Cancer survivor mom inspires Jaguars’ Lacy
No matter how good or bad a day is going for Jacksonville Jaguars defensive tackle Tyler Lacy, he can’t bring himself to detach from immediate family for any length of time.
His cellphone records would probably show more calls from Jacksonville to Texas than anybody who ever wore a Jaguars uniform.
“Our family is so tied together where we talk amongst each other all the time,” said Lacy, the Jaguars’ fourth-round draft pick in 2023.
Lacy has been known to talk to his older sister and only sibling, Azia, whom he considers his best friend, for hours. Every day, Lacy also makes a point to FaceTime Azia’s 5-year-old daughter, Aaliyah. Daily conversations with his father, Marvin, often center around financial advice or maybe issues with Tyler’s Ford F-150 truck.
Maintaining constant communication with family is an unbreakable habit for the Jaguars’ second-year player from Oklahoma State, none more so than with the woman Tyler calls his “hero,” mother Veronica.
No matter how busy Tyler is with football game day, practices or otherwise, you can bank on him talking to Veronica two or three times daily.
That’s because to the 24-year-old Tyler, every day is Mother’s Day. Some of it is just the natural bond between mother and son, but Tyler also has a genuine appreciation for how the toughness of Veronica – a breast cancer survivor – inspires him to always try to be the best version of himself.
Family’s ‘rock’ keeps life normal
Seated in a Jaguars conference room after a conditioning workout, it’s easy to see Tyler has inherited his mother’s outgoing and engaging personality.
Veronica, 55, will not let negativity in any form – even when her 14-month cancer battle was at its worst back in 2007 – take over her life. She is relentlessly upbeat.
“Oh, yeah, no one is more outgoing than me,” Veronica said from the family home in Murphy, Texas. “I’m the Mom in the stands getting people to cheer. I do not meet a stranger.
“I don’t let anyone steal my joy. I’m always smiling. I always give what I like to get in return.”
Veronica’s take-charge attitude makes her the family anchor. Throughout his football career, Tyler has leaned on Veronica more than anyone else to navigate life because he now understands what it must have taken to overcome cancer and not let it beat her down.
In February 2008, when Veronica went to Methodist Richardson Medical Center and learned she was cancer-free, Tyler walked with her down the long aisle before they joyously rang the bell.
“She is the rock of the family, the one who gets everybody moving,” Tyler said.
Tyler had just turned 7 when his mother’s cancer diagnosis came on Dec. 11, 2006. He remembers scant details about that time, partly because Veronica and Marvin tried to keep things as normal as possible.
“As a kid, I didn’t really understand the severities of the cancer,” Tyler said. “I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what it could lead to. There were days when you’re seeing how much she moves around and does everything with a smile on her face, but on the backside, she knows what’s really going on.
“She loses some of her hair, and she’s still smiling. For me, after experiencing all she went through, she really became my hero. Watching her take me to practice, taking me to school, helping with my classwork, going to work. You really couldn’t see on her face that she was battling something much deeper.
“It put in my mind that, ‘Hey, no matter what you’re going through, you got to push through it and see the light at the end of the tunnel, because everybody is going through battles.’ ”
With two young kids in grade school, Veronica didn’t want them feeling stressed about the cancer. She did her best to hide the nasty side effects of the treatments.
“What I told my husband, before I told the kids (about the diagnosis), is I don’t want to make this about me,” Veronica said. “I didn’t want to put pressure on them. I still wanted them hanging out with their friends and going to movies.
“I could tell there were times they wanted to treat me like a baby. One thing I kept from the kids was when I’d get sick, I didn’t want them seeing me on the bathroom floor hugging the toilet.”
‘Pain is nothing you can imagine’
Veronica talks freely about her cancer experience because she hopes others can avoid the trauma of what she went through.
When she first detected the lump on her left breast at 37, some doctors told her not to worry because they didn’t really push women to do mammograms until age 40.
A female physician finally listened, arranging for a mammogram and then a biopsy that confirmed the cancer.
Veronica couldn’t shake the memories of losing her mother to pancreatic cancer at age 45. It was in the family DNA.
“My initial reaction was shock and I started to cry, but it felt like somebody put their arm around me and whispered, ‘I got you,’ ” Veronica said. “That was the only time I cried. I am strong in my faith, and I believed God would just take care of it.”
The toughest part came when about midway through the chemo and radiation treatments, some of Veronica’s skin fell off from the radiation.
She had to go to a burn center to heal the wounds with special solutions. Her skin was so sensitive, Veronica could not shower the left side of her body.
“They have to wash (the wounds) and clean it for you to heal,” Veronica said. “That pain is nothing you can imagine.”
Despite spots appearing the past couple years during mammogram checkups, biopsies revealed them as benign, so her cancer remains in remission.
But that life-changing experience not only gave Veronica a new outlook, it serves as a reminder to the Jaguars’ No. 94 to not waste one moment of his time in the NFL.
“It inspires me every day, especially when I wake up out of bed, just saying, ‘Hey, you got breath today, you got your health,’ ” Tyler said. “So why not give your 100% all in what you’re doing, so you don’t have any regrets later on in life.”
About the only thing Tyler did growing up that went against his Dallas Cowboys-rooting family was become a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.
Oh, how he roared in delight during the 2006 NFC wild-card game when Dallas quarterback Tony Romo fumbled a field-goal snap, tried to run and was stopped short of the goal line, preserving a 21-20 Seattle Seahawks victory that annoyed his family.
Veronica still cherishes that memory, just as she does raising a champagne glass when the Jaguars drafted her son. Or when Tyler lifted her in the air after Oklahoma State beat Texas in his senior year, a picture that appeared in The Oklahoman newspaper.
Those football moments with family are priceless. If Tyler wants more of them in his future, then he knows he will have to attack every obstacle the way his mother tackled cancer.
Whatever becomes of Tyler with the Jaguars, he is never lacking for inspiration. Mom, his greatest motivator, is just a phone call away.