Football is a dangerous sport. From ACL tears to concussions, athletes risk it all from the moment they step foot on the field. An NFL career without at least one catastrophic injury is a rare exception.
Watching it at home, however, is supposed to be relatively safe. One man’s story proves that isn’t always the case, especially when fans get a little over excited by a generational folly.
Kicker’s flub causes fan to laugh way too hard
Mark Toothaker of Kentucky was watching a game from the comfort of his home last season. The New York Giants were taking on the New England Patriots, and Giants’ kicker Younghoe Koo was lining up for a routine field goal.
In inexplicable fashion, Koo missed. He didn’t just miss the field goal uprights, he missed the ball entirely, with the toes of his right foot slamming into the ground several inches away from the ball’s laces.
Koo has been a good kicker throughout his career, but this was one of the worst misses of all time. Few analysts had seen anything like it before. The broadcasters were besides themselves. Unfortunately for Koo, the slow-motion, close-up videos of his blunder quickly became viral meme fodder.
Toothaker was right there watching along with everyone else, but he didn’t get to enjoy the moment for long. He was laughing so hard after watching and rewatching the replay that he suddenly collapsed.
“I’ve never felt anything like this in my life,” Toothaker told the AP. “I felt like I got electrocuted.”
Toothaker had suffered a seizure. Further testing showed a surprising result.
Toothaker’s wife, Malory, called paramedics and an ambulance quickly got him to the hospital. Doctors determined he had had a seizure—his first—but that’s not all.
CT imaging revealed a large tumor on Toothaker’s brain: the source of the seizure. He’d suffered no symptoms at all until his intense laughter preceded the intense seizure.
Seizures can have all kinds of fascinating triggers, including music, being startled, or even laughter. Some specific forms of epilepsy have precise triggers like a certain body part being touched or having your natural stride broken by someone stepping in front of you.
It’s impossible to say if the laughter from Koo’s viral miss caused the seizure, but don’t tell that to Toothaker:
“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.”
He says he thinks about what might have happened if the seizure had hit him while driving or out in public; how he could have died or accidentally hurt someone else.
Instead, the tumor was identified and removed quickly. Doctors say it was benign, and Toothaker has no lasting damage from the seizure or the surgery to remove the mass.
In medicine, luck is a matter of life and death
Stanford Medicine writes about how many crucial medical discoveries were happy accidents, and how good fortune always plays a big role in whether people ultimately live or die:
“We’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that we actually had that much control over the direction of medicine. Medicine is intractable and unpredictable, and luck plays a larger role than we’d like.”
Some people might call Toothaker’s story a miracle. Others might just call it a case of fantastic luck that he happened to be watching and just so happened to find the NFL moment so dang funny.
Whatever it is, Toothaker says he’s grateful to Koo: “I know it wasn’t his best moment…For [Malory] 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.”
