In 2009, Mark Herzlich was an All-American linebacker and the ACC Defensive Player of the Year, and then he was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma in his left femur, and the conversation turned from football to survival. Doctors told him he would be lucky to walk again, let alone play. He was declared cancer-free on September 29, 2009, returned the following year to play all thirteen games for Boston College, went undrafted, signed with the New York Giants as a free agent, and on February 5, 2012, won Super Bowl XLVI. On his way to the game he tweeted, “2 yrs ago I was told I’d never walk again. Just WALKED off plane to #Indy to play in #SuperBowl.”
It is a genuinely great comeback story, and we tell it carefully, because sarcoma stories do not all end this way, and survivors are not heroes for surviving nor failures for not. What makes Herzlich’s story useful for Sarcoma Awareness Month is less the triumph than what it reveals about the disease, that Ewing sarcoma strikes young, athletic, otherwise healthy people, often in the bones and often at the very peak of physical life. It does not select for weakness.
His outcome also depended on exactly what this month keeps emphasizing, aggressive, expert, coordinated treatment for a hard cancer, because comebacks like his are built on reaching the right care and getting the treatment right, and that is not available equally to everyone. The gap is rarely about the patient’s will.
For most families facing Ewing sarcoma, the fight is quieter than a stadium and every bit as real, and the question is whether they can reach the specialists who give them their best shot. When they can, stories like this one become a little more possible. Herzlich walked off that plane and into a Super Bowl; plenty of patients simply need help getting to the clinic.