Billy Graham's Flu Game that Never Happened

The greatest basketball player in history as I’m writing this, Michael Jordan’s most memorable performances deemed by sports writers was Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Playoffs referred to as one of Michael Jordan's most epic games in his career, the game deemed as his famous "Flu Game" against the Utah Jazz in the Delta Center in Salt Lake City. As sports writer Rick Weinberg for Espn put it, "A day before the game, according to Jordan he woke up nauseated and sweating profusely. He hardly had the strength to sit up in bed and was diagnosed with a stomach virus or food poisoning. The Bulls trainers told Jordan that there was no way he could play the next day. The Jazz had just won two in a row to tie the series, and Chicago needed their leader in this crucial swing game. In the NBA Finals best of seven games format, that Game 5 was critical, since the winner would be just one game away from the NBA Title."-Espn


Team trainers heavily advised Jordan only to resume play after the flu subsided but Mike wasn't down for that; he knew watching this must win game on TV wasn't going to help his team one bit to win this crucial game. Michael played "hurt" scoring a breathtaking 38 points to help the Bulls lead the series 3-2 and take Game 6 back to Chicago for the Bulls to win their first 3-peat NBA Championship.

In 1963 Billy Graham had the same experience but it turned out differently. From Billy's Autobiography "Just as I Am":

"THE LAST TIME I was with Kennedy was at the 1963 National Prayer Breakfast. I had the flu. “Mr. President, I don’t want to give you this bug that I’ve got, so I’m not going to talk right at your face.” “Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “I talk to a lot of people all day long who have got all kinds of bugs.” After I gave my short talk, and he gave his, we walked out of the hotel to his car together, as was always our custom. At the curb, he turned to me. “Billy, could you ride back to the White House with me? I’d like to see you for a minute.” “Mr. President, I’ve got a fever,” I protested. “Not only am I weak, but I don’t want to give you this thing. Couldn’t we wait and talk some other time?”It was a cold, snowy day, and I was freezing as I stood there without my overcoat. “Of course,” he said graciously. His hesitation at the car door, and his request, haunt me still. What was on his mind?

Should I have gone with him? It was an irrecoverable moment.

John Connally (a Democrat at the time) invited me to Texas to participate in his inauguration as governor on January 15, 1963. In late fall of that year, when I was back preaching in Houston, the governor come to my hotel room. He confided that he was concerned about President Kennedy’s forthcoming trip to Texas in November. He said that there was much hostility against the President in Texas and he feared a lukewarm, or even a negative, response. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in the 1964 election, and his conservative cause appeared to be developing a large groundswell in Texas. Kennedy planned his visit to build Democratic unity and help shore up the Democratic resistance.

Sometime toward the end of the second week in November, I unaccountably felt such a burden about the presidential visit to Dallas that I decided to phone our mutual friend, Senator Smathers, to tell him I really wanted to talk to the President. His secretary told me Senator Smathers was on the Senate floor and would call me back. Instead, he sent me a telegram that the President would get in touch with me directly. He thought I wanted to talk about the President’s invitation to another golf game in Florida that weekend; the game was off, he said, and would have to be rescheduled.

But all I wanted to tell him and the President was one thing: “Don’t go to Texas!” I had an inner foreboding hat something terrible was going to happen.
I told this to T. W. and Calvin Thielman, pastor of the Montreat Presbyterian Church, while were on the golf course one day (and before I put through the call to Smathers). But was such a strange feeling enough to justify the President’s attention?

WHERE I WAS WHEN I HEARD In the early afternoon of November 22, I was playing golf with T.W., Lee Fisher, and Cliff Barrows at the local course in Black Mountain, North Carolina. We had just teed off for the fifth hole right next to the road when Loren Bridges, manager of WFGW, the Christian radio station we owned there, drove up and shouted that the President had been shot. Just then, the Black Mountain golf pro, Ross Taylor, came running out, shouting the same news. We rushed to the WFGW studio, where dispatches were clacking over the wires. Loren handed me the latest Associated Press Teletype copy. The report was sketchy; hard information about the President’s condition was not available yet. I asked Calvin Thielman to go on the air with me to pray for Kennedy and his family and to read Scripture. I also asked T.W. to call a friend of ours who was a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas to get the latest word.

As Calvin and I went on the air, T.W. came to the control room window and held a scrap of paper up against the glass. “He’s dead,” it said. I dared not break such news to western North Carolina until a public announcement was made, which Walter Cronkite did over CBS three or four minutes later. Then, Calvin and I spoke of the President and prayed for his family and for the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson." –Billy Graham

As it reverberates implicitly and repeatedly throughout this excerpt, Billy Graham echoes that he regretted making both decisions. Standing in the middle of the Capital with Jackie Kennedy and little JFK Jr. with sadness descending in their hearts each minute like a plane that’s losing control slowly, tragically spinning to it’s fate- something that in his innocence & bright future he would one day unfortunately and tragically experience firsthand. They must have felt suspended in time in that moment, like generations passed, as if they experienced the lifetimes of each president on the wall that lived a longer more fulfilled life.

Billy Graham missed an opportunity.

Could he have helped reverse this?

I don’t know.

Billy is not alone. We all miss opportunities some of great proportion and others less. We make opportunities too and these have the power to change the direction of our lives and consequently the world.

Billy's deep inner prompting to communicate to the President not going to Texas was even more regretful. An alarm piercing through his emotions like a 1960’s “duck and cover” alarm sounding across schools in America to prepare if a nuclear threat was issued-how could Billy release the alarm louder? Piercing into souls like he’s done for over 20 years before this?

Billy Graham is loud but this was different, completely unorganized, a crusade of 1 person not 100,000, how do you turn on an a “duck and cover”, and flip the switch on the most important person on the planet who stopped an arms war 90 miles south of Florida.

I don't know Billy Graham, how he makes decisions and what went through his mind in 1963. But I hear the deep regrettable reverberations in this writing. I learned from Billy Graham was one thing: don't leave the game. - even if it hurts don’t let opportunity shut on you.

In this life you will have extreme spiritual and natural pain & resistance it’s what Jesus’ called "tribulation". He had it. If he had it you're going to have it too. But be of good cheer, I have overcome the world-we have too.

In the journey through the tight, narrow, constricted way, it’s impossible to escape resistance. No matter how hurt, how many points you’re down, how cold it is in Washington D.C., how painful the flu-feeling is as the cold D.C. air pumps through your lungs and bloodstream like icy water running through your veins that you feel as you grasp to escape from an ice broken freezed over pond, how embarrassed you may feel in expressing yourself

--the door hasn’t closed yet- get in the car.

Don't hold back the impression, the word given to you. Even if you screw up, turn the ball over, miss easy shots, embarrass yourself, lose the game, weak/suffering-- stay in-you're embarrassed because your not 100% no matter how humiliating you feel; when you’re obeying God he sees your 10% as a 100%-& through Him you're unstoppable. You're a superstar with God in you—anything can happen; it doesn't matter what team you’re against or what court you are playing on.

Stay in there, keep fighting.

You may be in a bad family situation, a soured marriage, terminally ill with Dr's giving you no hope. You maybe abandoned, you may feel alone.

It maybe hard but:

Stay in the game.

Keep fighting

Don’t give up

Don’t hold back, don’t be intimated, release what God has placed in you.

You may be the hero, win the game and see the streamers fly,

You may collapse, have to be carried off, as the fans cheers echo through the stadium, you’re hurt but you tried.

With the surround-sound of cheers for miles, on a warm, forebodingly sunny Texas day you might just save a President that shouldn't have prematurely died.