Pat Rice Has Cancer; World Sucks

Soccer in England has a lot of history.  Arsenal, for instance, have been around since 1886 - 127 years worth of history, tradition, and continuity.  A big, big part of that history is Pat Rice, the long time player, coach, and all around awesome guy who was with Arsenal for 44 of those years, which is, lessee here, almost 35% of the entire history of Arsenal.

So yeah, it's fair to say that as much as we of this generation consider Bergkamp, Henry and the like to be icons, Pat Rice is an Icon with a capital I - he's a trophy winner as a player (both First Division championships and FA Cup wins), and was a huge part of the coaching staff that built Arsenal into a juggernaut in the 90's and early 2000's.

He retired in 2012 at age 64, and was awarded an MBE for his service to the sport.  Today comes news that he was admitted to the hospital with cancer; this is absolutely not the way either he or we wanted him to spend his retirement years.  There are few details about the nature of the cancer at this point or a prognosis, but hopefully he's getting treatment and will beat this thing down.

He'll never see it, but all of us here at The Short Fuse wish Mr. Rice well in his fight against cancer, and send our thoughts and best wishes out to his family, both his biological one and his Arsenal one.