LISBON -- Everyone who's ever played for legendary coach Gary Stamp has been required to memorize a classic poem called "It's All in the State of Your Mind."

Whether the team star or a reserve, if they couldn't recite the 24 lines word-for-word to the coach before the season started, they didn't dress for the game.

The hard-and-fast rule went for his own four children as well - sons Tait, Quinn, Shea and daughter Paige, each of them all-staters for their dad's Lisbon High School teams.

Over 42 years of coaching softball, baseball and football at 11 area high schools and a small college, Stamp instilled the lessons of those lines. "If you think you're beaten, you are, and if you think you'll lose, you've lost."

But, "Think that you can, and you will - it's all in the state of your mind."

Now, as the respected coach and teacher faces a life-threatening disease that was diagnosed just last month, the words of a simple poem take on new meaning.

"It's how I've always lived my life," says Stamp, 65, who has Stage IV lung cancer though he never smoked in his life.

"I have always been optimistic and hopeful. And I've never believed in upsets. The team that usually wins a game is the team that thinks they can win the game."

He plans to be coaching when the latest of his long line of state tournament teams, the Mount Vernon High School softball Mustangs, open practice on May 9.

Before that, however, he has a follow-up appointment on April 28 at the world-renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to find out if the high-powered chemotherapy pill he's been taking since the start of the month is killing the cancers that have spread beyond both lungs.

"If not," he says, "I'll go to Plan B, but I really don't know what that might be. I do know I'm not going to give up and quit."

A physical education and English teacher for 35 years and a lifelong exercise buff who regularly ran seven miles a day, Stamp was feeling fit until December.

As a longtime top-flight wrestling referee, he was well into a full slate of officiating at 90-some meets this season, culminating as usual with the high school championships in early March.

Feeling a little rundown and coughing, he was diagnosed with bronchitis in January. Despite getting stronger medications, he never got better and was told in late February he'd developed pneumonia.

Still, he continued to referee wrestling, right up to his last match at Linn-Mar on March 8. The next day, doctors at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City told Stamp and his wife Ava that he had a rare, difficult-to-detect and likely terminal form of lung cancer.

"It was like our legs were cut off from under us," says Ava, a third grade teacher in Olin. "I was almost paralyzed by shock and fear.

"For Gary, the coach in him said to the doctors, 'Is it beatable, is it winnable?' They said they were afraid not."

She called all four grown children, and they immediately began to confront their dad's disease with the same determination they'd learned from him from decades ago.

The oldest, Tait, 35, an Air Force pilot living in New Jersey, recalls memorizing his father's favorite inspirational poem as a third grade wrestler while sitting on the bathtub and watching him shave.

He set out to find the best treatment there is for the specific type of lung cancer and settled on the famed Houston clinic. Gary and Ava had not heard of it, but they sent all his tests and records to the hospital, then went to Texas for an examination two weeks ago.

They came home with hope.

With the medication prescribed to attack the rare but aggressive cancer, doctors at Houston said it is successful in almost 80 percent of cases. But it's a waiting game to see if it works.

"It's been like a roller-coaster," Stamp says. "Some good days followed by some bad days. I just hope I start getting more good ones than bad. And that we get a good report when we go back."

He doesn't have a lot of energy, has trouble sleeping and breathing and has only been able to walk a few blocks without getting worn out.

He's lost his appetite and became so bloated with fluid build-up in his legs, stomach and around his lungs that he was hospitalized in Iowa City for three days this past week to drain the fluid and have a catheter implanted in his chest so that Ava can do it at home.

"He's feeling a lot better," she said Saturday afternoon. "We have our highs and our lows, and we're about it the middle right now."

Meanwhile, a life lived the right way has resulted in an amazing rally of support. A CaringBridge.org website journal written by his children has recorded nearly 8,000 visits from hundreds of family and friends, former players and students, coaching and officiating buddies and strangers he never even knew he touched.

"Our son Quinn started it out on Facebook by asking for prayers for his dad," says Ava, "and it just took off like wildfire."

The phone calls, e-mails, letters and visits have been overwhelming. A player from years ago, Kim Billick of Stanwood, recently mailed her old coach a signed softball (without the box), saying she thought it more appropriate than a card.

Supporters from several different groups are organizing a benefit to defray medical costs on Sunday, May 1, at Mount Vernon High School, where Stamp has coached softball for the past five years after retiring from teaching. They are selling apparel with LiveStamp emblazoned on it. Information about the benefit and apparel can be found at  http://www.coachgarystamp.com.

"It has been amazing, the number of people that have contacted us," says Stamp. "It just blows you away. And to see such kindness in people. It's been a real morale booster to realize I've had some positive impact on so many people's lives.

"Without the kind of support we've had, I don't know how we could make it."

He knows in his heart, too, that there are an awful lot of them who believe, as he does, that "the man who wins is the fellow who thinks he can."