Brick by Brick: There’s something unexpected to be found at House of Bricks wrestling shows

“It kind of just came out of nowhere,” says David Baker, Brickhouse’s son and a pro wrestler in his own right. “It was supposed to be one show. I had no idea where we were going.”

Here in the U-Haul garden, men become boys, and boys are king.

Dreams are born and realized. Personas are worn with reason. Fans are birthed.

Behind these tattered blue tarps strung along chain-link fence, marking off a dusty field that shares a parking lot with a pizza joint advertising two large pies through the hazy front window, is something unexpected.

*****

It wasn’t that long ago that Mike Baker was “Brickhouse.” He last appeared in 2013, 24 years after he emerged from the old wrestling matches on Coggeshall Street.

Before “Brickhouse Baker” was inducted into the New England Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame, before he was YPW Interstate Heavyweight champion, before he fought WWE stars Larry Zybszko, Rick Martel, Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, Jamie Noble, Tito Santana, R-Truth ... it goes on, before all that, he was Mike from East Freetown.

One day in 1990, his cousins came running up to his home on Coggeshall Street, babbling about a poster they’d seen for some wrestling in a mill on Belleville Avenue, practically their backyard, for only $3.

FIND HOUSE OF BRICKS

Facebook: House of Bricks Pro Wrestling

Twitter: @HoBWrestling

Instagram: @houseofbricksprowrestling

YouTube: House of Bricks Pro Wrestling

E-Mail: houseofbricksprowrestling@yahoo.com

On TV: Watch “Turnbuckle TV” every Saturday at noon on Channel 95, or anytime on YouTube

UPCOMING SHOWS

Flashback Friday Night, Aug. 12, Dublin’s Sports Bar ’N Grille, New Bedford

BaseBrawl, Sept. 10, Dias Baseball Field, New Bedford, to benefit GNB Youth Baseball

Over Drive, Oct. 8, Moose Lodge, New Bedford, to benefit the Moose Lodge

Veteran Slam 2, Nov. 5, VFW Poirer Post, New Bedford, for veterans of foreign wars

Brickaversary, Nov. 18, Dublin’s Sports Bar ’N Grille, New Bedford, eighth anniversary event

“Nah, I’m good,” Mike said, waving them away. “I don’t have the money for that.”

Two weeks later, they came scurrying back.

“No,” Mike scolded them. “I can’t afford it.”

Two more weeks passed.

This time, his cousins wouldn’t let him speak.

“Shut up,” they said. “We bought you a ticket.”

It wasn’t love at first sight. Mike enjoyed watching wrestling, but he still dreamed of being a firefighter. Or a stunt man. But he kept showing up. One day, he absentmindedly picked up a pamphlet.

“Live your Dream,” it read, “Become a wrestler!”

He took it home. Maybe wrestling wasn’t such a bad idea.

*****

In 2009, during the final years of his professional wrestling career, Brickhouse was working for a man who helped run the Greater New Bedford Youth Baseball League. Needing a fundraiser to help sustain the league, he asked Brickhouse if he could put on a charity wrestling match.

“I threw it together,” says Mike, now 47. “I got a bunch of friends and we ended up getting a ring and we did the fundraiser.

“Next thing you know, I did two, and the following year I did four.”

Now in its eighth year, House of Bricks wrestling has a 13-event calendar in 2016.

“It kind of just came out of nowhere,” says David Baker, Brickhouse’s son and a pro wrestler in his own right. “It was supposed to be one show. I had no idea where we were going.”

At face value, it’s a great story about a guy finding his groove in retirement and starting a successful, local, independent wrestling promotion.

There’s nothing wrong with running a solid wrestling show. Fall River has Top Rope Promotions. Brickhouse’s close friend and fellow New England Hall of Famer member “Sweet” Scott Ashworth — known to others as the athletic director and boys basketball coach at Bourne High School — has run Whaling City Wrestling for six years out of the VFW in Fairhaven. (Multiple times in interviews, Baker expressed his thanks to Ashworth for supporting and participating in House of Bricks events.)

Except Brickhouse doesn’t run his that way. He does it for charity.

*****

The sun is setting over the tower lights of the car dealership across the street as one of the stranger collection of men you’re likely to encounter gathers behind a pair of rented U-Hauls at Dias Field off Mt. Pleasant Street in New Bedford’s North End.

Overalls. Face paint. Priest robes. Green hair. Chainsaws. Shredded shirts. Masks. More spandex than Joseph Shivers could have imagined. Chef’s pants — or Hammer pants, it’s a little ambiguous — covered in onions and tomatoes.

Over on the other side of this makeshift U-Haul truck wall, through the bright red curtain strung between the side-view mirrors, are wrestling fans like Noah, 8, and Lilah Digregorio, 3, attending their first wrestling match. Noah says he hopes to see John Cena, and, while he won’t, maybe he’ll see something in Teddy Goodz to root for. Five-year-old Jordan, who speaks so quietly his last name is lost to the wind, likes it when they’re “down, but they kick out.”

Jayden Pereira, 13, and Christian DaSilva, 12, ardent Devil’s Reject fans who are chowing down on ice cream bars, have been to more than 10 of these shows.

Then there’s Emiley Scanlon, 8, who spends her evening alternately yelping at and high-fiving the wrestlers. She wants to be a diva, like her idol Nikki Bella. She’s been watching wrestling since she was 4 and she squeals when they jump off the top rope, because, well, who doesn’t.

The air turns a hazy orange as the sun settles in for its nightly slumber. There’s north of 150 people inside these blue tarps, watching 22 wrestlers in 11 matches for the sticker-shocking price of $5 (most events are $10).

“We’re not going to make a million dollars running wrestling shows,” Brickhouse says with a weary chuckle. “We already figured that out. I wrestled for a lot of years. We all had regular jobs.”

That’s why he decided to put on his events for charity. Tonight, it’s youth baseball. Recently, they raised more than $1,000 for non-profits during Wish-A-Mania and Veteran Slam events. They’ve held fundraisers for a funeral, a choir, the VFW and the Moose lodge. He does hold a couple of shows a year at Dublin’s Sports Bar ’N Grille that aren’t for charity, like the upcoming Flashback Friday Night.

“I had an inkling it would (take off),” said Mark Gomes of Klassic Komics, who sells souvenirs at the shows and has known Brickhouse for a decade. “As soon as he said he was doing this, I wanted in.”

So, what’s the key?

“I honestly believe it’s Mike,” Gomes says. “He’s trained half the talent in the area, or helped start them out. He’s well-respected. That’s the difference. He even gets guys out of retirement.”

*****

It may be Brickhouse with the priceless contact list, but an overlooked explanation for why House of Bricks has grown so rapidly is the promotional work of 30-year-old Jordan Rapoza.

He grew up in Tiverton, and when his friends started training to be wrestlers at a mill in Fall River, he perpetually declined. He watched wrestling, but never saw himself as a wrestler.

“I’m good,” he would tell his buddies. “Yeah, it’s a dream. But I’m good.”

In 2003, spurred by the death of his mother, Rapoza went to see a wrestling show. Hanging around after the fight, his friend coaxed him into the ring and showed him how to take a fall.

“I wasn’t great,” he says now. “I sucked. I’ll admit it. I was horrible. But I was able to do what I wanted. Now I do the stuff I really like, putting shows together, putting graphics together, putting our weekly TV show together. It’s great.”

It’s close to a 50-50 split these days, with Brickhouse booking and scheduling the fights and Rapoza creating posters — printed locally at Alpha Graphics — and running the sound system during fights, all while constantly promoting on social media, highlighted by a wildly active Facebook page.

“It’s like two chefs,” Rapoza says. “One builds the sauce and the other adds the spices. That’s how you make a good sauce.”

*****

Outside the ring — when he’s working as a machinist in the North End or as a bouncer downtown and not wearing the elaborate face paint that takes him 30 minutes hunched over an air conditioner to apply — Devil’s Reject is known as Brandon Webb. (No, he is not often mistaken for the Cy Young-winning former Diamondbacks pitcher, but he appreciates you asking.)

He started wrestling at age 15. He became a fan three years before that.

“I didn’t like other after-school activities,” he says.

He’s been participating in House of Bricks events since their inception.

“Other places are more of a business and we’re more of a charity,” he says. “It’s more family-friendly oriented, too.”

Brickhouse offers his events to local charities with no upfront costs. He pays for the posters, tickets, U-Haul trucks and the ring, then re-coups his costs from the gate before passing along the rest to the charity.

“If someone calls up and asks if we can do a fundraiser, we look into it,” he says. “We’ll do anything for a good cause.”

Once, through a miscommunication, too many tickets were given away and an event lost money. Brickhouse ate it.

“It’s a hobby,” he says. “I don’t drink. I don’t hang out at bars. If I lose money, well, I gambled and we still put on a good show.”

*****

Reverend Redemption is a 30-year veteran of the New Bedford wrestling scene. He thinks it’s cute if you accidentally call him Rev. Run.

He started wrestling to prove a friend wrong. Says he prefers it to bowling. He’s here because of Brickhouse.

“He’s a great guy,” he says, “He has knowledge of the business. It’s always nice to do a fundraiser. We’re not making much, but hopefully (the charities) are.”

Sitting next to him on a set of silver bleachers is Mike Foster, who has been wrestling for 19 years, starting at age 24.

“Mike’s great,” he chimes in. “He really understands how to put a show on. He goes from a beginning to a middle to an end. He understands the flow. And he always tries to bring out everyone’s good points in a match.”

*****

The air hangs still as the first bout emerges from the fluttering red curtains. Devil’s Reject vs. Teddy Goodz. You can guess who the heel is.

Teddy Goodz is really Ted Bolduc. He’s lived in Westport for 15 years and learned to wrestle at the same mill off Coggeshall Street, with Brickhouse as his trainer.

He’s one of the biggest names here — although everyone is dwarfed by three-time WWF Tag Team Champions Demolition, who are signing autographs ringside — as he’s wrestled with Top Nonstop Action, one of the Big Three of pro wrestling, but one notch below WWE. He’ll be wrestling in Milwaukee in August. He battled in front of 3,000 fans at McCoy Stadium. And for the last couple of years he’s been doing House of Bricks events for free.

“I like the fact they’re all benefit shows,” he says. “And you can give them a moment they’ll remember. It might be someone’s first match ever and maybe I can get them into it.

“I realize it’s all about the kids. It’s cool. People look up to you. You’re a role model, believe it or not.”

*****

Not every show has been perfect. If the crowd knew of half the drama erupting behind those U-Hauls, they might turn their seats.

But smiles abound, at least on this Saturday evening, the sky alight in gold, dust hanging like a dawdling mirage.

A kid sees his first piledriver. A mom shows her daughter that wrestling isn’t just for the boys. A youth baseball league can afford some more catcher’s equipment.

“We’re going to ride it as far as it takes us,” says Brickhouse. “It’s only gotten better.

“For some reason, people like us.”

The Blueprint: How Marion’s Jim Manning launched a professional MMA career at age 39

The bitter cold snapped at Jim Manning’s face as he paced the end of his Marion driveway one January night a decade ago.

Hesitantly, he began to jog.

He reached the street sign at the end of his road and stumbled to an exhausted stop, hands desperately gripping his knees as he sucked wind. He peered back at where he’d come from.

There was a mere 100 yards separating him from his home.

For this beleaguered man, fresh off a two-week stint in jail after his second OUI offense, it might as well have been a marathon.

He walked back to his house. The next day he went out again.

This ritual continued, the runs steadily progressing until he made it around the block.

Each night, as his feet rhythmically slapped the pavement, thoughts sped through his mind. He thought of his children. The years he’d wasted drinking and drugging. The future he could still enjoy.

“I had to change,” he says now.

*****

On Jan. 28, 39-year-old Jimmy “The Tooth” Manning — “You don’t get to choose your own nickname,” he says, sticking his tongue through two gaps in the left side of his smile — needed just 90 seconds to submit David McClendon in the octagon at Cage Titans 32. It was his second professional Mixed Martial Arts victory in three months and signaled the seriousness with which this elder statesman, ranked No. 25 in New England by Tapology, was taking his last shot at the sport.

“I doubted he would make it,” bluntly states his trainer, Bill Mahoney, owner of South Shore Sportfighting in Norwell. “Of everyone that says they’ll make it, nine of 10 quit when they meet the brutal reality of a bunch of punches. They quit and get another job.”

Manning has had plenty of other jobs. He knows exactly what he’s gotten himself into. He’s no naive 19-year-old brimming with testosterone who thinks he can turn a high school wrestling title into MMA millions. He’s not even the 20-something amateur weekend warrior, content to spend a few hours in the gym after work. He’s a 39-year-old coming off a two-year retirement, a man with a late start and an all-consuming desire to make up for lost time.

“He wants it bad,” says his boxing trainer, Israel Santiago. “He’s motivated.”

*****

It’s a mild Thursday morning in the North End of New Bedford. A long, brick mill building appears mostly abandoned on the west side of Brook Street. A blistering white sign on the corner advertises Morrison Music. A metal awning, equal parts green paint and rust, perches over an open door. Down a half set of wide stairs is a long, dark hallway. A rusty pipe drips somewhere in the distance. What looks like decades-old construction detritus lines one wall.

About halfway down this tunnel to the underworld is a small boxing gym, the type of dark, dank place you only expect to see in movies, cold light streaking across the room through painted-over windows.

“This is where it all starts,” Manning yells from the ring.

This is where Santiago and Ebony Silva run their S&S Boxing training sessions.

Manning, dancing around the black ring with red-white-and-blue ropes in a black sleeveless T-shirt over a white longsleeve T, black shorts over blue tights and graying Asic sneakers, started coming here about seven months ago when he committed to adding boxing to his MMA repertoire.

“His footwork was horrible,” Santiago recalls. “He was crossing his feet. He was off-balance. If you pushed him he’d fall down.”

But Manning had an important ally when it came to boxing: Motivation. He started showing up seven days a week, going at it for more than an hour each day.

“That’s every day,” Santiago stressed. “He picks it up quick. He’s learning fast. He’s been better every time.”

That’s important because boxing is one of the last skill sets Manning is adding to his toolbox, as the top half of his personal MMA timeglass gets lighter each day.

“One minute he’s a geriatric,” Santiago says, “the next he’s the second-coming of Walter Payton.”

*****

There was a time when Manning had nothing but time.

A star athlete at Old Rochester High School, where he nearly owned the school record in rushing yards on the football field, Manning’s father was never in his life. He was raised by mother, Kathy, who worked in restaurants and home health care to keep food on the table.

“I think that’s where 99 percent of my work ethic comes from was seeing her always trying to make ends meet,” Manning says. “We didn’t have the best clothes. We didn’t have the best toys or best bikes. But there was always breakfast, lunch and dinner and she was always at school events.”

But late in high school, she finally had enough of his indignant teenage ways and kicked him out. He made his way into UMass Dartmouth, but dropped out after one year. By age 19 he was a father.

“I was an untamed animal who didn’t understand consequences and repercussions,” he says. “It took me about a decade to figure out what I was doing.”

That decade featured plenty of booze and drugs, a few arrests for assault and battery, two more kids, a series of construction jobs and two OUIs. He moved between New Bedford, Acushnet, Fairhaven, Rochester and Marion.

Then came that night in Marion, when he ran to the end of the street.

“I had to change,” he says. “My kids were still young and they didn’t understand yet. My (older) daughter had seen everything I went through and I didn’t want to go through that with my youngest two. That ignited me wanting to do something, get in touch with my athletic side.”

*****

The next step in regaining his sense of self was running the Marion Village 5K. He crossed the finish line in 26 minutes, a time not noteworthy beyond the fact that it existed at all.

“I was so thrilled,” he says. “Everyone in town, law enforcement especially, was like ‘Good for you.’ I don’t think anybody thought I would not only make changes, but catapult myself to where I am now. I think I have exceeded every expectation.”

Not long after he started running 5Ks, Manning began studying Jiu Jitsu with Stephen Whitter at Nexus Martial Arts in Wareham, now called SBG East Coast.

His first competition came seven months later, when he was still a white belt. Soon, he asked for the keys to the gym so he could put in after-hours workouts.

He’d always been interested in MMA, a natural extension from Jiu Jitsu, and he joined the Cape Cod Fighting Alliance for his first amateur fights, knowing he needed to expand his skill set to win in the cage.

“I got the wrong impression of him at first,” says Mahoney. “I thought he was very straight-laced. Very boring. I thought he was a traditional Jiu Jitsu guy who was good at Jiu Jitsu, but would probably lose a few fights because he didn’t understand punches to the face.”

What Mahoney didn’t expect was for Manning to be so malleable.

“I was right,” he notes. “But, unlike a lot of people, he understood what he didn’t understand. He knew he had to get used to getting hit and get a little tougher. Then he became a badass.”

By 2014, Manning had an amateur record of 6-2 and was a two-time Cage Titans title holder at 155 pounds.

Then life happened. He went through a divorce and dealt with custody.

“Winning fights and training for fights was a temporary band-aid to the bigger problems I needed to focus on,” he says. “I had to fix stuff in my personal life.”

In the end, he spent nearly two years away. When he came back he started training full-time with South Shore Sportfighting, under Mahoney’s direction.

“He had already mastered Jiu Jitsu, he wanted to get good at punching and kicking,” he says. “His standup, his kickboxing, have dramatically improved. He’s improved his cardio. It’s a whole other level of cardio when you’re naked in the cage and they’re trying to take your head off.”

It also meant Manning was no longer the top dog in his gym. He was training with fighters undoubtedly better than himself. And always younger.

“When I grow up, I want to be just like him,” jokes Manny Ramirez.

“There’s a stigma that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” says Johnny Cambpell, an MMA pro from Plymouth. “He puts that into question. He never settles.”

*****

On a recent Thursday night, the only glow emanating from the side of a long, narrow concrete warehouse squatting in a nondescript business park in Norwell is the fluorescent lights of South Shore Sportfighting.

Inside, Mahoney teaches Jiu Jitsu to a youth class in the front, while a cackle of fighters gather around the octagon in the back. Manning has been training here for about a year, since he re-entered the MMA world.

In the cage, Manning, now wearing a white Anthem shirt with red sleeves and gray shorts over black tights, spars with Rich Hacking, an amateur from Hingham.

“He’s a tough mother-f-----,” Hacking says. “But his intellect is extremely high. He keeps us all on our toes.”

This is Manning’s first night back after a two-week vacation to Florida to help his mother fix up her house. After his last fight he needed a short break before he enters a year of intense training and body manipulation as he embarks on the home stretch of his MMA career.

At 39, he figures he might have two more years left. He hopes for five or six more fights. He wants to stay undefeated. He dreams of a television appearances with Bellator or the World Series of Fighting.

“It’s now or never,” Manning says. “At my age, it’s a constant fight, 24-7. I’m not young so my body doesn’t metabolize the same. Every meal I eat has to be spot on. I have to get the proper amount of sleep.”

For the next year, Manning will weigh out each of his meals, subsisting mostly on fish, chicken, lettuce and egg whites. He’ll eat 3,000 calories for breakfast to jump-start his metabolism.

“It’s the hardest way in the world to make a living,” Mahoney says. “Even if you have the talent, luck can keep you from making it. But Jimmy is humble and willing to listen to criticism.”

*****

For his first fight, Mahoney set out to get him an easy win. But his past Cage Titans titles and Jiu Jitsu experience left most first-timers wary of him. Eventually, he found Dylan DiBartolomeo, a fighter in a similar situation, and they faced off in their pro debuts on Nov. 5, 2016, at Cage Titans 31.

“They were both very good fighters,” Mahoney recalls. “Honestly, I thought his first fight was 50-50, and he might lose. Not only did he win, but he won not even having to use his greatest strength, Jiu Jitsu.”

Manning knocked out DiBartolomeo in just 108 seconds, then, two months later, submitted McClendon, more of a boxer than a ground fighter, in 90 seconds.

Leading into that fight, Manning kept sounding off on Facebook about how he was going to stand up with McClendon and use his newly acquired boxing skills to take him down.

Moments before the fight, Mahoney pulled his pupil aside.

“You’re not really going to box this guy, are you?”

“Nah,” Manning laughed. “I’m just tricking him.”

“You have to be smart when you’re old,” Mahoney notes. “People talk a lot about age, but for everything you lose, you gain something. You just have to change as a fighter. You can’t go out there depending on your athleticism and youthful confidence. You have to depend on your brains.”

Manning knows that. He’s also smart enough to realize he will probably never fight in the UFC, unless they improbably add a 35-and-older division. Still, he quit his construction job for this two-year window of opportunity.

“I’m taking a very huge risk,” he says. “There’s probably a lot of people out there who don’t like what I’m doing. But I’d rather fail at doing what I love than not ever try. I have one last chance to really go after what I’ve been dreaming about. I’m following my blueprint. I think I’m in line with the Universe.”

His next fight is April 8 at Cage Titans 33. He doesn’t know his opponent. He’s not too concerned. Whoever it is, he’s faced tougher.

How Wareham’s Cody Stahmer fought a secret battle with cancer and won

His teammates didn’t know he had it. His family called him Batman because he was so stealth about it. But Cody Stahmer was diagnosed, beat testicular cancer and came back to play football at Mass. Maritime within a year.

On a deceptively ordinary October night in 2012, the Stahmer family sat around the dining room table, a copy of a newspaper laid open to a story describing a catch made by Cody, the oldest of Nichole Stahmer’s three kids, in a Vikings football game the night before.

The story described Cody coming off the darkened bench onto the fluorescent-tinted field to make two touchdown grabs while leading Wareham to victory.

“It made him sound like he was Batman coming in from the night,” Nichole says. “It was like a superhero.”

And thus Cody Stahmer earned a nickname reserved for those closest to him, one that friends and family soon began using on Facebook: “The Dark Knight.”

Within 18 months, his weekly chemo sessions were called his “Superhero serum.”

AN ATHLETIC JOURNEY

Cody Stahmer never called anywhere except Wareham home until he went off to college in the fall of 2013.

His father, Joseph, is a construction worker and truck driver with five kids. His mother, Nichole, raised Cody and his younger sister and brother — the older two are half siblings — while working two jobs, spending her days as a physical education teacher at Wareham Middle School and her nights bartending.

“From the day he was born,” Nichole says, “I wanted to be a better person for him.”

Since he could walk, Cody has competed in sports. Early on, it was soccer, then BMX racing. When he was 7, he started playing basketball and baseball, but because of when his birthday fell, he was often the youngest, and always the scrawniest, on the team. Football quickly became his passion.

“I liked it right away,” Cody says. “Sometimes it was tough being a younger kid on the squad, but I loved it and I stuck with it.”

A tall, skinny kid — he now stands 6-foot-3 and has built his weight back up to 180 pounds — with obvious athleticism, youth coaches weren’t sure where to play Cody. He moved from quarterback to defensive end to tight end to safety. By the time he reached Wareham High School, he was quarterbacking the freshman team. But midway through his sophomore campaign, while playing for the JV squad, he made his final transition, migrating to wide receiver and the defensive backfield.

“I kind of knew with my height and speed I shouldn’t be at quarterback,” Cody says. “I knew in my mind I had the height and speed we really needed at wide receiver.”

As a junior, Cody was relegated to playing cornerback. Finally, his senior year, he lined up out wide and immediately went to work, catching three-quarters of the Vikings’ passes and finishing with 348 yards and five touchdowns, earning him All-South Coast Conference and Standard-Times Super Team honors.

“He runs really good routes and he tracks the ball real well,” Wareham head coach Dan Nault said after Cody’s senior season, during which the Vikings went 9-2. “When you’re in third-and-long and have no choice but to throw, he’s the choice.”

Meanwhile, at Mass. Maritime Academy, Cody’s close friend, E.J. Bennett, was a sophomore wide receiver who wouldn’t keep quiet about his lanky former Vikings teammate.

“E.J. turned us on to him,” Buccaneers head coach Jeremy Cameron says. ”(Cody)’s got good size and he’s deceivingly fast because he has tremendous strides. You look up and he’s constantly getting by people.”

By October of 2013, Cody was every bit an average Division III football player. He hadn’t suited up as a freshman, which he admits was tough, but he’d practiced hard all fall. He was adjusting to life on campus. His Facebook feed featured requests for a mini-fridge. His Twitter account spoke of Paul Pierce and MTV. His Instagram was filled with photos taken with his 2-year-old pitbull, Chief.

Then, he noticed a lump.

DEALING WITH REALITY

After a visit to the doctor in October, he was sent to a specialist, then to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in December. He was diagnosed with seminoma, a form of testicular cancer most commonly found in men age 15-35 which, if there was any solace to take, carries a 95 percent survival rate, according to the National Institute of Health.

“I thought my life was going to end,” Nichole says. “You never think it’s going to happen to you. I couldn’t even think to live a day of my life without him. There really were no words.”

Soon the chemo began. Cody moved out of his dorm and back home. His family, often his sister Maddison, would drive him up to Dana-Farber, leaving before 5 a.m., where he would undergo treatment before returning to Wareham at 8 or 9 at night. He could have stayed overnight, but that would mean he lived in a hospital. And hospitals weren’t where Cody belonged.

“It was very stressful for me,” Cody says. “I wasn’t a fan of IVs or needles at all, and putting IVs in my veins was not easy for the doctors. That was one of the toughest parts. The chemo made me feel super week. It changes everything.”

Cody would come home and bundle down with Chief, sleeping away half the day in his weakened state. He kept his treatment a secret to all but his closest family and friends. Many of his Buccaneers teammates didn’t know until this fall.

“He was almost in denial, I think,” Nichole says. “He was like, ‘This isn’t happening.’ Cody has always been the strength out of the family. He’s always been a pretty strong kid.”

His coach started hearing a few rumors about Cody having health issues and approached his lanky wide receiver.

“I just went to him and said I heard this through the grapevine and asked if there’s anything I could do,” Cameron says. “He hasn’t asked for any help. He’s just done everything that everyone else does without a hiccup.”

Try as Cody might, his spiraling health soon became impossible to hide. For the first few weeks he didn’t lose his hair, but then it started coming out in clumps. His weight loss turned dramatic.

“He almost went back to infancy,” Nichole says. “You don’t want to see your grown child with no hair and so frail. His skin color was the wrong color. He would just crawl home.”

As he drew closer to his family, Cody kept his silence around his football brethren. Other than a few choice teammates, including E.J., they were in the dark as May’s spring practices arrived and Cody returned to the field, just weeks after completing his last round of chemo.

“He had noticeably lost some weight and when you watched him play he obviously didn’t have his cardio up to speed,” Cameron says.

Cody could tell the strains of fighting cancer had ravaged his young body.

“I felt clumsy at times, very weak,” he says. “Running was very hard. My chest, I couldn’t breathe as well.”

In May he went in for a checkup and was greeted with the type of news every cancer patient hopes to hear, but also knows isn’t a concrete lifeline: Doctors proclaimed him cancer-free.

“It was heart-lifting,” he says. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure what I was going to hear. They said ‘You’re free.’”

So he set a goal. He gave himself one summer to accomplish it.

“I wanted to get back to where I was before,” he says. “I wanted to play football again. I wanted to play for Mass Maritime.”

BACK TO BASICS

Six days a week, all summer, after they got out of work, Cody and E.J. would head down to the Wareham YMCA to train. On the seventh day, they went for a run. He asked his mom to only prepare chicken breasts, fruits and vegetables for dinner.

“I couldn’t believe how quickly he got strong,” Nichole says. “He was very self-disciplined.”

E.J. and Cody became so close, with E.J. often staying for dinner with the Stahmers, that Nichole took to calling him “my fourth kid.”

“As much as he was helping Cody and motivating Cody, I think E.J. felt just as motivated by Cody,” Nichole says. “Wareham gets so much bad press, but here’s kids doing good stuff.”

By the end of the summer — which brought one more good-news visit at Dana-Farber during his three-month checkup — Cody was in the best shape of his life. He was back to his playing weight of 180 pounds and his quickness and agility had reconciled with his body.

“I was surprised how hard I worked and pushed myself,” he says now. “I didn’t realize how good I felt about myself until I realized I felt better than I did before I felt the cancer. Cancer was a real inspiration to me to get to that next level.”

That’s precisely what he did when he returned to the practice field in August.

“He hadn’t missed a beat, he looked better than ever,” Cameron says. “If you don’t come in in really good shape it’s hard to get through training camp. He was certainly in excellent shape.”

Cody was still deep down the depth chart behind E.J., who would set the school’s all-time receiving yardage record this season, but in a Week 3 loss to Worcester State on Sept. 27, less than a year after his diagnosis, Cody caught his first collegiate pass on an 11-yard hitch route.

His proudest moment in that game, though, came on a broken play.

The Buccaneers began the down by running the wrong play, but halfback Kenny Pierce still found a hole and broke it to the outside. Cody followed the play, eventually catching up and laying a block on the final would-be tackler to spring Pierce for a 69-yard touchdown.

“My biggest moment was making that block, it wasn’t catching the ball,” Cody says. “I didn’t think I’d get in that game. It was very exciting, a big moment for me.”

Up in the stands, Nichole cried.

“Even to see him in the uniform,” she says before pausing to compose herself, “There was a chance he wouldn’t have been there. I think for all of us, it makes us appreciate things and time in a different manner. It puts things in perspective and humbles you.”

A RETURN TO NORMALCY

Cody has been cancer-free for six months now. He still has to return to Dana-Farber every six months for check ups.

Mass Maritime wrapped up its 4-6 season with a 31-21 win over Bridgewater State in the annual Cranberry Bowl on Saturday. Cody didn’t catch another pass on the season, although he got on the field a few more times and nearly caught a deep bomb against Fitchburg State; he still feels he should have drawn a pass interference penalty on the play.

The team’s top three wide receivers, including E.J., were all seniors, giving Cody a chance to move into a more prominent role next year, something his coach is confident he can achieve.

“We expect him, next year, to be in the mix and contributing,” Cameron says. “He’s shown he wants to be a part of it. He works hard. He’s a really good kid. He just had a couple of guys ahead of him who were two or three year starters. He’s capable of doing it.”

For the past year, the doctors, nurses and patients at Dana-Farber have become a second family for Cody, one he could dare expose his vulnerability to while he maintaining his stoic front at school.

“It’s been a pretty hectic year,” Cody says. “It’s definitely made me think about life, see all the people I saw there. I would never think I would be going through something and seeing other people going through something worse. I realized I didn’t have it that bad. A lot of them were my inspiration.”

The nurses at Dana-Farber loved to call him “The Dark Knight,” and it soon spread. Cody’s sister had read that in Brazil, they put plastic covers over the chemo bags so patients don’t have to stare down their own debilitating medicine. So she ordered Batman stickers, and when the nurses brought a chemo bag, she would affix one to the side.

In the children’s hospital, the nurses loved the idea so much, Nichole says, they asked if they could share his stickers with the kids in the unit.

“He truly is my superhero,” Nichole says. “The world needs more Codys.”

Despite a debilitating illness, life for Marion’s Alex Pateakos is as normal as it can be

MARION — Just an hour after sunrise, out front of a split-level home a click down a gravel road off Route 6 in Marion, sit all the typical trappings of an ordinary American family. A basketball hoop perches over the driveway; a red-framed hockey goal sits facing the garage beside an old minivan. Everything is as commonplace as the homes that squat quietly on either side.

On the first floor, down the stairs and past the sign warning of “ninjas, pirates, monsters & zombies,” the shades are drawn and the only illumination emanates from a single floor lamp in the corner beside a blue recliner. In this hollow light, Stephani Taber sits by a bed, taking what looks like an athletic cup and pounding it repeatedly into the chest of an 11-year-old boy, who is laid out Avengers sheets, his legs propped up on a SpongeBob SquarePants pillow and his hand resting on a stuffed blue bunny.

It looks painful. Makes you cringe. It also helps keep young Alex alive. This exercise, repeated three times a day in 10 spots, combined with a maze of ventilators and a tracheotomy hole in his neck, allows him to breathe.

This process, called chest physiotherapy, breaks up the secretions in his lungs and allows him space to breathe again. As she finishes and Alex wakes up, Stephani suctions the secretions out through a long tube that sounds eerily like the tiny vacuum the dentist asks you to close your mouth around during a cleaning.

In so many ways, Alex Pateakos is just like every other sixth-grade boy. He loves comic-book movies (Thor’s his favorite), sledding and Percy Jackson books. Every inch of the walls are covered with Marvel Universe posters, hanging on the ceiling over his bed is a map of the continents and a three-foot tall Spiderman statue looms on a shelf in the corner. Last week he went rafting and showed up to school the next day proud to show off photos. On one wall is a poster he made in fourth grade that says his greatest wish is to travel to the moon and that when he grows up, he wants to be a race car driver — for that you can thank his 14-year-old brother, Zachary, a freshman at Upper Cape and proud Fast and Furious enthusiast.

One thing crystallizes when you spend time with Alex, as he gets ready in the morning, rides to school and attends homeroom and music class: Don’t count him out.

The boy who can’t move has already lived nine years longer than he was supposed to.

*****

On the morning of April 8, 2004, Alex Pateakos entered the world on his father’s birthday. The pregnancy, the delivery, the first few days in the hospital, all were typical for Jenessa Gerard-Pateakos.

Tammy was Alex’s nurse before a back injury left her unable to lift him. Yet nine years later, she and her husband put on the motorcycle run to help raise upwards of $5,000 a year for Alex.

“They don’t get anything for this and they work a ton to provide for Alex,” said Jay Pateakos, Alex’s father. “It’s just an incredible amount of work. Every year it’s more bikers and more people involved who don’t know Alex, but do this out of the goodness of their heart. It’s very humbling for us.”

In the past, much of the money raised has gone to maintenance for the handicapped-accessible van Alex uses to get around. This year, they’re looking to upgrade the software on the Tobii Dynarox tablet he uses to communicate through eyeball tracking.

“It’s an amazing effort and it’s been integral in us being able to have the handicap van, which allows him to get out in the community and participate,” said Jenessa Gerard-Pateakos.

This is the family’s only fundraiser, as they aren’t always comfortable seeking donations.

“The ride is all about Alex and the outpouring of people is really amazing,” Jay said. “It gives you a positive outlook on human nature in general.”

For more information about SMA, visit the Families of SMA Web site at www.curesma.org.

But weeks later, Jenessa could tell something was wrong. Little Alex didn’t move his arms or legs normally, and struggled to hold his head up. He would break into a huge smile, but he wouldn’t cry very loudly.

A week before he turned seven months old, Alex was spending the night with his grandmother when she noticed his breathing speed up and food began spilling out his nose. He was rushed to Boston Children’s Hospital, where a triage nurse immediately scurried him out of the waiting room.

The diagnosis came back. Alex was suffering from Type 1 SMA — spinal muscular atrophy, also called Werdnig-Hoffman disease, which affects 1 in 6,000 children and strips him of muscle function by affecting the motor neurons in his spinal cord. Doctors predicted he wouldn’t live past his second birthday, which is when 50 percent of those born with the genetic disorder die.

“It was awful,” Jenessa says. “I prayed a lot about it.”

As his muscles shut down, no longer receiving signals from the brain, Jenessa and Jay were forced to make a difficult decision. A tracheotomy would extend his life, but what kind of life would it be?

“It’s a tough decision for parents to think about,” Jay says. “For us, it was giving him every opportunity to live.”

The pages of the newsletters they get every few months are filled with “In Memoriams” for those with SMA who didn’t make it. Many of them chose not to operate.

“If we hadn’t done it?“Jenessa reflects. “He would have died.”

As Alex grew older, his body broke down even more. He stopped being able to move his head. He had a G-tube inserted into his stomach to feed him when he couldn’t swallow any more. One of the many whizzing, buzzing machines next to his bed allows him to cough.

“He had a really full smile,” Jenessa remembers. “It’s things we take for granted, like breathing, we don’t even think about it.”

Yet, in Alex’s brain, he’s perfectly cognizant. He sees you, hears you, understands you. But for years he could only communicate with subtle eye movements and a sneaky smile that lifts his upper lip like an Elvis snarl. On request, he can move his left thumb. He looks at you for yes; away for no.

*****

Upstairs, Alex’s little sister, Zoe, plays a Christmas tune on the family’s Baldwin piano while Jenessa cuts up cucumbers and tomatoes for her lunch.

In so many ways, Zoe’s life is normal. Her mom is a lawyer at the firm Pateakos and Poulin in New Bedford and her father works at the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce. She’s an effervescent third grader who just happens to know how to re-insert a tracheotomy tube into her brother’s throat.

Zoe likes to watch Spongebob with her older brother, and that’s exactly what he’s doing downstairs as Stephani, one of three nurses who work in shifts throughout the day with Alex, gets him ready for school, pulling on his body brace and covering it with an Avengers T-shirt. Stephani brushes his teeth with a bright orange toothbrush, then suctions out the toothpaste. She feeds him using syringes of Peptamen and hydrates him with what looks like a turkey baster of water. Then she uses a Voyager lift to move him from the bed to his wheelchair.

Meanwhile, Zoe sits at the kitchen table, recalling a family trip with Alex to upstate New York, where he attended the Double H Ranch camp, founded by Paul Newman, and got to sing songs around a campfire, take part in arts and crafts and shoot an arrow using a finger-touch release.

“Kids like Alex don’t get to do those things,” Jenessa chimes in from the kitchen. “It was great for Alex to see other kids like himself.”

Alex has done lots of things kids in his situation never experience. He’s been to Maine and Florida. He’s ridden down the boardwalk in Atlantic City. He loves going to Wareham’s Flagship Cinemas and the drive-in.

“You can treat these kids as bubble children or you can try to give them every experience possible,” Jay says. “My thinking, these kids are going to die young anyway, so they might as well live the best life possible.

“Being that he’s cognitively fine, it’s gotta be the most difficult thing to see people doing things and not being able to do them. You have to wonder, what’s going on in his head? We try to make it so he’s doing as much as possible.”

*****

At promptly 8:30 on this bright, dewy morning, driver Joe pulls up in a Whaling City Transit van to bring Alex to school at Sippican Elementary.

Minutes later, Alex rides the elevator upstairs to Mrs. Sinnott’s class, his homeroom, as Mozart plays over the school speakers. At his side is Mimi Wicker, his one-on-one assistant, who has worked with him since preschool.

Outside the room, Mimi and Stephani slide armrests and a writing table onto his wheelchair and spin his brand-new Tobii Dynarox tablet into position in front of his face, where he can control it using his eyes.

Alex joins the rest of the class in a circle at the front of the room where they make duck noises as an icebreaker. During a memory and concentration game, Mimi says Alex’s favorite dessert is popsicles, which his mom gives him for the taste, then must vacuum out of his mouth.

His breathing apparatus makes a constant Darth Vader-like hum, but the students here are blissfully unaware. Most of them have been in class with Alex since kindergarten.

“They have very special relationships, and he’s very much a part of the class,” says principal Lyn Rivet. “This class has a special appreciation of him as a person.”

Classmate Katie Nilson remembers attending his second-grade birthday party and playing in his backyard. On this day she sits at a folding table in the back of the classroom with a map of Europe spread in front of her, remembering meeting Alex for the first time in kindergarten.

“At first it was a little uncomfortable because I didn’t understand,” she says.

Next to her, Bella Romig speaks up.

“He’s funny,” she says. “He can say things at random times. You just have to adjust. It helps me appreciate life and what you have.”

When Alex first attended Project Grow, the school’s preschool program, his parents brought breathing tubes into the classroom for the kids to play with and get used to.

“They’ve grown up with him,” says Jenessa. “The school has been really good teaching the kids. They’re comfortable with him. That’s exactly what we want.”

“He’s like the most famous kid in the school,” Jay adds. “He doesn’t talk, but everyone knows him. He provides an element of humility to the kids. These kids get that experience and they move on and they’re more humble and they’ve experienced his troubles. He has that type of impact.”

*****

At precisely 9:10, the students shuffle downstairs to music class, where the walls are lined with ukuleles and a beautiful wooden harp sits by the windows overlooking a playground. As the rest of the class diagrams notes off the projector at the front of the room, a music app displays the notes on Alex’s personal screen.While the rest of the class taps out Mozart beats using their hands and thighs, Mimi works Alex’s hand in rhythm.

His eyes follow the teacher as she paces the front of the room, discussing the difference between allegro and vivace. Alex’s monitor has been turned to the side, so when he makes direct eye contact with Mimi, she swings it in front of him. With a few glances, he speaks for the first time all day.

“I need to be suctioned,” the mechanical voice barks. “Please suction my tract.”

Stephani bursts into action, vacuuming out his mouth and throat. None of the other kids even offer a glance his way.

As Mimi pushes his chair out the double doors at the end of class, Alex’s eyes dart around his screen. The staccato voice pipes up, “You’re so pretty. I love you.”

“He’s a very special guy,” Mimi says, beaming. “He’s a gift.”

The day before, on Stephani’s birthday, he had called up the birthday song.

*****

Alex has been educated in as mainstream a track as feasible his entire life. He’s given reports to the entire school on George Washington and led an all-school meeting, all part of Sippican’s efforts toward teaching inclusiveness. He’s preparing a book report on “Bread Winner” and when he’s learning something he enjoys, he says “I like that topic, can we learn more about it?”

When he first started attending preschool, he would cry and his heart rate would rise rapidly. Now, he’s calm and content. He attended six weeks of summer school this year when his parents noticed him missing his classmates.

“He loves being with other children,” says Mrs. Sinnott. “He’s a pleasure. He teaches the children — besides new songs — about not always thinking about themselves.”

At the beginning of the day, he often leads the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. On this day, he brings in a video of dogs and cats frolicking to the music of Pharrell’s “Happy.” The class huddles around his monitor, bopping their heads to the infectious beat. He breaks into his Elvis smile.

The week before, as Mrs. Sinnott asked the class to predict the score of the Patriots’ season opener against the Steelers, she heard Alex’s mechanical voice chime in: “6-0.”

“He’s just really an integral part of his class,” says Denise Bouvette, a special education teacher at Sippican. “The kids love having him. You can see he’s very caring. They even ask about him when he’s not there.”

And that’s sometimes the case. While Alex has been relatively healthy the last few years — one of his most recent hospital trips came when he swallowed a baby tooth — he’ll soon be spending five weeks at the Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston in an effort to straighten out his spine, which is shaped like a “C” and bent at 84 degrees due to scoliosis complications from his SMA. He’ll undergo a procedure to stretch his back out, then a steel rod will be inserted and his spine fused.

When he returns, his classmates will be waiting for him, ready to watch the next goofy video he brings in or sit next to him while they color in Denmark on a map. They’ll talk to him about Halloween, ask if he’s decided if he’s going as Ant-Man yet.

And he’ll bring his sense of humor. When his dad enters the room he likes to say “Hi, Mom,” with what you can only imagine is a tongue firmly planted in his cheek. He’ll be chomping at the bit to watch “Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

You know, just like any other 11-year-old boy.

“The best part of people come out when Alex is around,” says Jay. “I think people are giving and show him attention and learn a lot from him. He doesn’t take life too seriously. He enjoys life. That’s a lesson for everybody.”

He has undergone 23 heart procedures. But that doesn't stop Old Colony freshman Brady Weglowski from playing the game he loves.

MARION -- Early on, the Weglowskis learned how to read the doctor’s wardrobe.

As he would approach down a hallway toward the waiting room -- in what they couldn’t help but recognize from every hospital scene from every TV show and movie ever made -- he would either be wearing scrubs or a suit.

“If he comes up here in scrubs, that means he’s not going home tonight,” Marc Weglowski says. “He’s going to stay here and watch something. If he comes out in his street clothes, he’s going home and he feels comfortable.”

The first time this played out for the Weglowskis was at 10:20 at night on Aug. 29, 2005, after their 2-month-old son, Brady, had just undergone his first open-heart surgery.

The doctor was wearing his scrubs.

*****

It’s one of those marvelous sunny-yet-cool fall afternoons at Acushnet River Valley Golf Course as Brady raises his blue rangefinder to his brow, lining up his tee shot on the sixth hole.

The orange pants he is notorious for wearing around Reservation Golf Club are gone, replaced with khakis and a black Old Colony shirt. But there’s a slight nod to his favorite player Rickie Fowler’s penchant for gaudiness in Brady’s orange-highlighted shoes.

The slender-framed freshman is coming off a birdie on the fourth hole and a par on the fifth. He’ll finish the round with a six-over 42, showing off cleanly placed second shots and a measured approach on the greens.

“He’s great off the tee box,” says his coach, Kathy Peterson. “He approaches every shot differently and he takes it seriously. If he has a bad hole, he’s able to recover, which you don’t see sometimes in young players. He gives himself a chance in every match.”

Weglowski proved that just about two weeks into his high school career. While playing as the Cougars’ No. 3 golfer in a match against Norfolk Aggie back in September, he finished as the low medalist with a nine-hole 41.

“He approaches his golf shots really well,” Peterson says. “He’s always looking one shot ahead. He’s really good with his club selection and what he should be hitting. A bad day of golf for him is probably a good day for most people.”

On this sunny Tuesday, Brady walks off the ninth green comparing scorecards with fellow Cougars freshman Luke Butler. As they head down the path toward the clubhouse, there’s only one small hint that Brady isn’t just your typical high school freshman: the motorized push cart holding his bag.

But even that is a point of contention.

“He doesn’t want to use his pushcart,” Peterson admits. “He was against that.”

A few hours later, sitting on an overstuffed couch in his family living room in Mattapoisett, Brady is asked about his pushcart.

“Coach makes me,” he says with a sheepish grin. “I’m like, ‘Coach, I’m fine.’”

*****

Brady was just two days old when a pediatrician at St. Luke’s hospital noticed a heart murmur and sent him for an electrocardiogram.

Doctors quickly discovered Brady had been born without a pulmonary valve, a condition known as pulmonary atresia. He was also diagnosed with tetralogy of fallot, which involves four abnormalities of the heart that result in insufficient oxygen reaching the bloodstream.

He was transported to Boston Children’s Hospital, where he spent the next week. He necessitated open heart surgery to insert an artificial valve, but it was determined he needed to put on more weight first, so he was sent home for two months.

On Aug. 29, he underwent his first open heart surgery. He went into cardiac arrest and spent three days on life support.

“My husband and I watched our baby’s life end as the doctors and nurses worked on trying to save Brady,” Kelly wrote online. “After three of the longest days of our lives, Brady fought his way back.”

“It was extremely difficult. Very difficult,” she says now, sitting in her living room with a baseball game playing in the background. “But he championed through it.”

“He pulled through like a champ,” Marc echoes from across the room.

Thirteen days after his surgery, Brady was back home. But as his heart grew, the valve wouldn’t. And the tetralogy of fallot meant he needed other procedures, including numerous cardiac catheterizations.

“You almost go into this fog,” Kelly says. “I’ve gotten friendly with a lot of other moms with kids who were born with congenital heart defects and it’s the same thing. You go into this zone.”

In his first two years of life, Brady had 21 hospitalizations. He had three open heart surgeries by the age of 3.

“I remember carrying him into the operating room I don’t know how many times,” Marc says. “I would carry him in there, walking into this brand-spanking new operating room.

“There’s this little operating table, and you have to put him on it and he’s holding your finger and you have to walk out of the room.

“I got outside and there’s a nurse and I hit the deck. You just break down uncontrollably.”

*****

As the family discussed Brady’s diagnosis with his doctors, they asked if the family was athletic. Marc had grown up playing sports at Durfee High and as an adult enjoyed golf, despite his 20 handicap.

“They said be careful of high cardio sports,” Marc says. “Because if they get good, they might not be able to do it later and they’ll be disappointed. So I went with baseball and golf.”

Brady first started swinging a club at age 3. He played his first round at age 6.

One day, Brady was hitting some balls at Meadowbrook Driving Range in Acushnet.

“There was a pro there practicing and he stood behind Brady,” Kelly recalls. “He said to me, ‘Don’t ever let anyone mess with his swing.’”

“He has a beautiful swing,” Peterson confirms.

When he was 11, Brady decided to quit baseball to focus on golf. In 2016, he won three events on the PGA New England Junior Tour and finished fifth at the Tour Championship. He won two more times in 2017 and took sixth at the Tour Championship, then handed in three second-place finishes during an abbreviated 2018 season.

“He could always really swing it,” Marc says. “A lot of kids have to learn how to swing, but some kids pick it up as a natural swing. He had that.”

Peterson, who works part time at Reservation, where Brady is a member (he also holds a membership at Bay Club, but he first learned to play at Little Harbor), noticed him as the little kid with the orange pants.

“I knew he was thinking of coming to Old Colony and I spoke to his parents,” she says. “I was excited when he decided to come. I didn’t know anything about his background. I just knew he had played golf since a young age and he took it seriously. I was excited to work with him. He’s always working on his game.”

*****

If there’s an official Golf Bucket List, Brady is in pole position for his age.

He plays four rounds in the golfer’s paradise of Myrtle Beach every year. He played legendary Pebble Beach days after his 12th birthday, recording a par on the famously petite and picturesque 7th hole and a bogey on the camera-friendly 18th.

But we’re just getting started.

Through Make-A-Wish, he was able to walk 18 holes with his idol, Fowler, at the Deutsche Bank Championship.

“At the end he went and brought me in the clubhouse and I got to meet a bunch of different pros,” he says, before listing off names including Phil Mickelson and Jordan Spieth. “It was really cool.”

But all that pales in comparison to his experience at TPC Norton during the Dell Technology Championship Pro-Am. Kelly had a connection with someone who was playing in a group with Tiger Woods and invited the family up to meet him. They expected a quick photo op, maybe an autograph, and then they’d be on their way.

But Tiger had other plans.

“He spent 18 holes walking side-by-side shooting the breeze with Tiger for four or five hours,” Marc recalls.

“That was crazy,” Brady says with a big grin. “We talked the whole time. We talked about golf, school, sports. He gave me one tip with putting: Speed.”

At the end of the round, Brady got to hit a tee shot using Tiger’s driver.

“I actually hit it pretty well,” he admits. “There were a bunch of people around and everyone was screaming. Tiger was right behind me. It was insane.”

His mom couldn’t help but think: “You don’t even grasp what you’re doing right now.”

*****

Since the age of 3, Brady has been reasonably healthy. While he has still had to go in for occasional cardiac catheterizations -- 16 of them in all, plus seven heart surgeries, three of which were open heart -- including once earlier this fall, he’s mostly lived complication-free for the past dozen years.

“He’s not sickly,” Marc says. “He’s almost never sick. He’s not on oxygen. He’s riding his bike and skiing on the weekends in the winter and swimming in the pool in the summer.”

“Every once in a while I get chest pains, but it’s not bad,” Brady says. “It’s not anything I’m ever worried about. The only thing is running. I can’t run for very long.”

Brady’s run of 12 years without an open heart surgery is about to come to an end, as well. On Dec. 11 he’ll undergo what is expected to be his final valve replacement surgery. It will be the first one he remembers.

“When I was 3 I remember walking into a room (in the hospital) and getting a graham cracker, but that’s it,” he says.

His thoughts on his upcoming surgery?

“Get it over with, I guess,” he says.

The reason Brady has to undergo a fourth open-heart surgery is because the synthetic valve he had inserted at age 3 doesn’t grow as the heart does. But Kelly is trying to change that.

When Brady was a child, she was talking with one of his surgeons, Dr. John Mayer, about how many surgeries he would have to endure throughout his life. Dr. Mayer told her about his research at Harvard Medical School on developing a tissue-engineered valve that would grow with the child. But funding was tight.

Kelly and Marc had recently attended the annual Champions for Children fundraiser and she was emboldened to attempt a miniature version of it in New Bedford at the Whaling Museum. She called together 20 or so friends for a meeting over wine in her home and nine years later she had raised $1 million through the Healing Little Hearts Gala. In 2012, Kelly was named the Mattapoisett Woman of the Year by the Standard-Times.

“It took on a life of its own,” she says.

The event ended in 2016, but Kelly is bringing it back on March 7, 2020, after learning that they are close to clinical trials.

“That’s huge,” she says. “We’re doing it to give the research the push it needs.”

*****

One of Brady’s best rounds this year, a 78, got him an invite to the National Invitational at Pinehurst in North Carolina, which means he’s postponing a possible baseball comeback in the spring in order to practice for the 7,000-yard course. Lately, he’s been focused on improving his driving accuracy.

While he’s more focused on his next three seasons at Old Colony, Brady has put some thought toward pursuing the game beyond high school.

“If I can, I’ll play in college,” he says. “Division I would be a stretch, but I think (I could play) Division II if I keep practicing and playing.”

He has been deciding between business and health tracks at Old Colony and already has eyes on following in his dad’s footsteps as a manufacturing representative selling industrial equipment to chemical plants and oil refineries, the type of job where deals often get made on the golf course.

“My goal for him was to make the high school team,” Marc says, “so mission accomplished.”

The real mission accomplished will come Dec. 12, when he should be recovering from his 24th heart procedure.

For Brady, that’s just par for the course.