Cancer survivor completes comeback
It was a fourth-quarter extra point that increased the lead of a good team, Minnesota, to 28 points over a lousy team, Rutgers. But it was so much more than that.
One would be hard-pressed, in fact, to find a more emotional moment at any point in a recent college football game than what transpired Saturday evening at SHI Stadium in Piscataway, N.J. That’s because the successful extra point represented the first game action for the Gophers’ holder on the play, Casey O’Brien, who had to repel a rare bone cancer four times just to be able to suit up.
“It was a lot of emotion,” O’Brien said after Minnesota’s 42-7 win, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “It was a moment and a night that I’ve been thinking about since I picked up a football.”
After the kick went through the uprights, O’Brien was mobbed by teammates before sharing a lengthy hug with Gophers coach P.J. Fleck, who shed tears.
“To have it be one of those things that went from tragic to hope to accomplishment, that’s important,” Fleck said.
A redshirt sophomore walk-on for the 7-0 Gophers, O’Brien was a high school quarterback when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 2013. Since then, he’s undergone 14 surgeries, as well as more than 200 nights in hospitals and numerous rounds of chemotherapy, as he’s battled the disease four separate times: twice in high school and twice after joining the Gophers in 2017.
“I took chemo pills before every practice in my first spring ball. Didn’t miss a practice,” O’Brien said in July during a speech at the annual Big Ten Kickoff Luncheon.
O’Brien told the Athletic at the time: “When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I was told that I wouldn’t play football again. And I knew that I needed football in my life, that had been something that had been there my whole life, and I just wasn’t ready to give it up.”
On Saturday, it came down to a college debut that made all the hard work, both at practice and medical facilities, worth it.