A missed field goal on “Monday Night Football” ended up leading Mark Toothaker to a brain tumor he did not know he had.
Toothaker said he had an ordinary day last December. He worked at Spendthrift Farm, went to the gym and settled in at home in Lexington, Kentucky, to watch the New York Giants play the New England Patriots with his wife, Malory.
As they watched from bed, with Malory reading a book beside him, Giants kicker Younghoe Koo missed a field goal attempt in a moment Toothaker said reminded him of Charlie Brown and Lucy in the “Peanuts” cartoon. He rewound the play and laughed so hard he had a seizure.
“I’ve never felt anything like this in my life,” Toothaker recalled. “I felt like I got electrocuted.”
Malory Toothaker, a nurse at a rehabilitation hospital working for a brain-injury doctor, first thought her husband was joking. Then she called 911, and paramedics took him to a hospital.
A CT scan found a tumor the size of a tennis ball on the left side of his brain.
“When you hear the news, ‘You’ve got a brain tumor,’ that’s what nobody wants to hear,” Malory said.
Toothaker was transferred to the University of Kentucky’s hospital, where doctors surgically removed the tumor. It turned out to be benign. He was back home by the end of the week with no lasting damage.
On Saturday, Toothaker is set to be at Churchill Downs as Spendthrift Farm-owned Further Ado runs in the Kentucky Derby.
He told The Associated Press he is grateful for Koo’s missed kick.
“(The) kicker saved my life because it could’ve happened any other time,” Toothaker said in a phone interview. “I wholeheartedly believe I was in the right spot at the right time, and he was the trigger for that happening. It was a miracle.”
Toothaker, 59, said he had no symptoms and did not know the tumor had moved his brain 6 millimeters to the right.
In the months before the seizure, he had driven and flown around the country for his job as stallion season manager. The Saturday before the seizure, he had traveled to Louisville to watch Further Ado win the Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes.
“I could have had it on a plane, anywhere,” Toothaker said. “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t run over a family in my Expedition running up and down the road. I guess that would’ve been the hardest thing for me to live with if somebody would’ve got hurt out of this. Believe me, as tough as that thing was, as violent as that seizure was, I have no memory of it and I would find it hard to believe that I wouldn’t have hurt somebody or hurt myself if I would’ve been behind a wheel.”
Toothaker said he made a point of watching the game because he has long been friends with Dale Robinson, the father of then-Giants receiver Wan’Dale Robinson.
He said he would like Koo, 31, to be his guest at the Derby, while acknowledging the miss was hardly a career highlight. Koo, who was released two weeks after the game, did not respond to messages from AP for this story.
“I know it wasn’t his best moment, but it was beyond crazy,” Toothaker said. “For she and I to be belly-laughing at his expense, which I feel terrible about now, but it all worked out in the end, that for me it couldn’t have been a better moment.”
Malory Toothaker said her husband is now doing very well.
“So many people aren’t that fortunate,” she said. “Really the first indication that he had a problem was the seizure, and to be in your own bed at home, not behind the wheel of a car or traveling, you’re just so humbled and feel so blessed and just fortunate that if this had to happen, it was the best-case scenario.”
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