What It Takes : Fighting for My Life and My Love of the Game (9780698151130) by Herzlich Mark; Coughlin Tom

Author:Herzlich, Mark; Coughlin, Tom [Herzlich, Mark; Coughlin, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2014-06-02T12:00:00+00:00

Are answered prayers miracles? Is that what we’re really praying for—a miracle? What is a miracle, anyway?

I had a lot of time to think about questions like that. I had endless hours to wonder how God moves all the little pieces around on this earth. Look at Walter Musgrove. He thought he’d been dealt the worst possible hand, and with pain in his heart he asked, “Lord, why?” But in fact he’d been given the best hand of all—the chance to go on living. What he thought was bad news was actually a blessing.

Or how about this: I mentioned how, after my junior year, I submitted my name to the NFL to see where the league’s thirty-two top scouts predicted my being drafted. The answer I got back—the second round, not the first—was extremely disappointing. Maybe even crushing. It made me wonder whether I was even as good as I thought I was. A bit reluctantly, I tabled my NFL dream and stayed in college.

A few months after that, and long after I’d been diagnosed, my father ran into one of my assistant coaches at Boston College. My dad didn’t even know who he was, but the coach knew my father. He pulled my dad aside and asked how I was doing. Then he told him he had a friend in the NFL front office.

“I just want you to know, the NFL is notoriously conservative when it comes to rating college juniors,” he said. “They will look at all the grades the scouts give and they will always go with the lowest grade. That’s just how it works.”

My father wondered what he was getting at.

“My friend told me that when he dug around, he saw how many scouts predicted Mark would be a first-round pick,” he said. “Do you know how many it was? It was thirty-one. Thirty-one out of thirty-two. Only one guy thought Mark was a second-rounder.”

At first this news made my father angry. “How could one idiot scout mess up the whole thing?” he asked. But then he thought about it some more, and he realized something profound.

If it weren’t for that one idiot NFL scout, I’d have been rated a first-round pick and almost surely would have left Boston College and signed up for the NFL draft. And the minute I did that, I would no longer be a college student, and—back then—no longer eligible to be covered under my parents’ health insurance. Presumably I would soon have been covered by whatever NFL team picked me.

But the chances are, my cancerous tumor would have been discovered at the preseason combine in Indianapolis, which is where teams make sure they’re not getting damaged goods. And once it was discovered, no team would ever have signed me. I’d have been stuck between two worlds, without health insurance. I’d have been facing a monstrous cancer battle with no way to pay for it. I can’t imagine what that would have done to our family.

What I thought was terrible news was actually a huge blessing.

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