NEW YORK (NEXSTAR) – Talking for four hours a day, five days a week has been Boomer Esiason’s job for the past 17 years.
Before that, he lit up the Bengals’ record book, throwing for nearly 38,000 yards and 247 touchdowns en route to a 1988 MVP award.
Boomer’s lone trip to the Super Bowl ended on a sour note, watching Cincy’s three-point lead slip away.
“I’m on the sideline for what is like a half an hour in real time. Now, it’s three minutes and thirty seconds, but it’s a half an hour in real time. I got a guy tapping me on my shoulder and there’s about ten people that are associated with the Disney commercial. They wanted to know if I knew my lines.
“You mean like, ‘I’m going to Disney World?’ I think I can come up with those lines. I don’t need cue cards or anything. But, there’s a makeup person fixing my eye black and all this crazy stuff going on.
“Meanwhile, Joe Montana’s hitting Jerry Rice, Roger Craig, diving over people. Our defense just misses to knock a ball down. We’ve almost got him sacked and they move all the way down the field and they score with about thirty seconds left to go in the game. Before I can get the words out of my mouth – ‘I guess I’m not going to Disney World’ – these ten people that are shooting the commercial going running across the field looking for Jerry Rice. He was the one who ultimately went to Disney World.
“Unfortunately, that’s my memory of Super Bowl XXIII.”
Boomer’s greatest victory came off the field, helping his son Gunnar beat the odds.
“My dad and I are best friends. My dad was the hockey dad that was banging on the glass in the middle of the game, embarrassing the heck out of me.”
“Probably the greatest day of my life was the day that he was born, which was April 6th, 1991. What we didn’t know that day and we found out about a year and a half later was that he was born with cystic fibrosis, which is a genetic disease and usually shows itself at birth in some way, shape or form. But, unfortunately for Gunnar, it did not show itself. Unfortunately, he had to struggle the first year and a half of his life. When I think back on those days, I have such a level of guilt because he shouldn’t have suffered the way that he did.”
Boomer actually learned of Gunnar’s condition on the Jets’ practice field.
“I’m literally putting my helmet on, getting ready to take a snap, and the head coach’s assistant comes running out to me saying, ‘Your wife is on the phone. You’ve got to run in here. You’ve got to take this. It’s an urgent message.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, Jesus,’ so I go running in. She tells me that Gunnar was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
“My wife Cheryl and I were crying. I never felt so helpless in my life. I remember my first phone call was to my father. My second phone call was to a man by the name of Frank DeFord. Frank DeFord, I had met in 1989 after I had won the NFL MVP award at an awards banquet. He was the featured speaker. I didn’t know he was speaking that night and I had no idea what he was speaking about. He was speaking about how he had lost his daughter Alex at the age of 8 to cystic fibrosis. That night, in 1989, was when I actually got involved with cystic fibrosis fundraising in Cincinnati.
“All these thoughts and all these things were going through my head. I’m thinking, ‘I have to retire. I have to stay home and take care of him. But, there was a bigger mission than just Gunnar. That was, what Frank DeFord ultimately told me, ‘You have to put a face on this disease if we really want to try to move this forward.'”
Five months later, Boomer and Gunnar were front and center on the cover of Sports Illustrated, detailing the painstaking measures the two-year-old went through.
“Basically, three hours a day tied to a nebulizer or physical therapy device to shake that mucus free from my lungs so I could cough it up.”
“Parallel to all of this are the mental hurdles that he had to get over, especially when he was a young man and the internet started to flourish. He started to be able to Google things and look things up and see all the worst parts of cystic fibrosis. Some kids don’t get past their 10th birthday and some kids lived into their 30’s.
“But, he’s thinking, ‘Man, my life could be over when I’m 10 and I’m not going to live past 30?'”
But, Gunnar kept fighting.
“When you are living with a rare disease like cystic fibrosis, the only way to move the ball down the field is to actually participate in that clinical research. It’s an all for one, one for all kind of thing.”
Gunnar started enrolling in the first of many clinical trials in his early 20’s.
“At the time, I was extremely sick. I was basically on the verge of end-stage disease, which with cystic fibrosis is pretty ugly. You can’t breathe. You constantly have fevers. There were mornings when my symptoms were flaring that I couldn’t get from the bed to the bathroom because I just couldn’t breathe. It was hard. It was lonely. It was terrifying. I was 22-years-old and my friends starting their careers and moving to this city or that city – starting their lives. I was basically living like a high school kid again in my parent’s home. I could not care for myself alone. I needed somebody around constantly and that was my mom.”
Finally, in 2018, one worked.
“Within 12 hours, my mucus started changing. Three days later my cough went away. A week later I could take a deep breath. Then, for the first time in my life, all of my cystic fibrosis baseline metrics started going up and to the right, which was a remarkable thing. It happened so fast.
But Gunnar isn’t slowing down. Now, he helps run the Boomer Esiason Foundation, which has raised over $200 million over the past 30 years, breathing new life into CF research.
“The foundation has, in a lot of ways, come full circle. I was diagnosed at a very early age with not a great prognosis and here we are, almost 30 years later, helping people with CF build families.
“If that’s not a sign of progress, then I don’t know what is.”
Gunnar celebrated his 32nd birthday last April with a family of his own.
“I say this all the time – Gunnar is my hero, personally. His son, Kaspar, is our miracle. Miracles can happen. It’s right there in front of everybody to see.
“We’ve been fighting this fight for a long time. I’ve been traveling, running all over the place, getting on planes in the middle of the night, trying to raise as much money and awareness as I possibly could. I can’t tell you how fulfilling it is to know that we have left this mark on this community. It’s a community that now is thriving.”
