Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Paul Torgersen, former president of Virginia Tech, watches the university's football team practice Tuesday. Torgersen was diagnosed with cancer in the throat and mouth last year and received treatment in Chapel Hill, N.C.

BLACKSBURG -- When Frank Beamer talks football, people listen.

During Tuesday's game week news conference, people heard the Virginia Tech coach say something more important than anything likely to happen on any football field.

"Paul Torgersen came by the office this morning," Beamer said, "and gave us the news that he had received a clean bill of health yesterday and is now cancer free."

Torgersen, 76, was Tech's president from 1993 to 2000. Dean of the College of Engineering for 20 years, he has taught at Tech every year for 41 years. He learned last spring that cancer was growing under his tongue.

Tuesday afternoon, Torgersen was where he often is during Hokie football practice, in a weathered folding chair with his back against Jamerson Athletic Center, his face toward Lane Stadium.

"Getting from there to here was pretty long way, let me tell you," Torgersen said.

Sid Smith, a Virginia Tech engineering graduate and a cardiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, persuaded Torgersen to get his treatment in Chapel Hill.

"It's a huge operation, but you got the feeling you were part of a family," Torgersen said.

Some of the family members were trying to kill the parts of Torgersen that were trying to kill him. At first, they used chemotherapy. Then radiation.

"I handled the chemo pretty easily," Torgersen said. "I mean, they pump all these chemicals through your body and I had no problem with that. But the radiation was murder."

For seven weeks, Torgersen and his wife would travel to Chapel Hill on Sunday and come home Friday evening. In between, Torgersen had his treatments. It was bad at first, he said. It got worse each week.

"What they're aiming at is the cancer, and they're trying not to destroy too much other tissue," he said. "And, of course, they don't do this to perfection, so you end up with a lot of sores in your mouth and your neck and your tongue and that sort of thing."

On Sunday, the Torgersens went back to Chapel Hill. He had a CAT scan at 7:30 Monday morning and a meeting with a doctor at 10. The doctor looked at the scan results, examined Torgersen's mouth and throat. Then he told Torgersen, "Well, you're clean. It's gone."

It's not quite that simple, Torgersen said. There are follow-up scans and precautionary checkups to come. He's still eating through a tube to his stomach -- seven cans of liquid food a day. And he tires easily.

"I take a nap after lunch," Torgersen said. "And I really look forward to that nap."

In six to eight months, the doctors have told him, Torgersen will have 90 percent of his strength and stamina back. And that's as good as it will get.

That sounds pretty good to Torgersen.

"It's a wonderful, exhilarating feeling, you know? I've got things I want to do," he said.