Sometimes, a basketball can seem larger than its actual 29.5-inch circumference. With all the talk of bubble teams and bracketology, the simple sphere of composite leather feels weightier than 22 oz. For the average college ballplayer, who sacrifices countless hours in the gym and gives it his all night in and night out on the hardwood, all season long, basketball looms large.

That is, until he learns he has a baseball-size growth lodged in his chest.

That’s what doctors told Belmont senior center Boomer Herndon last August on his third trip to the hospital in a month with mysterious flu-like symptoms. Based on the location of the growth, doctors told Herndon that the lump was almost certainly cancerous. In the span of minutes, the former all-Tennessee high school center had gone from worrying about how his “bug” would cut in on his weekend pick-up games to whether or not cancer would cut his life short.

“It was definitely scary. The whole time they said it was just a bug, some kind of flu bug, and they kept telling me it would work its way out of my system with time,” says Herndon, who transferred to Belmont in his native Nashville as a junior after spending two years at the University of Tennessee. “All of a sudden, they’re telling me there is a mass in my chest that they think is probably cancer. It was heartbreaking.”

Herndon, who led the Bruins to their first-ever NCAA tournament appearance last spring, spent over two weeks languishing in a Nashville hospital bed, blinded by throbbing headaches and drained by fevers that surpassed 104 degrees. After watching the 6-foot-10, 255-pound Herndon waste away for 12 days, doctors decided surgery was their only hope. A large incision was made in Herndon’s back, from which surgeons extracted a piece of the cyst lodged dangerously close to Herndon’s heart. When Herndon opened his eyes, he awoke to the same sight of men in white coats that he had grown to dread during his time in the hospital.

Except this time they were smiling.

“When they did the biopsy, they discovered it wasn’t cancerous at all, which was pretty neat,” Herndon says in his understated Tennessee drawl.

Baffled as to what could have caused the growth, doctors hypothesized that a fishbone had punctured Herndon’s esophagus. The wound had become infected, causing a bacterial growth, much in the same way a splinter can fester if left untreated.

“They said when I got out of [the hospital] that they had no clue how it had originally got there,” Herndon recalls. “The whole thing is kind of strange.”

Herndon believes he suffered the injury while touring Taiwan with Athletes in Action, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. On the trip, Herndon and other Division I players like Notre Dame sophomore forward Luke Zeller split their time between shooting hoops for a team coached by former St. John’s Head Coach Mike Jarvis and spreading the word of God. Somewhere in between schooling the Taiwanese on the court and teaching parables, Herndon evidently swallowed a piece of fish the wrong way.

“I am not really sure what kind of fish they served us, but that was the only time I can remember it hurting when I ate,” Herndon recalls. “In late August I started feeling sick.”

Once the cause of his ailment was determined to be less cancerous and more piscine, Herndon was eager to return to the hardwood and make the most of his final season in the Music City.

“The day I got out of the hospital I started running,” says Herndon, whose real name is Justin, but he goes by Boomer as a tribute to former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Boomer Esiason. “I had to try and rehab as fast as I could because I wanted us to have a good season and I know I am an integral part of the team.”

Through it all, it was his team more than anything else that spurred him on. One of the first calls a distraught Herndon made upon learning of the growth was to the Belmont coaches’ office. When Bruins head coach Rick Byrd heard his star center sobbing uncontrollably on the other end of the phone line, he knew basketball would have to take a backseat.

Four weeks prior to the opening tip-off against UNC-Wilmington, Byrd could not have cared less about defending Belmont’s first-ever conference title.

“There comes a point where there is no concern about how it affects your team – it’s a friend who is facing a life-threatening illness,” Byrd says. “There was a point in time where we would have all taken the option of him living and being fine even if he never played another basketball game.”

Seeing their close friend struggle for his life made the prospect of a weak season seem a little less devastating to the Bruins’ returning starters.

“Early on we were all worried about what that might be,” senior center Andrew Preston says. “We were all just glad that it turned out to be a little less than what they originally thought it was.”

Although Herndon never missed a game, he was far from the player who had captured second-team all-Atlantic Sun honors in 2006. issing a fully healthy Herndon, the Bruins dropped two of their first five, including a painful 64-57 loss to in-state foe Middle Tennessee State. Although Herndon was discouraged, the trials he had endured over the previous months made the loss easier to swallow, in a manner of speaking.

“The whole beginning of the season was not where I was supposed to be,” Herndon admits. “[My situation] definitely changed my mindset on the importance of basketball. You feel blessed to be at a place where you can play at a high level and go to college and get a free education for it, and it made this season more valuable to me and my teammates.”

Herndon rebounded to become the team’s leader in rebounds and blocked shots, as well the Bruins’ second leading scorer. Seeing his teammate lying helplessly in a hospital bed in early September, it was hard for junior guard Justin Hare to imagine Herndon leading the Bruins to the NCAAs for a second consecutive arch.

“I think he went through a tough struggle, and I think it helped him a lot personally,” Hare explains. “He lost physical fitness through it all, and we were just glad to have him back and be a part of our team. He has done a great job, especially scoring down low, and he really adds a dimension to our team.”

Boomer Herndon’s whirlwind tour over the past year has taken him far and wide – both geographically and emotionally. After all the headaches and fevers, hospital walls and hardwood, sharp pangs of dread and deep sighs of relief, he has managed to keep a sense of humor.

When asked what sight would frighten him more when first-round action in Winston-Salem rolls around on Thursday – fish served at the pregame meal or the imposing figure of Roy Hibbert, Herndon just chuckles.

“I can chew my food up pretty well, but I can’t do anything to make Roy Hibbert any shorter, so I think Hibbert is the bigger scare for sure,” he says.

Even so, Byrd doesn’t want to take the chance.

“We stick to chicken for before games,” Byrd says. “Without the bones.”