Bill Goodman and I were watching the ponies run in Philadelphia. A radio guy and a newspaper guy at the races. It seemed so Front Page.

Of course, we were at Goodman’s house in North Providence at the time. The trackside grit was missing. There was no cast of hustlers, no angry shredding of a losing daily double ticket.

There was just a laptop. We were being updated — again. Technology had done it — taken away the old smells and rough edges and left us with the horses on the small screen. It was a Web site Goodman has discovered. He even places a small wager now and then. Eras seemed to be getting mixed up right there in his living room.

“I love to watch horses run,” says Goodman. “I always have. This takes you from the stable to the track, actual races. It’s incredible. I can sit here and watch Santa Anita.”

It is a small part of the way he deals with this bad hand he was dealt last year. He deals with his colon cancer in a lot of ways, most not in keeping with the recommendations of medical science. His computer, radio, newspaper and TV are part of it too. He stays connected. It’s important.

You’ve probably heard him. He has presided at a lot of microphones over the years. For six of those years he was in Las Vegas. He thinks WPRO might be the only local station that still carries the same call letters as it had when he was there.

He knew he wanted to be in radio when he was growing up in North Providence and listening to Carl Henry playing rhythm and blues records.

But he walked away from his last radio gig here. It wasn’t what he knew radio could be.

“It was backward and ridiculous.”

He sold cars for a while. He liked it. It involved meeting people.

He retired in the same town he grew up in. He was drawn to its favorite spectator sport. He ran twice for town council in North Providence, once for mayor. He didn’t win.

“If I keep my health, I might run again for mayor.”

That is, of course, a huge question. The stomach pain he started feeling early in 2007 was eventually diagnosed as colon cancer. He underwent surgery June 1. The doctors recommended aggressive chemotherapy. Goodman decided against it.

If there is one thing I have seen far too much of in the last few years, it is people I know dealing with cancer, trying to sort through their options and make the best choices for them and their families.

As so many have done, Goodman tapped into the cancer network. There is the investigative reporter in him, he says. He is connected to the computer for a lot more than entertainment.

“Nothing says ‘If you do chemo life will be better,’ ” he says. “It’s really a big guessing game.”

For him, chemotherapy came out as a lousy tradeoff. The potential misery was not worth the uncertain gain.

He talked with his wife, Judy, his “special angel” who has been through the bad times and the good. He talked with his daughter, Wanda, and his son, Billy. And he is doing it without chemotherapy.

“You can either be depressed or try to come up with a way of life that will not affect your family too much,” he said.

He started to do a lot of walking. He changed the way he ate.

“I know every single thing I’m putting in me,” he says.

There were a lot of vegetables, a lot of salads. Then he suffered a blood clot in his chest, and the blood thinner he had to take meant he had to change his diet. There are a lot of adjustments. It is daily management of his life.

“Right this second, I feel I could do anything,” he says as we await post time in Philadelphia.

Three days a week, he goes to Bible classes at the Grace Christian Fellowship Center near his home on Iris Lane. It is the other side of his treatment, the less quantified side. Instead of chemotherapy, he likes to say he is doing God therapy.

It is the Bible, he says, more than formal religion that helps him find what truly matters.

“When you get to this point, when you’re told ‘you’re going to die,’ you start to reach out. I enjoy reading the Bible. ‘Put your trust in Me’ — that sounds more positive than the doctors.”

He is 67. He has friends and his family, including five grandchildren. There is even North Providence politics to think about. There is a good life and there is cancer.

He is a messenger for God, says Bill Goodman.

“There’s something going on here. He has his hand in it.”

bkerr@projo.com