It starts with the kid.

There is no other way, really, to explain Greg Durfee's life and his ambition, no other explanation for why a college-educated and deeply religious man found himself homeless and one night dumped on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles after a near-suicide.

Come late September, 11 years later, he will sit with two other men in a tent on a Hollywood street, attempting to set a world record by watching television for more than 86 hours over four days, all of it to raise at least $50,000 for childhood cancer research.

To tell the story of Greg Durfee, a currently out-of-work, 48-year-old grocery clerk from Denver, you have to tell the story of Nicholas, a 7-year- old boy his pastor introduced him to all those years ago.

Nicholas had a brain tumor and was a patient at Children's Hospital in L.A. the day the pastor introduced the two.

It was immediate. The boy and Durfee clicked. The man would stop by the hospital almost every day. One day, Durfee asked the boy if there was something he could get him.

"I need you to pray," Nicholas whispered to him, "and ask Jesus for my miracle."

When the boy was well enough, Durfee took him to an Angels baseball game, calling the team ahead of time and telling them the story of Nicholas. The team arranged for him to meet a few players and get autographs.

Two weeks later, Durfee again arrived at the hospital. The first thing he saw was Nicholas' parents in a hallway, weeping. The boy had died.

"To see him wilt away, all the while asking God to heal him, it totally wiped me out," Durfee said.

It happened so fast. Deep depression set in. He lost his job as an assistant manager of a clothing store. His roommate abandoned him. He was evicted.

For eight months, he wandered the L.A. streets, his depression so severe that he attempted to kill himself. The hospital he was taken to dumped him on the doorstep of a rescue mission.

He joined the men's program there.

"I had no addictions," he said, "just this severe depression. The program, it helped me get my faith back."

A year later, he had rescued himself.

He found an apartment and a job in Hollywood. It was at the store that he struck up a conversation with Doug DeLuca, then the chairman of comedian Jimmy Kimmel's San Gennaro Foundation.

Durfee asked if there were any jobs on the comedian's television show. No, he was told, but there was a part-time job with the foundation.

He told DeLuca about Nicholas. Durfee and the foundation that year took young cancer patients to games at all five Major League Baseball stadiums in California.

He met Steven that year, a 9-year-old boy with stomach cancer. He has since been diagnosed as cancer-free.

"He's my new hero," Durfee said.

From 2008 until last year, he organized the baseball outings, finally formally giving them a name: the Rally Fantasy Baseball Tour.

At each stop last year, in Tampa Bay, Seattle, Atlanta, Cleveland and Los Angeles, he would take at least four families of cancer patients to a game.

This year, he came up with the television-watching record attempt to raise funds for more baseball tour stops.

DeLuca invited him to do it at Kimmel's Feast of San Gennaro Los Angeles celebration in Hollywood, from Sept. 23 to 25.

"They are expecting anywhere from 85,000 to 100,000 people at the festival," Durfee said. "All I want is $1 from each of them for childhood cancer research."

He plans to leave his studio apartment near downtown Denver for Hollywood in mid-September, well ahead of flipping on the television for the first time on the 21st.

Children's Hospital has arranged for Durfee to meet with several young patients and their parents that week.

He plans, Durfee said, to take them to a Dodgers game.
