Baltimore Sun | Jef Barker
With help of football personnel, ex-walk-on donates late son's kidney to ailing alum
COLLEGE PARK — Too much was happening at once.
It seemed that years worth of life-altering news — some good, some tragic — was being compressed into a single, unforgettable day.
Remarkably, the thread that tied the day's events together was football.
It was this past July, and Mark Sobel, a 51-year-old New Jersey orthopedic surgeon and former walk-on Maryland football player, was suffering through the unimaginably sad death of his 17-year-old son. Nearing the end of his life, Mark Sobel Jr. lay in Children's Hospital of Philadelphia with myocarditis, an infection of the heart.
The elder Sobel had a decision to make: Should he donate his son's organs? In the haze of his grief came an unmistakably clear thought — Frank Romano.
Romano, 59, is a retired restaurant owner and chef from Connecticut who played on the offensive line for the Terps before Sobel arrived at the school. He was on dialysis after being diagnosed in 2007 with renal failure. He had become sick enough that he had passed out several times.
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