What It Takes

In 2011, he became starting linebacker for the New York Giants and triumphed in the Super Bowl—after being told his cancer diagnosis meant he would never play football again....

As a child, Herzlich found true meaning in football, eventually turning his passion into a first-team All-American spot at Boston College. But the budding star was sidelined by persistent, debilitating pain in his left leg. The shocking diagnosis: He had Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Doctors put his odds of survival as low as ten percent—and no one thought he would be able to run, much less play football, again.

Then Herzlich learned of a radical treatment that would give him the best chance to regain his strength and maybe even play football again, but it could cost him his life. Relying on family, friends, faith, and deep wells of determination to help him through treatment, his plan worked. Not only could he run, but he was physically stronger than ever, and mentally ready to battle his way into the NFL. When he was passed over by all thirty-two teams in the draft, he dug deeper and continued his training, winning a spot in the Giants’ training camp and, eventually, on the team.

Mark Herzlich fought a battle against cancer, against statistics, and some days against himself. Told with candor and raw emotion, What It Takes is a story for anyone who has ever fought to beat the odds, for anyone who has ever been told that what they are about to attempt is next to impossible.

INCLUDES PHOTOS

With a foreword by New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin“I truly believe Mark’s story will motivate and inspire anyone who reads it.”— New York Giants Head Coach Tom CoughlinMark Herzlich is a linebacker for the New York Giants. Winner of the ESPY award for Best Comeback by an Athlete, Mark now seeks to inspire others to fight their own diseases and achieve their dreams in the face of harsh obstacles. He lives in New Jersey.
 

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, and it brought me closer to God. It was only after I got sick that I was able to pray and speak to God and walk through the door He opened for me at birth. It was only then that I walked with Him through the valley of the shadow of death.

And it was only after I’d lost all my physical strength and toughness, and was left feeling less like a man than ever before, that an amazing woman came into my life and taught me what it truly means to be a man.

Because, you see, I also thought I knew what it meant to be in love, and to have someone love you. But I didn’t.

Finally, and perhaps more than anything else, my story is about the blessings we sometimes take for granted in our lives. Because sometimes it’s only in hardship that we discover how truly blessed we are.

When I was in the darkest stretch of my fight I received a lot of letters from other people going through their own hard battles. Many of those letters came from kids. One of them was from an eight-year-old boy named Logan.

Logan sent me two photos of himself—one that showed him with no hair and pale skin, and one that showed him in a football uniform, running on a field with a full head of tousled brown hair, a determined look on his face.

In his jangly script, he wrote:

Mark:

I have leukemia. I know what you’re going through. I just want to tell you, never give up and always be positive. I know it is tough but you’re tougher and you will win this fight.

P.S. I’m in remission. I lost my hair but now I have lots of it.

I haven’t been able to write back to every Logan out there who sent me a letter, so this book is my way of doing so now. This book is the letter I have wanted to write to hundreds of students, children, patients, teachers, moms, dads, grandmothers and grandfathers, doctors and nurses, fans and friends—all of whom have touched my life in remarkable ways.

I hope what you’re about to read gives you even a fraction of the strength and inspiration and hope their letters gave me.

CHAPTER ONE

In my life there is before and there is after, and that divide started with pain.

It was right after the New Year—a time for dreaming and looking ahead—and I was home from Boston College for winter break. At the time my mother was coaching squash in our hometown of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and I challenged her to a game. My mother, like my father, was an athlete. She had played squash, field hockey, and lacrosse at Wesleyan University, and had eventually been inducted into the school’s inaugural Athletic Hall of Fame, alongside football coach Bill Belichick and marathoner Bill Rodgers. She was a sophomore when she played lacrosse for the first time ever, and by the end of her senior year, she was playing for the national team. My mother was fast and aggressive, and she had unbelievable eye-hand coordination, and on the squash court, I was technically no match for her.

Even so, I was determined to beat her. And in sports, determination can go a long way. We got on the court and my mom put the tiny black squash ball wherever she wanted—high, low, deep, shallow, everywhere. All I could do was chase down every shot and wait until she made a mistake, which I happily did. I still had a chance to beat her when I lunged for one of her perfectly placed shots.

As I lunged I felt a sharp pain in my left leg.

Pain, I have come to learn, is a deeply personal thing. The only one in the world who can feel it is you. No one knows how much you hurt, and no one can ever know. You can share your thoughts with others, and you can share your joy and happiness. But you cannot share your pain. It is yours and yours alone, and your relationship with your pain may be the most personal relationship you ever have.

As a football player, I was no stranger to pain. By then I’d probably played in a couple hundred football games in youth leagues and high school and college, and I’d been banged up in all sorts of ways. Twisted ankles, broken bones, mangled fingers, you name it. And over the years I’d learned that in football, pain is something you play through. Pain is something you endure. You don’t allow pain to take you off the football field. You don’t complain about your pain or use it as an excuse. In football you swallow your pain and you play as if you’re not in pain at all.

In my freshman year at Boston College, one of my teammates, Brian—who happened to be the Big East Rookie of the Year and a top NFL prospect—made the mistake of telling a reporter about his pain. He explained that he’d been playing at less than a hundred percent strength, and that the team’s trainers made him go out and play anyway, and that was why he needed shoulder surgery in the off-season. The day his quotes appeared in the newspaper, our head coach, Tom O’Brien, huddled us together for a team meeting on our practice field.

“You all know how I feel about the media,” Coach O’Brien said to start things off. “Don’t tell the press anything. Not your opinions, not your injuries, not your feelings or philosophical observations. Nothing.”

Then Coach picked up a copy of the newspaper and said, “Brian, stand up.”

Brian did as he was told.

“You told a reporter you weren’t feeling a hundred percent,” Coach said, his face turning red. He pointed to the team’s defensive line coach, Keith Willis, who had played in the NFL for several years. “Keith, were you ever feeling a hundred percent when you played in the NFL?” Coach hollered.

“No, sir,” Keith said.

“Bill!” Coach continued, pointing to our linebacker coach. “Have you ever played at a hundred percent?”

“No, sir,” Bill said.

Coach O’Brien went around the room and asked the same question of every coach there. Big, tough, strong, hard men. And every one of them said the same thing: “No, sir.”

Then Coach turned to Brian.

“How the hell could you ever be a hundred percent before the last game of the season?” he screamed, his eyes bulging and his veins popping. “Don’t ever blame trainers for your bumps and bruises!”

I sat there, stunned. I was just a freshman, and I was shocked to see a player as good as Brian publicly shamed that way. After that, I never complained about any of my injuries. I learned to play through them. The culture of football demands that you deal with pain like you deal with any other minor annoyance—you block it out of your mind so you can go out and play the game.

So when I felt the sharp, unusual pain on the squash court, I really didn’t think much of it. It bounced right off the imaginary wall I’d built around the pain center of my brain. It felt like something pinching on the inside of my left knee, almost like I’d banged it against a helmet during a tackle. It just didn’t feel like anything major. But when I told my mother about it, she immediately shut me down.

“Let’s take a break,” she said. “You just finished a whole season of football.”

Reluctantly, I left the court without finishing the game. The next day I felt better and I asked my mother for a rematch.

“We’d better not,” she said. My mother was determined to protect me from myself. She knew I was so headstrong, I’d play through the pain, and she didn’t want me hurting myself any further.

“C’mom, Mom, just one more game,” I pleaded. “I’ve got to end on a good note.”

“No way, mister. Not gonna happen.”

My mom took me to my favorite lunch spot, Nudy’s, instead. I ordered my usual, the bacon-ranch fajita wrap, and decided to take my mom’s advice: I rested my knee for the remainder of my winter break, and when I didn’t feel the sharp pain again, I wrote it off as a onetime thing. When I returned to Boston College for winter conditioning drills, I told the team’s medical staff about the pain I’d felt, but assured them it had gone away. Telling a trainer about your pain is different from complaining—you want them to know how you feel so they can have a record of your injuries and adjust your workload. The goal is always to be ready for game day, and telling your trainer about any pain is the responsible thing to do. A couple of medical staffers looked over my knee and listened to my assurance that it was no big deal.

They agreed and gave me the thumbs-up to practice and play.

My first winter workout began with six eighty-yard sprints. The players formed a straight row along the goal line of our domed practice field, the really big guys on the left, the not-quite-as-big guys in the middle, and the smaller skill guys on the right. I was in the middle with the linebackers, fullbacks, and tight ends. My group had to run each sprint in under ten seconds, with a forty-five-second rest in between. I dug my right toe into the turf as I loaded up on my left leg, and when the whistle blew I ran the first sprint pretty easily. I knocked off the second and third sprints with no problem, either.

For the fourth sprint, I cocked my left hand back over my head as my right hand touched the turf to stabilize my torso. I wound my body into a coil of potential energy. At the whistle my muscles tensed and fired. My left arm swung out in front of my body, propelling me forward. My right knee shot up toward my face. Finally, my left leg straightened, launching me.

And that was when I screamed.

I felt a fiery pain in the same spot I’d felt it on the squash court. Even so, I kept running and finished the sprint. I went ahead with the fifth and sixth sprints, too, but instead of pushing off hard at the start I began slowly and built up speed after forty yards or so. I wasn’t about to bow out of the first practice of the year, pain or no pain. I told myself I was just clearing away the cobwebs of the winter break.

But after the sprint drill, the pain was still there, and I had no choice but to tell the trainer about it. If they’d asked me to run six more sprints, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done it. The trainer told me to go to the weight room and finish my workout there.

“Go do some lifting and see how it feels,” he said.

In the weight room, I went over to the big leg-press machine. I wanted to test my leg. I sat down at the bottom of the machine and put my feet up against a platform that held the weight. I’d loaded only three hundred and fifteen pounds, which for me was a good warm-up. Ordinarily I could press as much as six hundred pounds. I released the lock and let the platform lower so that my knees were bent and ready to push the weight back up. But the instant I tried to push the weight, I realized I was stuck.

The pain in my left knee was so sharp, I couldn’t even push the platform a single inch.

I took my left foot off the platform and used just my right leg to push it back up and lock it. I got off the machine and limped over to our strength coach, Jason Loscalzo, or “Loco,” as we called him.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t work out my legs,” I told him.

Loco sent me to the trainer, who gave me an ice pack and told me to ice my knee and keep track of the pain.

The ice didn’t help, and neither did rest. The pain in my knee not only continued—it got worse. I went back to practice and I kept doing workouts, and for a few days the pain was manageable. But after a while, it wasn’t. The pain began to colonize my entire leg. It moved up from my knee to my thigh, and it wouldn’t go away. I’d sit in a classroom at Boston College and feel my leg start to throb. Or I’d be in my dorm room playing video games with my roommate, Codi, and I’d feel the pain attacking my leg.

Even in the dead of night, when I was fast asleep, the pain would appear and stab me in the leg, like Freddy Krueger torturing my thigh with his sharply bladed gloves, and I’d wake up with an awful howl.

“Shut up, man; I’m trying to sleep,” Codi would say, and I’d grab my knee and rock back and forth in bed and try to keep my moans as quiet as possible. But nothing I did could make the pain go away. I had no idea what was wrong with me, and neither did anyone else. All I knew was that I was in excruciating pain that was only getting worse.

My screams got so bad, Codi finally had to go sleep in his girlfriend’s room.

For the next several weeks, I wrestled with the pain and lived with the pain and hated the pain and played video games late into the night to take my mind off the pain. I tried to understand the pain, to somehow make sense of it, because not knowing what was wrong or how to fix it was the worst thing of all. I’d had back problems before—could this be some lingering symptom of that? A slipped disk? A pinched nerve? There had to be a logical explanation. Pain doesn’t just happen.

And some nights the pain—my constant companion, my torturer—would let me sleep for a while, an hour or maybe two. But always it came back, hard and angry and all at once, and I’d wake up in the dark, screaming and clutching my knee, at three a.m., at four a.m., then at five and six. The weeks turned into months. I went to see my trainers, and I went to see an orthopedic surgeon. I had an MRI on my back and I was given an epidural. I worked with a chiropractor and I saw a spine specialist. Finally I had an EMG—an electromyogram—to try to diagnose the source of the pain. A few days later, the EMG test results came back.

They were all negative.

As far as the medical community could tell, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. There was no reason I should have been in pain, much less unbearable pain. No medical professional could verify that I was even in pain. There was no