SALT LAKE CITY — As the Utah Jazz cut a 15-point deficit to just one with 11 minutes remaining in their 2017-2018 season opener against the Denver Nuggets at Vivint Arena, Mike Crane came up with an idea.
The then-39-year-old pharmacist had seen commercials for 5 for the Fight, a charitable arm of the Utah-based company Qualtrics, which encourages people to donate money to cancer research $5 at a time and had become the Jazz’s jersey patch sponsor in the first year the NBA allowed them.
With the ads in mind showing prominent Utahns holding up their hands with names written on them of people who have had cancer, the native of Springville who attended the University of Utah during the Jazz’s NBA Finals runs in the late 1990s and moved to Las Vegas after graduation in 2001 somewhat nonchalantly made a proposal on Twitter.