Linebacker’s world ‘flipped upside down’
Stanford’s football season doesn’t start for another 10 days, but the team already has a most inspirational player.
Just a few months ago, Ryan Beecher wondered if he’d be back on the field banging pads with his teammates in preseason training. In December, on the night before he was due to leave his home in Fresno to drive to the Farm for the Alamo Bowl trip to San Antonio, he was “blind-sided,” he said.
He received a call from Stanford Hospital that a biopsy taken of a lump in his right armpit was positive for nonHodgkins lymphoma. After cancer diagnosis, Stanford’s Beecher working hard to return Ryan Beecher (left) fist-bumps Stanford teammate Lewis Burik during practice. “Every play he makes, everybody gets excited,” head coach David Shaw said.
“Anybody who has had a diagnosis like that can tell you it’s like a football blind-side” hit, Beecher said. “It was a pretty good blind-side.”
Yet, after missing spring practices and two quarters of academic work, he’s back in training camp, competing as a backup inside linebacker and special-teams player.
“Every play he makes, everybody gets excited,” head coach David Shaw said. “He’s running full speed. He’s making contact. He’s making plays. He looks no different than where he was before. … He’s been an inspiration to all the guys.”
Following six rounds of
chemotherapy, a full-body PET scan in July showed no evidence of the disease. He’ll have another scan in October and will have follow-up scans the rest of his life.
That July report was a gamechanger.
“That was when I was mentally able to say it’s behind me,” Beecher said. “I’m able to live the way I want to live and push my body more. That was a big moment. I’m incredibly grateful.”
At 6-foot-1, he’s just about back to his normal playing weight of 245. He missed the beginning of training camp while doctors waited for an intravenous feeding port to close.
The week of the Alamo Bowl, which Stanford lost to TCU 39-37, was emotional, he admitted. Doctors had to wave him off the bowl trip before the pathology report was completely finished.
“So they didn’t know exactly what type of lymphoma I had when they called me,” he said.
As a result, he had no idea initially how serious it was.
“Anything is scary in that situation,” he said, “but not knowing exactly what I had for a couple of days was terrifying. Hearing something like that, out of nowhere — I was feeling good, I was playing good — it flipped my world upside down.”
A few days later, he was told his disease was “treatable and curable.” According to the American Cancer Society, non-Hodgkins lymphoma starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes, a key part of the body’s immune system.
Beecher’s was a rare type of lymphoma called “ALK-positive,” referring to a protein called anaplastic lymphoma kinase in each cancer cell. The protein makes the disease more treatable than ALK-negative lymphoma.
“I was extremely lucky,” he said.
As he and his family tried to come to grips with this, the whole Stanford team signed a jersey and sent it to him. Wide receiver JJ Arcega-Whiteside called and asked if he would mind if his teammates wrote his No. 43 on their arms or, in Arcega-Whiteside’s case, his neck during the game.
Seeing so many 43s on TV, during a viewing party of family and friends at his home, he was overcome with emotion, he said.
Beecher said Shaw told him in a phone call that “I could look around and see hundreds of people in my corner, backing me up. That was completely the truth.”
Beecher was moved by the support he received not only from his family and friends, the Stanford doctors, teammates and coaches but from “people that had a similar situation or knew somebody that had a similar situation, people that reached out to me that didn’t know me personally.”
He lost his hair during the chemo treatments.
“Going bald, I didn’t think I looked too bad, but (losing) the eyebrows took some getting used to.”
Despite the lost school time, he still could receive his degree in history in June. He might decide to do graduate work and, with one more year of football eligibility, he might try to take advantage of it.
Asked what the biggest takeaways were from the experience, he said, “That I have an awesome family, awesome parents. My mom was at every treatment, every meeting with the doctor. Even if I told her she didn’t have to come, she wouldn’t listen.
“That being at Stanford was such a blessing. Football has really prepared me for adversity in life. I’ll look back being thankful I had the builtin responses to adversity that really helped me during that time.
“I’ll credit a lot of that to coach Shannon Turley, our strength and conditioning coach. He really changed my mind-set and approach to life after I got here. It was extremely helpful.”