Angela Wallace is struggling. Her words are incomplete. She begins to shake.

Wallace is fighting back tears.


Talking about Ryan Wallace — her vibrant, athletic son who was robbed of two years of playing football, basketball and baseball because of a rare cyst on his right leg — isn’t any easier in 2017 than it was in 2014.

Watching Ryan wither on the couch was downright arduous.

“It was really difficult for me,” Angela Wallace said. “I mean, I would take his place if I could.”

For two years, and seemingly out of nowhere, Wallace’s athletic career — and his very being — was put on hold as he recovered from a rare cyst that, it was discovered in 2014, was eating at the bone in his right tibia.

“Growing up, I played Church League baseball, travel baseball, travel basketball — I played everything,” says Wallace, a junior. “My dad wanted me to say active, and it (sports) just grew into my childhood.

“Ever since I was little, my parents have pictures of me holding any kind of ball.”

As the calendar speeds toward May, signaling the end of Wallace’s junior year at Southside High School, Angela and Mark Wallace’s world is normal again.


Ryan Wallace isn’t the star quarterback; he won’t ever hit a walk-off home run or drain a buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

But he can walk; he’s active.

“I don’t know if all of his buddies know the entire situation, but I’m glad to see him out there doing something,” Southside track coach Brad West said. “I was sad to see him give football up, but understandably with his situation, you never know what could happen.”

Wallace, a discus thrower on the Mavericks’ track team, was a poster child for today’s three-sport athletes.

“Ryan was involved in a lot of sports,” explains Mark Wallace. “He played up a grade in junior high (football). He was playing travel baseball, and when that was over he was playing travel basketball.”

Toward the end of the summer of 2014, as Wallace was preparing for his ninth-grade year at Chaffin Junior High, Wallace couldn’t seem to shake a nagging ankle issue.

Finally, he sought the advice of longtime Southside trainer Brent Griffis.


“I thought I had growing pains,” Wallace said. “I would ice it down every day, and it didn’t get any better. He (Griffis) said I had actually fractured it a couple of times during football.”

On the advice of Griffis, Wallace went for an X-ray.

“The X-ray showed that a cyst had eaten away part of my bone,” Wallace said.

Looking over the X-ray, a frazzled Griffis pulled out his cellphone and called Ryan’s parents.

“It was a little bit doom and gloom at first,” Mark Wallace said. “They called it a tumor at first, and it had eaten away about 45 percent of the bone. They said it could be cancerous; he may not walk right ... he probably won’t play sports again — that’s kind of the information we got at right at first.”

“It was just a red flag to me; it didn’t seem like a normal problem,” remembers Griffis. “I had never seen that; I had never had one of the athletes come up with that.

“If I remember, the bone was practically gone.”


X-rays concluded that Wallace had developed an aneurysmal bone cyst.

The Wallaces were devastated.

Ryan Wallace was referred to Arkansas Children’s Hospital and Dr. Richard Nicholas.

“Thank goodness we were referred to (Arkansas) Children’s (Hospital),” Mark Wallace said. “The doctor down there was a little more used to seeing this type of injury. Although it’s not real common, (Dr. Nicholas) had seen it quite a bit.”

As fall faded to winter, and the cold, brown ground began to thaw for spring, both Mark and Angela Wallace had learned all there was know about to aneurysmal bone cyst.
