My good friend, Richard, recently passed-along a link to a Sports Illustrated article about a former University of Michigan place-kicker that had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
Here are a few excerpts from that lengthy piece:
The do-or-die life of kickers—outsiders in their own game—forges a bond that connects them across generations, and misses
LEE JENKINS – September 10, 2012
Ten years after the kick that changed his life, Phil Brabbs walked onto the patio of a coffee shop last Thursday and took three steps back, two to the left. Moments earlier he’d looked like any other suntanned tourist in Emerald Isle, N.C., checking his e-mail at the Beans-N-Screens Internet Café. Now he was standing over an imaginary left hash mark, in his sandals, reciting Philippians 4:13.
It was the verse he chose at Michigan Stadium on Aug. 31, 2002, with five seconds remaining and the Wolverines trailing Washington 29–28. Brabbs was a junior at Ann Arbor who took out student loans because he was not on scholarship. Until that day he had never attempted a field goal in college. Early in the first quarter he missed wide left, and late in the second he missed left again—a snap hook that barely rose more than 10 feet off the ground. At halftime Brabbs was booed by the sellout crowd as he jogged into the locker room, where he sat with his head in his hands. Before the third quarter he missed every one of his warmups, all to the left. Coaches benched Brabbs in favor of his best friend, Troy Nienberg.
With 1:24 left in the fourth quarter, Nienberg pushed a go-ahead 27-yard field goal to the right, and Brabbs told himself, Not only am I going to get lynched, my best friend is going to get lynched with me. But an unfathomable sequence ensued: a Washington three-and-out; a fourth-down pass to Michigan receiver Braylon Edwards that was dropped, ruled a fumble (in the days before replay) and recovered by another Wolverine; and, finally, a too-many-men-on-the-field penalty against the Huskies that set up a 44-yard field goal try. Lloyd Carr didn’t summon Brabbs so much as shove him. “Get out there,” the coach growled. As Brabbs loped onto the field, he looked at the stands and noticed that maybe 10% of the fans had gone. Still, about 100,000 remained. “I was the last guy they wanted to see,” Brabbs says. Michigan receiver Ronald Bellamy grabbed him. “You’ve got this,” he barked…
I felt like I was frozen in time,” says Brabbs, “and then I saw the ball fly between the uprights, and I woke up.” He didn’t know what to do, so he ran, as fast as he could toward midfield until Bellamy caught him and wrestled him down. A hundred teammates leaped on top of them. Bellamy shrieked at the bottom of the dog pile. “I could have died right there,” Brabbs says, “and I’d have died happy…”
Besides the Michigan hard cores, no one heard from Phil Brabbs again. He injured his quad later in the season and tore it in the summer. He made two field goals the rest of his career. He graduated with a degree in engineering, landed a job as an IT project manager and married his girlfriend, Cassie. They had a son, Ocean, and two daughters, Iris and Ruby. They bought a house six blocks from Michigan Stadium. In 2007, while Brabbs was training for a marathon, he felt a pain in his left ankle. Doctors discovered a blood clot in his left leg and, a few months later, another in his right. The day after Brabbs turned 28, he received a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.
He chose the most aggressive treatment: two bone-marrow transplants and seven cycles of chemotherapy. “You’re completely exhausted, lying on your back, and you have a lot of time to think,” Brabbs says. “I’d never really savored the kick—I just sort of stowed it away in my heart—but I started to reflect on it a lot. I tapped into the hope from that game. I asked myself, Why can’t you do it again?”
This spring, tests revealed that Brabbs was free of the myeloma protein…
This is an incredibly long article–the type of writing that the internet allows. The emphasis is on the crazy, unsettled lives of place kickers, not multiple myeloma. But Phil does go on to explain how rebounding after missing field goals helped prepare him for the challenges to come.
CLICK HERE to read more.
Feel good and keep smiling! Pat
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