What It Takes: Fighting For My Life and My Love of the Game - Hardcover

FOREWORD

As a head football coach in the NFL I’ve been around a lot of tough men. You don’t make it to the NFL, and you certainly don’t last, unless you’re exceptionally tough. Mark Herzlich, whom I’ve had the privilege of coaching on the New York Giants, is one of the toughest men I know.

I was well aware of Mark’s many accomplishments long before he joined the Giants. I used to be head coach at Boston College, and though I left before Mark got there, I kept track of the team and I heard a lot about number 94. Mark was a tremendous football player for the Eagles, a first-team All-American and the Atlantic Coast Conference Defensive Player of the Year in 2008. He was highly regarded by everyone in the Boston College community, and his future seemed limitless.

But in 2009 Mark’s life took a drastic turn. He learned he had an extremely rare bone disease, and he was told he’d never play football again. For a time his survival was not a sure thing. For someone like Mark—so young, so strong, so full of promise—it was a staggering blow. Doctors recommended a surgery that would end Mark’s football career, just as he was discovering how good he really was.

Mark had other ideas. Despite what doctors told him, Mark truly believed he would play football again, so he made some very difficult decisions about his treatment. He didn’t take the safe road; he went with the riskier, harder course of action. And even while he was undergoing weeks of grueling treatment, he would often hit the weight room to stay strong for his eventual return to the field. Mark never lost sight of his goal, and he never stopped pushing himself past the limits other people set for him.

It is a testament to Mark’s belief in himself and his strength of character that he made the decisions he made and fought as hard as he did.

There would be other setbacks for Mark. Even after he somehow made it back to the football field, he wasn’t selected in the NFL draft. That was when the New York Giants entered the picture. At the urging of our team president, John Mara—like Mark, a Boston College alum—I met with our general manager, Jerry Reese, and discussed the possibility of giving Mark a chance to play for the Giants. There are only a few open spots in any training camp and dozens of good players waiting to take them. But the vote on the Giants was unanimous—we were all in favor of giving Mark a shot.

After that he faced another obstacle—the NFL lockout. Because of the lockout, our training camp was condensed, and we never had a chance to work with Mark in the off-season. The first time we saw him was when he showed up at camp. We had questions about Mark’s physical condition, and we were eager to see him play. Because of everything he went through, we were even prepared to give him a little leeway.

Yet Mark never gave any indication he needed any leeway. Quite the opposite: Mark was relentless.

He wasn’t far removed from his treatments, and he had to deal with other physical setbacks along the way. But it was clear Mark worked extremely hard to get himself into NFL shape. It was clear he didn’t just want to play again—he wanted to play at the highest level. In that first training camp Mark’s endurance was unbelievable. I am still in awe of that. If it was ninety-five degrees and unbearably humid, Mark was still out there, pushing himself harder and harder every practice, every day.

Mark faced extraordinary adversity and answered it with an extraordinary show of will, faith, and strength. On the field Mark personified toughness.

But that is only half the story. In 1996 I created the Jay Fund Foundation, which provides financial, emotional, and practical support to families of children stricken with cancer. Each spring, the Jay Fund hosts a fund-raising dinner and golf classic. Mark is on the Jay Fund advisory board, and he has become one of the stars of our annual event. It is quite a thing to see how the children respond to Mark. The kids cling to him, drawn in by his big heart and his openness. And Mark doesn’t just spend time with them—he becomes a friend. Mark stays in touch with some of the kids who most desperately need companionship as they fight their own battles to survive.

That positive, never-say-no attitude is something I see in Mark with each play on the field and each interaction off it. What he’s been able to accomplish in football, and how he has used that platform to provide hope and inspiration to kids and families everywhere, is truly remarkable. Mark is a giver. He gives of himself tirelessly, and if you ask him to do something to help other people, he will never refuse.

One of the jobs of a head coach is to evaluate skill and talent. But it’s just as important to evaluate a player’s character. With Mark, that part was easy. He is clearly a man of great courage and compassion—a man whose bravery and achievements make him a hero to children and grown-ups alike.

I truly believe Mark’s story will motivate and inspire anyone who reads it, and that is why I am proud to introduce him to you. I have coached football for almost forty-five years now, and there are few players I admire as much as Mark Herzlich.

INTRODUCTION

Let me tell you what it feels like to hit someone.

First of all, it’s silent. Or at least it is for me. I don’t hear the sound of bodies colliding, the rumbling thunder of impact. The first sound I hear is the deep thud of my opponent’s body hitting the ground, followed by gasps as he struggles for air. Maybe it’s the adrenaline that blocks out the sound, or maybe it’s my euphoria at delivering the hit. Either way, it’s silent.

A good hit is also strangely effortless. If I do it right it feels like the man I’m hitting evaporates into me. There is no resistance, only the purity of my own movement and momentum. Many of the guys I hit stand three or four inches taller and outweigh me by twenty to fifty pounds, but none of that matters. A perfect hit absorbs the extra mass and feels like nothing at all. Like the time I drove my right shoulder into the chest plate of a three-hundred-pound tight end so perfectly flush, his arms flailed forward and his head snapped back, his helmet unbuckled and sailed into the air, his body recoiled like a crash-test dummy, and his feet were the last things to hit the turf.

And I didn’t hear or feel a thing until it was all over.

For much of my life I’ve been a football player. My position: linebacker. Physically devastating another man’s body is my job description. It is also something I truly love doing. To be honest, I can’t say I’ve ever felt guilty about inflicting pain on a football field.

I understand football is a violent sport, and I’m aware of all the research into the damage high-speed collisions can cause the brain and body. I firmly believe we should do everything possible to make football a safer sport on every level. But when I step between the white lines, my view of the world is filtered through the steel mesh of my face mask, which blocks out everything except the bodies I need to displace in order to get to my endpoint: the ball carrier. There is no room for regret or caution or apology on a football field. As a player I’ve entered into a covenant not to resist pain and damage, but to overcome it. My opponents have entered into the same agreement. We all operate under the same code.

Believe me, I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of brutal, bone-crunching hits—hits that temporarily flattened my lungs and scrambled my brain and sent tremors of pain radiating through my body. And after each one, I’ve risen up from the hard ground and walked off the pain. It’s a point of pride to get right back up after a big hit. That’s because a football player is not conditioned for self-preservation. He is not taught to protect his body. A football player is trained to surrender his body to the game, to hurl it at brick walls of bone and muscle again and again and again. In football, your body becomes your weapon. Your strength becomes your faith. Your toughness becomes your salvation.

Now let me tell you about the hit that took all that away from me.

The hit that left me fighting for my life.

It didn’t happen on a football field. It happened in a small room with an examination table, two chairs, a window, and a metal light box mounted on the wall. My mother, Barb, sat in a chair, while my father, Sandy, stood by the window, staring out absently. I sat on the exam table, waiting.

On that day in 2009 I was a star football player at Boston College. I was a first-team All-American. I was the ACC Defensive Player of the Year, and I was a finalist for the Butkus Award for the nation’s top linebacker. I was six-foot-four, two hundred forty-eight pounds, and in peak physical condition. On almost every day I played or practiced football, and at night I dreamed about it, and in the mornings I woke up desperate to play it again. My life was football and my future was football, and nothing else. I was projected to be a top-ten pick in the upcoming NFL draft.

Four doctors in white lab coats came into the small exam room. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew four doctors couldn’t be good. One of them took two MRI results and jammed them in the top of the light box, then turned it on. Images of the two longest bones in my body—my left femur, or thighbone, and my right femur—were lit up. But the two bones looked completely different. It was as if they came from different bodies, or even different species. I knew that couldn’t be good, either.

The doctor got right to it. He explained that I almost certainly had an extremely rare disease that affects fewer than two out of every million people in the world. Only two hundred and fifty or so cases of the disease are reported each year. Depending on further tests, my chances of surviving the disease could be as low as ten percent.

The news blindsided me. I felt an instant rush of heat through my body, and before I knew it my hands and neck and forehead were sweating. I felt a strange weightlessness, like when you’re leaning back in a chair and it’s about to tip over. I felt dizzy and distant and disconnected from everything.

“Mark is a very good football player,” were the next words I understood, coming from my father. “He was hoping to make a career of it. When will he be able to play football again?”

The doctor’s startled look snapped me back to consciousness. He explained that if I survived—if I survived—the damage from the disease and the treatment would leave me “unable to participate in physical activity.”

“What do you mean, ‘physical activity’?” I heard my mother ask.

The doctor hesitated for just the slightest second.

Then he said, “Mark will never be able to play football again.”

Just like that, it was over.

I was twenty-one years old.

The story I’m about to tell is not really a football story, though there’s lots of football in it. And it isn’t a medical story, either, though the diagnosis I received is the reason I wrote this book. To me this isn’t really even a story, in the way it is to others. To me, this is my life. It’s made of flesh and blood.

Mostly, this book is about something we all have to do at some point in our lives—face a terrifying obstacle and find out how tough we are. Face our deepest fears and find our strongest faith. Face a troubling enemy, and find our true identity. Reach deep to find what it takes to fight for your life.

I grew up in a middle-class town in eastern Pennsylvania, not far from Valley Forge, where George Washington made camp during the Revolutionary War. I had what you would call a white-picket-fence childhood, with two loving parents and a younger brother, Brad, and a big backyard, where Brad and I pretended to be big stars like Barry Sanders and Marshall Faulk. But I had only one true sports hero—my father, Sandon Mark Herzlich Sr. My full name is actually Sandon Mark Herzlich Jr., so right from the start we had a special bond. My dad wasn’t a professional athlete, but he was strong and fit. He played lacrosse on a local club team, and I loved going to see him play. In fact, my earliest and most vivid memory of him is my mother pointing him out to me on a lacrosse field.

“He’s right over there, Marky. Can you see him?” she said, holding me up in the air. “Wave hello to Daddy.”

The man I saw waving back at me had huge biceps and defined legs. His face was hidden behind a shiny helmet, and he carried a gleaming metal lacrosse stick, like he was some kind of a warrior, which I guess he was. And when he ran off and started playing, he was fast and strong and powerful—to my young eyes like the Hulk and Superman rolled into one. He was the epitome of a pop culture icon—the rugged manly man. On the field that day, I got my first inkling of what I believed it meant to be a man.

It meant being just like my dad.

My dreams were shaped on that lacrosse field and many other fields like it, and ever since I can remember I wanted to be an athlete just like my father. And through hard work and tireless devotion I put myself on a path to achieving that dream. But then came the diagnosis, and everything I’d believed in—everything I’d thought to be true—came crumbling down.

I thought I was indestructible. I learned none of us is.

I thought life was something I could control if I worked hard enough. I learned it wasn’t.

I thought I knew what it meant to be tough. I learned I didn’t.

This is a story about everything I learned once I realized I didn’t know anything.

The reason I wrote this book is because I believe there is something in my story that speaks to all of us. Adversity is a great equalizer, and illness doesn’t care who you are. We all face challenges, some not so important, some life-or-death. We’re all eventually on the receiving end of a hit—a knocked-down, laid-out, brought-to-our-knees, bruised and bloodied hit.

And when that happens—when we wind up in the darkest, loneliest place we’ve ever been, facing the fight of our lives—we’re forced to ask ourselves, “What am I going to do now? Am I going to fight this thing? Am I going to beat it? Am I tough enough to beat it?

“Do I have what it takes?”

What I discovered, and what we can all discover, is that we’re capable of so much more than we ever dreamed. We’re stronger than we ever imagined.

We’re tougher than we ever could have known.

My own journey took me to unexpected places and rocked my mind and heart and soul. It altered the way I look at life and it altered the arc of my dreams. The people I met along the way—the doctors, nurses, new friends and supporters—changed me to my very core.

What I’m about to describe to you wasn’t just a detour in the journey of my life—it was the event that taught me what that journey is all about.

And at the end of it all, there is another unforgettable moment that happened on a sports field—a moment so surprising and logic-defying, I’d hardly believe it if it hadn’t happened to me.

My illness changed me in other ways, too. It brought me closer to my extraordinary family—and without my family I don’t know where I’d be. It brought me closer to my friends,...