NFL

For Giants LB Herzlich, beating cancer the real victory

INDIANAPOLIS — When Mark Herzlich first noticed the pain in his left leg, he did what most 21-year-old kids — and the rest of us, too, be honest — would do. He ignored it. He waited for it to go away. He was a football player, after all. A day without pain for a football player is a day they don’t try very hard.

“But then,” Herzlich said, “it wouldn’t go away.”

It wasn’t a dull ache anymore, either, but a shooting pain. It wasn’t going away. And it was impossible to ignore.

“I was naïve,” Herzlich said. “And maybe a little scared.”

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He’d been the ACC’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2008 as a junior linebacker for Boston College, a projected first-round pick if he had opted to enter the NFL draft. But his BC coaches felt he could rise even higher with an extra year of work, focusing on his pass-rush skills. So Herzlich decided the League could wait.

Then the pain started in his left leg.

And then, in May 2009, he went to a doctor’s office, had an MRI exam done, and what he could see was plain and it was terrifying: A tumor had infiltrated Herzlich’s femur. Even his untrained eyes could see it, compared with his healthy right leg.

“Ewing’s sarcoma,” the doctor announced.

Sarcoma. Cancer.

“I went home, went to my room, and for two hours I didn’t want to deal with anything or anyone, I just wanted to be by myself,” Herzlich said yesterday, standing just outside one of the end zones at Lucas Oil Stadium, where around him the sound and fury of Super Bowl Media Day crashed like an out-of-tune pit orchestra. “That may not sound like a lot of time, I guess, but it felt like forever to me. That was the why-me part of it.”

There were many players with many reactions to Media Day yesterday: annoyance, amusement, bemusement, impatience, wonder, delight, disgust. For Mark Herzlich, it was simply another adventure to add to his checklist, another chapter in a continuing story doctors were not entirely certain would last this long.

Three years after staring with dread at that MRI, Herzlich peered Monday at the red carpet that led him and his Giants teammates to the charter plane that would bring them to the Super Bowl. He drank in the adulation of fans who had made the pilgrimage to send the team off. And he was moved to type the greatest tweet of Super Bowl week.

“2 yrs ago I was told I might never walk again. Just WALKED off plane in Indy to play in The #Super Bowl. #TakeThatSh*tCancer.”

Anyone who’s ever stared down a cancer diagnosis, anyone who’s ever had a loved one who’s lost such an encounter, can thrill at the visceral nature of those sentiments.

“Cancer is an opponent,” Herzlich said, “and you really do have to prepare for it the way you would an opponent in any other walk of your life.”

Herzlich isn’t sure he’ll get a chance to play against the Patriots on Sunday. He hasn’t played since banging up his ankle against the Saints in New Orleans on Nov. 28, and though he’s been medically cleared to play and has started practicing again, he understands making the active list is a numbers game, a list Tom Coughlin will produce based on need and strategy, without an ounce of sentiment attached.

Still …

Standing on the Lucas Oil field, you could see how much that would mean to Herzlich. It was in this town, after all, when his comeback story suffered a major hiccup. After sitting out the 2009 season, after choosing radiation over the removal of the damaged portion of his femur so he still could harbor football dreams, he had returned to BC and had a fine senior season in 2010.

But at the pre-draft Combine, where dozens of watchful eyes were observing with cold detachment his physical prowess, he hadn’t had his best day. Walking into the building yesterday, he turned to his fellow rookie, Tyler Sash, pointed to a part of the field not far from where he held court, and said, “That’s where I ran the slowest 40 of my life.”

How slow, he was asked.

He grimaced: “4.91. But hey, it worked out OK for me.”

Not for the first time, either.