Alex Young's Battle with Stage Four Cancer: A Football Community Unites
Alex Young spent a lifetime stopping trouble at the back. Now the former All White and Tauranga City AFC stalwart is facing the toughest opponent of all – and this one can’t be shrugged off with a crunching tackle.
The 77-year-old has been diagnosed with stage four cancer, and friends from across decades of football are scrambling to help him meet a $50,000 bill for treatment not funded by the public health system.
Young first went to his doctor after noticing a growth on his left groin. Tests at hospital brought the kind of news no one wants to hear. He was told he had what he calls an “internal melanoma”, and by the time it was found, it had already spread.
“It was a strange one, but I've consequently got stage four cancer on my liver, on my lung, and on my chest,” he said.
He was put on the immunotherapy drug Keytruda and stayed on it for six months. Then the treatment stopped working. The next step was ipilimumab – a drug that, in his case, isn’t funded by Pharmac.
“I had my first procedure with that, which costs money, obviously. I think the first one was $10,400.”
Ipilimumab is publicly funded for some cancers. For Young’s condition, it is not. That gap between policy and reality is where his football community has stepped in.
He is due back at Tauranga’s Canopy Cancer Care on Wednesday for his second round of ipilimumab. Four treatments are required in total. Every one comes with a heavy price tag.
Football has been the through-line of Young’s life. He left Scotland as a teenager, arriving in New Zealand around the age of 16, and climbed through the local grades until he was a standout at Hamilton City, lining up with names such as Keith Nelson.
“Soccer is my sport and life, I suppose,” he said.
At around 6 foot 4, Young was built for the heart of defence. Strong in the air, uncompromising on the ground, he caught the eye when English clubs Bournemouth and Luton Town toured. His performances against them helped earn him a place in the 1977 All Whites squad.
From there, he became a pillar of Tauranga football. As player-coach, he led Tauranga to an unbeaten season, setting standards that still echo around the club.
Tauranga City AFC life member Mark Bougen, who served on the club committee with Young in the 1970s, said he was stunned when he heard about his old teammate’s diagnosis.
He remembers a defender you did not want to run into.
“You would call him a no-fuss football defender, a hard Scottish man,” Bougen said. “When he played, he took no prisoners.”
That same hard edge on the field has softened into something else off it: loyalty. A Givealittle page has been set up to help cover the cost of treatment, with organisers aiming to raise $50,000 – money they say is needed “to give Alex the best possible chance” against the disease.
The page points out that the financial strain of unfunded cancer treatment is “too much for one person or family to carry alone, especially while navigating the physical and emotional toll of a cancer diagnosis”.
Young didn’t rush to accept the idea. Pride and independence don’t disappear easily in a man who built his reputation on doing the dirty work at the back. But his friends’ determination eventually swayed him.
“When they came around to see me, they were so good and they had so many good ideas. I thought, well, if they're willing to go to this trouble, I'll try it.”
By the time of writing, donations had passed about $2000. A start, but still a long way from the target.
For Young, every contribution lands with weight.
“I'd like to thank them from the bottom of my heart. They're probably strangers. Thank you to them all.”
Once, opponents in New Zealand football knew better than to test the big Scot too often. Now the question hangs over a different kind of battle: can the football family that watched him guard penalty areas for decades now help buy him the time to win one more fight?
