STATE COLLEGE, Pa. ? Every morning, Bill and Colleen O?Brien know their older son, 10-year-old Jack, will have a seizure when he wakes up. It could last 30 seconds or go on for 30 minutes, necessitating an ambulance trip to the hospital. There may be more seizures during the day, depending on disparate factors like weather patterns and Jack?s growth spurts. And when they happen, the O?Briens can do little except to turn their son on his side and wait for the seizure to end.
The O?Briens face daunting challenges every day that have nothing to do with scholarship restrictions, a bowl ban or reviving the sullied reputation of the
Penn State football program. In a college town where perspective has become a buzz word in the wake of the
Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal, O?Brien, the Nittany Lions? new coach, and his family have plenty of experience in keeping it.
?Obviously the challenges that they?ve had, those are far greater challenges than what?s going to come down the road professionally,? said Syracuse Coach Doug Marrone, Bill O?Brien?s best friend. ?I know that the football situation now is a great challenge, and people have their perspective on it, but they go through great challenges every single day.?
Bill O?Brien has an Ivy League education and more than a dozen years as a college assistant, and he took a salary cut of more than 50 percent at age 37 in order to be a glorified film grunt for the
New England Patriots. Yet what has shaped him and his wife most has been their experience with Jack, who has a rare genetic brain malformation known as lissencephaly. Jack O?Brien moves around only by wheelchair or commando crawling on his belly and has severely limited motor planning, meaning the brain is slow to tell the body what to do.
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