A Saints wide receiver's college 'match' gave new meaning to his life
When this season is over, Austin Carr wants to go fishing. He has a friend in Missouri who wants the New Orleans Saints wideout and his wife to make the trip. It doesn’t matter that Carr isn’t really into fishing.
There’s another reason for the journey.
Way back when Carr was a freshman at Northwestern in 2013, teammate Jeff Budzien announced the chance to “Be The Match” and enter a bone marrow registry. All it took was a cheek swab of saliva.
Carr figured, “Why not?”
He is a devout Christian and the opportunity spoke to him. “When Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself, I thought this was an opportunity to do that,” Carr says by phone. “It was a small sacrifice.”
The chances of a match were remote. Carr assumed the swab would be the end of it. Only months later, though, he got a call from an unknown number.
“My first blood test was positive,” Carr remembers. “At that point it might have been November. It was shocking and exciting at the same time.”
The next step was a five-hour procedure, and Be The Match waited until after Carr’s bowl game to bring him in. He went to Rosemont, Illinois, for what was kind of like a dialysis. There wasn’t much time to waste: a man named Roy Coe was in trouble. He had been battling non-Hodgkin lymphoma and the disease had morphed into another form of lymphoma. At one point, on a trip with his wife, Coe felt so sick “I thought I was going to die,” reports Sports Illustrated.
The gravity of the moment still remains with Carr. “I remember distinctly after drawing the blood, it was 12 in the afternoon,” Carr says. “I took a picture and they shipped [the blood] to where he was right away. That evening it was taken intravenously. It was shocking how urgent it was.”
Carr wanted to know if it had worked. He got updates every now and then but donors have to wait a year and get permission from the recipient to be in touch.
“It was a long year,” Carr says. He spent a lot of time praying for someone he didn’t know.
The procedure worked. And last February, Be The Match invited the 59-year-old Coe, and Carr to the Super Bowl in Minneapolis, setting the Missourian up with tickets to the game. For Carr there was a bigger prize: meeting his match.
“To see his face. To know I had a chance to save his life,” Carr says. “It was breathtaking.”
The two of them are still in touch on Facebook, messaging occasionally, planning that fishing trip in the offseason. And another Northwestern player from that 2013 season has also been a match, according to SI. Budzein, who now works as an assistant vice president at a Milwaukee bank, helped save the lives of two people with a simple announcement to his teammates.
“Every player, coach and staff was so willing to help the greater good,” Budzien says. “I think I talked to Coach [Pat] Fitzgerald about it before he interrupted three seconds in: ‘Let’s do it.'”
Five years later, Carr couldn’t recommend it enough.
“Put yourself in the other person’s shoes, helpless,” he says. “There’s no silver bullet outside the match. You’re talking about brothers and sisters and aunts. It’s very simple. Someone in your registry might need it one day.”
Austin Carr worked his whole life to make it to New Orleans, but all it took was a swab to be a saint.
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