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" Against all odds, Mark Herzlich is a linebacker for the New York Giants. A year after he was named the ACC Defensive Player of the Year at Boston College, he was diagnosed with a bone cancer, Ewings sarcoma. From his new book, What It Takes: Fighting For My Life and My Love of the Game, this is the day he found out. Let me tell you what it feels like to hit someone. First of all, it&amp;#039;s silent. Or at least it is for me. I don&amp;#039;t hear the sound of bodies colliding, the rumbling thunder of impact. The first sound I hear is the deep thud of my opponent&amp;#039;s body hitting the ground, followed by gasps as he struggles for air. Maybe it&amp;#039;s the adrenaline that blocks out the sound, or maybe it&amp;#039;s my euphoria at delivering the hit. Either way, it&amp;#039;s silent. A good hit is also strangely effortless. If I do it right it feels like the man I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t hear or feel a thing until it was all over. For much of my life I&amp;#039;ve been a football player. My position: linebacker. Physically devastating another man&amp;#039;s body is my job description. It is also something I truly love doing. To be honest, I can&amp;#039;t say I&amp;#039;ve ever felt guilty about inflicting pain on a football field. I understand football is a violent sport, and I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;ve been on the receiving end of plenty of brutal, bonecrunching hits\u2014hits that temporarily flattened my lungs and scrambled my brain and sent tremors of pain radiating through my body. And after each one, I&amp;#039;ve risen up from the hard ground and walked off the pain. It&amp;#039;s a point of pride to get right back up after a big hit. That&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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. Iwas 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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t know what was happening, but I knew four doctors couldn&amp;#039;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\u2014my left femur, or thighbone, and my right femur\u2014were 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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;re leaning back in a chair and it&amp;#039;s about to tip over. I felt dizzy and distant and disconnected from everything. &amp;quot;Mark is a very good football player,&amp;quot; were the next words I understood, coming from my father. &amp;quot;He was hoping to make a career of it. When will he be able to play football again?&amp;quot; The doctor&amp;#039;s startled look snapped me back to consciousness. He explained that if I survived\u2014if I survived\u2014the damage from the disease and the treatment would leave me &amp;quot;unable to participate in physical activity.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What do you mean, &amp;#039;physical activity&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; I heard my mother ask. The doctor hesitated for just the slightest second. Then he said, &amp;quot;Mark will never be able to play football again.&amp;quot; Just like that, it was over. I was twenty-one years old. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a28911/mark-herzlich-on-playing-again/>