A Football Story (Mostly)

Disclaimer: this is a long one, but one near and dear to my heart … update on me at the end.

The autumn winds are upon us … a pirate, blustering in from the sea, with a rollicking song, he sweeps along, swaggering boisterously. Uhhh, if you’re not familiar with NFL films, you probably have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. Okay, in case you haven’t noticed, football season is in full swing again—heck, the high school regular season’s already wrapping up. Well, I went to a Loudoun Valley Viking freshman game the other night. I had nothing at stake, personally (other than being a Vikings fan)—I don’t even know the players at that level at this point—it was really just an excuse to meet up with a good buddy I spent years coaching youth ball with (that’s you G). Anyway, it reminded me of another freshman game I watched several years ago …

There have been a lot of highlights and lowlights over the past four years, but a few tough days really stand out. One in particular was in late February, 2021. I’d been diagnosed the previous October, and I’d just completed four rounds of a three-drug chemo combo anchored by the infamous “Red Devil.” That morning, I’d had a long televisit with Dr. Kim, my main man at Georgetown, during which he told me 1. the chemo wasn’t working, 2. the chemo had damaged my heart, and 3. we didn’t really have a clear plan on other options (i.e. we’d basically injected napalm into me for four months, and all it’d done was damage my ticker). At that point, surgery on the main tumor was a no-go—no hospital tumor board would approve such a major operation when I’d already been tagged “terminal.” In short, I was sick, exhausted, and, dare I say, on the verge of defeat.

That also happened to be the day of the first Valley freshman football game of that season. Yep, due to Covid, the season had been shortened and moved to spring. I was lying on a couch in the sitting room of our bedroom when I decided to tune into a stream of the game on my phone. Big mistake. The few minutes I watched were a crippling reminder of everything I was losing. In those days, I’d been thinking quite a bit about things I might never get to do, or do again: see my kids get married, meet my grandchildren, grow old with my wife, fly in a plane, see the ocean, run a race …. And, at that moment, it also occurred to me there was a very good chance I’d never see a football game in person again, and more to the point, I’d never get to see my son (you know by now I just call him “Graber” here) take the field again.

To understand the significance of this, you’ll need some backstory. If I’m correct with my math, I’d coached 27 seasons of youth sports by the time I hung up my whistle for good. Beginning with coaching Briton and Mackie’s soccer teams, then later, Aedan’s soccer, basketball, and of course, football teams … fall and spring, sometimes multiple teams/sports at the same time, year after year. In 27 seasons of coaching three kids in multiple sports, I did not miss a single game—honestly, I don’t think I missed a single practice. Again, doing the math, with football alone up to that point, I think Graber and I must have made our way through 500+ practices and 70+ games together. All those fall evenings at Franklin Park and Friday nights at Fireman’s Field … pure magic. Let it be known that this isn’t even a subtle pat on my own back. For one, I was a baseball player … I really had no business coaching soccer, basketball, or football. Two, although I think I had some great parenting moments coaching the kids over those years, I can think of a few comically bad parenting moments, as well (Graber, if you happen to see this, there’s no need to elaborate on any specific incidents where I might or might not have called you a name no father should ever call his son, especially when said son is only nine years old). And three, the bonds I made with other coaches, many of whom are close friends now, and the immeasurable reward of that time spent with my kids and their friends—let’s just say that coaching was as self-serving an endeavor as I can think of—I got way more out of it than I ever could have given.

Of course, I’m not the hero/protagonist of this story … that’d be Graber. For the record, he would not like me calling him that (no, he’s fine with Graber, but he’d cringe at “hero”). Anyway, I don’t believe he often reads these posts, so I think I’m safe. When he was a young athlete, like 3^rd/4^th grade young, he was a bit of … how do I say this without sounding like an ***hole … a one-kid highlight reel. For those who want to puke at the “crazy, proud, youth-sports parent” tone of this statement, I can only tell you I say this objectively. Simply put, at that age, it all just came very easy to him (yes, his mother’s genes, for sure). Particularly football. He was big, fast, and aggressive. Then, the summer before his 5^th grade year, something happened that changed the trajectory of his life. He was down with the rest of our family visiting my sister’s family in Richmond, when he jumped off a scooter of all things, planted his foot, and, well, his right knee just kinda exploded. His kneecap broke in half, and he ruptured his patellar tendon. I wasn’t there, but my brother told me, once Graber calmed down, lying there on the baking-hot pavement of the cul-de-sac, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, the first thing he asked was, “can I still play football?”—the season was right around the corner.

This one random accident kicked off an odyssey, unlike any other, the two of us would take together over the next eight years. I have special bonds with so many people in my life. My wife of 24 years, my three amazing daughters, members of my extended family, and many, many friendships, some close to 50 years in the making now. But the bond, Graber & Graber, forged by this particular fire, is a bit unique.

He had surgery to repair his kneecap and patellar tendon, and he missed an entire football season, but just six or seven months later, he was playing basketball again. But something wasn’t right. Actually, a lot wasn’t right. The scooter injury had been traumatic enough that his brain had gone into protection mode and had shut off his right quad … he literally couldn’t get the muscle to fire. On top of that, his body had a strange healing response to the surgery. His injured leg “hyper grew.” His surgeon would take x-rays a year or two after the surgery and proceed to tell us Graber, who was probably 5’3” at the time, had a kneecap the size of a 6’3” man. And it wasn’t just his kneecap. His right leg was close to an inch longer than his left, and the femur, lower leg bones, and his foot were all much bigger. The doc called colleagues up at the Hospital for Special Surgery, one of the best ortho hospitals in the world, and asked if anyone had ever seen this. They had not. This, of course, began causing all kinds of other mechanical issues that led to a string of further injuries. All I can say is, we did our best. Hundreds of sessions with physical therapists and athletic trainers. Stretching, massage, electric stimulation, Graston (think of someone trying to butcher your muscles with a dull butter knife), needling … every form of therapy torture known to man, trying to get his quad firing, his leg working right, and his mechanics cleaned up. Dozens of different shoe setups, insoles, etc. etc. Countless late night pep talks trying to assuage the pain of crippling disappointment, isolation from his friends, fear, anxiety, the loss of a big part of his identity, and perhaps worst of all, the sense that the world was moving on without him. Together, we slipped into this black hole, inside a rabbit hole, inside a black hole. To quote our favorite weatherman, Phil Connors, from Groundhog Day, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was the same, and nothing you did mattered?”

Year after year, through all this, Graber kept playing ball. Football, basketball, soccer. I have to tell you, it was brutal. I can remember sitting in the bleachers at basketball games, watching him ice his knee in the second half instead of out on the court playing, thinking, “What the hell are we doing? No kid should have to go through this.” I tried to tell him that he didn’t have to be the athlete he was before—that he didn’t even have to play sports, but he would have none of it. I remember one time I told him that maybe this was an opportunity somehow—that maybe he could be an inspiration to others … he gave me a twelve-year old’s version of a thousand-yard-stare and told me he didn’t want to be anything to anyone, he just wanted to play.

I stopped coaching everything when his eighth-grade football season rolled around. The girls had long moved on, and, after some youth league draft-room drama (everyone knew about Graber’s knee), he’d been picked by a head coach I didn’t know. The next day, I called the coach up and told him he could check me off the list of dads that were going to be calling him to see if they could be assistants. It was time for me to let go, and I knew enough about the coach (that’s you, Morga) that I knew Graber was in good hands. Then, the second game of the season, Graber’s playing middle linebacker, and I watch him make a tackle. He gets up holding his knee. He’s bending it, checking it out. I’m holding my breath. Groundhog Day. The next play is another run up the middle. Graber makes another tackle. This time he gets up, and I know it’s real. I watch him immediately start jogging to the sideline, waving in a substitute. A couple weeks pass … we’re working on the swelling, trying to rehab, and waiting for the MRI results. Then we sit down with the surgeon and get the news: it appeared that on those back-to-back plays, Graber’s kneecap had dislocated and snapped back into place. In doing so, most of the load-bearing cartilage under it broke off completely (in hindsight, that cartilage had probably been damaged way back in the scooter accident, we just hadn’t realized how bad). He gave us two options … Option 1. if Graber was ready to stop playing sports altogether (at age thirteen), we could forgo surgery and maybe look at getting a knee replacement down the road. Option 2. the surgeon could try to fix it by opening up the knee again, cutting some ligaments, flipping his kneecap over, and screwing the bigger pieces of cartilage back to the underside of his kneecap. It might work, it might not. We wouldn’t know until he went through nine more months of rehab and he tried playing. If the cartilage broke off again or disintegrated, we’d know pretty quick. A week later, Graber went back under the knife.

Then, a few months into rehab, Covid hit, and everything shut down. No more in-person PT sessions, no more outside help. We were on our own. The knee was coming along “okay,” but he still had all the leg growth issues, etc. Again, I tried to get Graber to maybe focus on other interests. He’s got some guitar talent (again, not from me). Foster that talent, I told him. Start a band—you can play music your whole life and guitar is damn easy on the knees … but he was never gonna let go of playing ball, especially football. I thought about other sports that maybe wouldn’t require a 100% healthy knee. We started doing bag work, mitt work, and eventually we put on the headgear and gloves and began sparring. No, I did not punch my child in the face. I still had about fifty pounds on him at that point, and I mostly pawed at him and pushed him around while he worked on his combos. Then one day, he shot a perfect straight right hand down the pipe that landed dead center in the opening of my headgear. Fifty-pound advantage or not, I felt that sucker. I told him maybe I was done sparring—I think this was about the time I began playing pickleball, in fact.

Finally, that summer, I got sick and, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to shake it. By fall, I’d gotten my official diagnosis—a ridiculously rare cancer that had come out of nowhere and spread all over before we knew it. Amidst a global pandemic and stage IV cancer, a profound isolation set in, and with our world more or less falling apart, the last thing we were focusing on was another Graber comeback. That following spring is when I tried tuning into the first freshman game. Everything he’d lost, everything I was losing, all represented by a few minutes of streamed high school football. It’s not an exaggeration to say that was one of the darkest days of my life.

But, you play to the whistle, right? How many times had we coaches screamed that over the years? So that’s what we did. I eventually got the surgery I wanted, to at least remove the big tumor under my sternum, that April. All bets were off, as the cancer had spread throughout my lungs, etc., but there was a chance my time maybe wasn’t going to be so short after all. I talked to Graber about football again. Did he still want to try to come back? Of immediate concern, would it be better or worse for him to be a part of the high school program the next season (fast approaching at that point) if he knew he might not get cleared to play or see the field? He hardly even understood the questions. He wanted to play. Period.

Late that spring, I called the head coach of Valley’s football program and asked if I could come in and talk to him. When I sat down in his office, I told him I knew it was every coach’s nightmare to have parents calling for such meetings and that I hoped this would be the only time we ever met like that (it was). I gave him some background about Graber’s knee. I told him that we weren’t sure yet if the last surgery had worked, that it’d be a while before he got cleared, and that I had no idea how things were going to shake out. But I told him Graber was a football player, plain and simple, and that he was all in. Then, I reluctantly told the coach about my situation. It was all matter-of-fact, but I told him there might come a time in the next few years where things went south for me, and if that happened, Graber would need structure and support. I told the coach Graber was surrounded by great men already, family members, my friends, dads of his friends, but it wouldn’t hurt if he had not just the camaraderie of his “boys” on the team, but role models on the coaching staff, as well. Looking back now, I have no idea if the coach would even remember this conversation. My God, I can only imagine what he was thinking! There are over a hundred boys in the Loudoun Valley High School football program (9-12) each season, and of course we were just another “story.” Knee injuries, check. Cancer, check. These things happen. Every kid—every family—in the program was going through something. Either way, to his credit, the coach said all the right things. He thought it’d be good for Graber to be a part of the program, cleared or not, and said he’d love to have him.

As it turned out, Graber wasn’t cleared that, his sophomore season, until the last few games of the season, but he did get back on the field, and I did, indeed, get to watch live and in person. It was magical, to say the least. The rehab and strengthening continued, and in the meantime, Graber started growing again. His days of highlight reel 70-yard touchdown runs were well behind him, but honestly, as much fun as it’d been watching him carry the ball when he was younger, he was always more of a hunter, and he took to chasing quarterbacks like he was born to do it. When we got knocked out of the playoffs the following, his junior, season, I think the team had one week off before off-season training began. He hit it hard. He didn’t miss a single lift all through the winter and only missed a couple in the spring, even though he’d taken up a new sport, lacrosse. After his second surgery, in eighth grade, Graber’s surgeon had told us he’d probably never be able to do weighted squats at all, ever again … I think he came close to hitting 400 pounds that summer. And the super-sized, 6’3” man’s kneecap that had caused so many issues over the years? Well, the rest of his body had suddenly grown to over 6’2”, and his growth plates were still open. A great off-season, great summer, great camp, great pre-season. But Groundhog Day wasn’t done with us just yet.

Anyone who’s been following along here the past few years may remember what happened next. Five days before the season opener his senior year, Graber stepped out of the pool one evening and said, “Hey, man, I can’t straighten my leg!”  Turns out an old surgical screw had broken off in his knee and was floating around in the joint. A couple of days later, his surgeon went in yet again and scoped out the screw. There was a bright side to this final hurdle though. When the surgeon scoped the knee, he took the camera throughout the joint to see how things looked. When he came out to the waiting room to tell me how the surgery went, he was downright giddy … all that cartilage he’d repaired back in 8^th grade looked pretty damn good. There’s a saying: “Once you have a knee, you always have a knee,” meaning once you have a major knee injury and surgery, you can recover, but that knee is never going to be the same. Well, Graber most definitely “has a knee,” but for the first time in eight years, we knew he’d healed, and the knee was healthy, relatively speaking. Three weeks of PT (the doctor didn’t even bother to write a script, he just told us to do what we’d been doing the past eight years) and he was cleared to play again.

I’ve written quite a bit about gratitude over the past four years … I do a lot of my praying while driving, and I always begin by listing things I’m thankful for. This part tends to take a while—terminal cancer has a funny way of making you thankful for just about everything. I can tell you every Friday evening that fall, you can bet my prayers started with giving thanks for being right there, right then, alive in that moment, sitting in my truck, driving to a friggin’ high school football game to see #43 on the field again. Everything we’d been through together, over the previous eight years, had somehow come full circle. Everything we’d lost, somehow given back to us. It was amazing.

Of course, football, like life, is no fairy tale. Not long after he was cleared, he started bumping up against the reality of missing the first four games of the season and losing some of his traction in the lineup. Football is unlike baseball, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, tennis, etc. etc. in one crucial way: when your days are up, they’re up. Pretty much every other sport there is, you can play in some kind of rec league or just for fun deep into middle-age and beyond. Not football. When you take off the pads the final time, that’s it. The weight of having so little football left after so many years was mounting, and Graber wanted to play every snap he could. What he’d been through wasn’t “fair” of course—none of it—none of the injuries over the years, not the pandemic, not the distraction of having a dad with cancer, and certainly not a broken screw right at the beginning of his senior season. But for all the lessons football teaches its disciples, one of the most valuable (albeit harsh) is that yes, at all levels, you are an asset—you’re a cog in a wheel—you’re just one moving part in a complex mechanism, something bigger than yourself. “Fairness” is not something that you should necessarily expect, out of football or life.

So, half-way into the season, we sat down and had one of the most important conversations we’d had over all the years and all the challenges … I told him I felt his frustration—in a different way, but as strongly as he did himself (he would understand when he had kids). But I told him the one thing he would be able to look back on when it was all over was that, when it came to football, nobody had given him anything for free. Every snap he played, every tackle he made, when it was all over, he would know in his heart he’d earned it (and then some) on his own, because he simply willed it into existence. I told him, as blessed as he was to have friends and family, fans and coaches that cared for him, nobody would ever quite know what he’d been through, and that was fine. What mattered was that he would know—that regardless of what happened, he would know, through all the challenges, for better or worse, what he was made of. Most importantly, I told him he was at a pivotal fork in the road—one he would come to many, many times in his life: you can accept being a victim of fate, bad luck, whatever, and let that notion take hold in your mind and define you, or you can refuse to accept it, stick yourself out there, and keep fighting. This second choice isn’t as simple as it sounds, of course. We go to the movies for fairy-tale endings … life is different. There are no guarantees things will work out for you. You can flat out refuse to be a victim and do everything right, and you still might be left disappointed with the outcome, but at least you will know that you saw things through and honored yourself in the effort. Finally, I told him my days of being able to help him were long gone. He was a man, or close enough to it. What he did from that point on, was up to him.

Graber, indeed, saw things through. He met with the head coach and told him, with respect, he’d earned every snap they’d give him, then he put his head down and went to work. The final half of that, his senior year, was truly magical. He started at edge and had a helluva time in opposing teams’ backfields. The team bonded, finished solid, and when they got knocked out of the playoffs in the second round, most of the seniors stayed on the field, surrounded by family, and cried like babies. How was that last part magical? Because it represented all that is special about Friday night lights: pure love for a game, a sense of community like no other, invaluable life lessons learned (some inspirational, some harsh), and brotherly bonds forged in the trenches. For me personally, those final months of Graber’s senior year, even the playoff loss tears, were beautiful.

In the end, Graber decided to put his film out, and although he was late to the recruiting game, he quickly had a half-dozen offers to play at the next level. The recruiting process—the visits, the offers, etc.—was fun—affirmation that, after being written off so many times, he’d fought his way all the way back. The “saying no” part—the “letting go” part—was hard for him. But God knew he’d given enough to the game, and he’d gotten just as much back from it. It was time to move on. And, before long, lacrosse was in full swing. Another magical season, in fact—one filled with a lot of success, triumphs, accolades, and memories. Again, God is good. Now, the autumn winds are blowing once more—the first football season in thirteen years that Graber & Graber are just fans. The first in many that dad Graber doesn’t have to pray that young Graber’s knee holds up for one more snap and that he’ll be blessed to just be able to play the game.

In an interview, Sean Connery (yes, of 007 fame) was once asked what, if anything, made him cry. He thought about it for a moment, then, in that one-of-a-kind, Scottish brogue, replied: “Athletics!” as if the answer was obvious. I can’t say I disagree with him. The old “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” The original, and best, reality show out there. The ultimate stand-in for life itself. And it doesn’t matter what level either, does it? One of the most invested-in games I can remember ever coaching or being a part of was a rec league soccer championship game Briton and Mackie played in together when they were maybe eight and nine. Rest assured, none of the kids in that game likely ended up playing D1 or professional soccer, but man, it was intense. In the end, we got the victory, but had we lost, I can tell you we’d have all been sitting in a fast-food drive-thru fifteen minutes later, goofing off and having a ball. It was the shared experience, the drama of the struggle, the lessons learned, the journey that ultimately mattered, not the outcome. Hell, probably the single greatest sporting event I ever witnessed was watching Tegan in her first Special Olympics track meet … running the 50 meters with three escorts alongside her, Graber and his boys out there with her, volunteering … priceless.

I was walking (if you can call it that) up and down the driveway a few months ago in the middle of what I now like to call “a pain day.” I won’t elaborate other than to say I was laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all and the inexplicable state of just suffering for no apparent reason. Needless to say, between the laughs, I was cussing quite a bit. I mean like breaking records cussing … just shuffling along, cackling and cussing. And in between the ****s and the *** ****s and the holy ****s and the laughing, I kept saying “I will not quit.” Side note: I’m wondering now if any of my neighbors were watching/listening, praying that I would, indeed, quit—at least the cussing and maniacal laughing. Anyway, it occurred to me that even though I very well might “lose” in the end, and along the way, I will break a little every now and then with some tears and self-wallowing, it seemed important to keep saying the words out loud: I will not quit. I suppose this notion is something I tried to instill in Graber over the years and through the long journey we took together, described above. Well, maybe all those desperate late night pep talks took root somewhere deep down in the pep-talker, himself … but words are just words. In the end, it was seeing Graber take the words to heart and actually live them out that ultimately made me a true believer. Refuse to be a victim. Anything is possible. Do not quit. Thanks, #43 … an inspiration, whether you want to be or not.

How am I doing? If you’ve read my last several posts, you may remember earlier this year, I put specific odds on being able to do certain things this year, or ever again. I think I put the odds at finishing an adventure race this year at 50/1. Well, about six weeks ago, I raced up in Maryland, along with my sidekicks, Paddle Boy (Logan Welsh) and the Washko duo (JohhnyWash and TurboKristin). I’d taken an extra week off chemo, but to say I was comically unprepared for this one would be an understatement, even though it was a very short (4 hours), very basic race, as adventure races go. It was ugly, but somehow glorious. I think we finished 39^th out of 54 teams. Not bad, all things considered, except this race seemed to have many small children in it for some reason (a lot of family teams), including the doppelganger of the kid in Jerry Maquire (“D’you know the human head weighs eight pounds?”), who passed me on his very small bike, late in the race. I have not yet decided if I’m going to destroy the GoPro evidence of this or not. As for an actual medical update … chemo continues, and I just started radiation on a few tumors in the lining of my lungs. Then we’re gonna radiate my orbital bone/eye (I’ve got one sucker wedged between my optical nerve and my brain), then my femur heads, pelvic bones, and the muscles surrounding my iliac bones in my pelvis. Yes, the new “front” in the battle seems to be my muscles, which, in this case, is literally a pain in my ass. Finally, we are still sorting out the liver stuff—whether we’ll radiate or try a new procedure offered up at New York Presbyterian. In short, I’ll be in some form of treatment just about every day the next six to eight weeks. This all sounds like a lot, but honestly, I’m doing okay. Been back out on the bike a few times recently, and I’m trying to make that a part of my routine again, at least on days when I’m not stumbling up and down my driveway, cussing.

To everyone out there, thank you once again for all the love and support. I know I keep saying it, but it has played an immeasurable role in keeping me going. And to you, Graber, thanks for the journey brother, and all the lessons I thought I was teaching you, when in fact, you were teaching me. Okay then, until next time, let’s all sit back and enjoy a little football. Peace out!