the hall from the sterile rooms.

The Neely Foundation is currently raising money for the Michael Neely Center for Brain Tumor Care and Research, in memory of Neely’s father. It will provide funding for research and care of brain tumors, in an outpatient setting. They are shooting for $5 million, and have raised $3 million so far.

Over the years, the Cam Neely Foundation for Cancer Care has raised more than $16 million. “I’m very proud of our numbers,” Neely says. “We beg, borrow and steal before we have to pay for anything.”

These days, Cam keeps busy with various fund-raising efforts and his job with the Bruins. In the fall of 2007, he was hired as a vice president of the Boston Bruins, where he serves as the face of the organization and helps with scouting, team decisions, sponsorships, ticketing and marketing. “Basically, I try to get a good handle on everything that has to do with the Bruins,” Neely says.

Though he checks in regularly, Neely is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the Foundation or the House. “We’ve been fortunate to have my brother,” he says. “I don’t get there as much as my brother does. And it’s hard for me. Not every story is a great story, and sometimes it all brings me back to my parents. But there are a lot of great stories, and even bad outcomes can have great stories.”

The McDonnell family, for one, spent 51 weeks at The Neely House, after their 11-month-old daughter Isabel was diagnosed with leukemia. She is nine years old now, and healthy.

Rowe gets calls all the time from people interested in building something similar to The Neely House. “I think every institution in Boston has sent over a team to figure out how to do something similar,” she says. “But as far as I know, we’re really the only place just like this. I got a call from a guy in Arizona just the other day. He wanted to know how to get something like it started out there. I said, ‘You know, you’ve got to find a Cam Neely first.’ He said he’d look and get back to me.”