Myles Brand wasn’t ready, he says, to ease into the winter of his 66-year life. He was fit. He had stayed energized. There was more he hoped to accomplish as president of the NCAA.

Those plans changed Christmas Eve.
As the world around him celebrated, Brand was told he had late-stage pancreatic cancer. Confirmation that the illness had reached the fourth and final stage, metastasizing and making surgical removal impossible, came just hours into the new year.

“I was very upset, to say the least,” Brand said Monday, speaking publicly about his illness for the first time. “(My wife) Peg and I were looking forward to another 20, maybe 25, years of a good marriage. And so that’s a real shocker.”

In an 80-minute interview with USA Today in a conference room next to his fourth-floor Indianapolis office, Brand candidly addressed his rearranged future.

Brand still makes it to his office regularly, though not for full days. He also works from his home by phone and e-mail.

Visibly thinner, he said chemotherapy treatments every two weeks leave him fatigued. After logging up to 150 days a year on the road, he’s unable to fly. But the NCAA’s signature event, its Division I men’s basketball Final Four, will be staged less than a five-hour drive up the road in Detroit, and he plans to be there.

He’ll stay on the job, he said, “as long as I’m able to contribute in a full-blown way, as long as I’m able to add some value to the position and help the NCAA stay on course.”

Brand’s doctors at the Indiana University s Simon Cancer Center have not given him a medical timetable, he said.

“I asked that question, as anyone would,” he said. “The long-term prognosis is very clear. Once one reaches Stage 4, no one survives, to speak of, more than five years. It just doesn’t happen. Or so rarely it doesn’t count.

“It depends upon your individual biology. It could be short. It could be long. But I have signed up for aggressive treatment. I’m going to fight it as hard as I can.”

Brand paused. “Some people said to me, ‘How come you’re not more angry?’ ” he said. “I’m not angry at anybody. This is biologically determined. It’s not even clear what role your genetic makeup plays in it. These things happen. It’s really bad luck — or as my physician put it, ‘It sucks.’ ”

A former philosophy professor who ran Indiana’s eight-campus system as president for eight years and the University of Oregon for five years before that, Brand has overseen the more than 1,000-member-school NCAA since January 2003. He was best known then for firing IU’s mercurial Hall of Fame basketball coach Bob Knight in September 2000 but appears to have left an equally indelible mark in his current position.

Unlike Roger Goodell, David Stern, Bud Selig and other commissioners of professional leagues, the NCAA president has no vote in policy-making. That’s done by the association’s Executive Committee and the presidents, chancellors and school and conference athletic officials who serve on other governance boards. The president identifies issues, offers direction and works to build consensus. And Brand has proved adept at that.

Most notably, he successfully threw his weight behind a series of academic measures, first toughening standards requiring athletes to make annual progress toward degrees and then subjecting lagging teams to unprecedented penalties.
Though they continue to lag in the high-profile, high-pressure sports of football and especially men’s basketball, athletes’ graduation rates have subsequently risen and now eclipse those of the overall collective student body.

Brand points to those gains as his crowning achievement.

“It’s not perfect,” he said, “but I think we’ve made some good progress.”

Brand is unequivocal, however, in identifying the primary challenge facing the NCAA and a new president, whenever he or she should take office. The nation’s current financial crisis is a concern on two fronts, he said.

As increasingly cash-strapped athletics programs try to make themselves as appealing as possible to ticket buyers and especially television and marketing clients, will academic interests take a back seat — arguably the circumstance that led to today’s academic reforms?

And as schools inevitably move to cut costs, can they do it without sacrificing lower-profile, non-revenue sports?

“I certainly hope universities find a way the next several years to resist that temptation,” said Brand, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native who played some basketball and lacrosse as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “Once you close a sport, it’s very hard to start it up again. I worry about the Olympic sports like swimming and track. They’re crucial to our student-athletes, men and women, to have opportunities to participate.”

His illness hit as Brand was diving into his latest initiative: signaling to schools that it’s not wrong for them — or the NCAA — to capitalize on marketing and other commercial opportunities as long as they meet the decorum of higher education. It was the subject of Brand’s state-of-the-association address at last month’s NCAA convention outside Washington, D.C., which aide Wally Renfro delivered in his absence.

Brand stayed in Indianapolis for his first treatment that week.

Discord remains in football’s Bowl Subdivision (formerly called Division I-A), where the nation’s six marquee conferences — the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific 10 and Southeastern — hog the vast majority of top-tier Bowl Championship Series berths and 85 percent of the more than $220 million in overall postseason revenues.

A number of schools in the division’s other five conferences complain annually about the inequity, joined more frequently by their states’ congressional representatives.

Asked if he’s satisfied that his legacy is now less tied by the masses to Knight and one of college athletics’ most famous coaching changes, he smiled.

“I don’t hear it as much as I used to,” Brand said. “It’s not a defining point for me. I’ve moved on.”

“I have signed up for aggressive treatment. I’m going to fight it as hard as I can.”