The pass that saved a life

The Ashbury Park Press

The late Mark Sobel Jr., whose kidney was donated
 to a former football player at the University of Maryland,
 where his father, Middletown resident Dr. Mark Sobel,
 played. / DOUG HOOD/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Were football as a metaphor for life merely some tired sports cliché, there would be no dots to connect from Matawan High School to the University of Maryland to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where Dr. Mark Sobel and his wife, Mary Grace, held a vigil no parent should ever have to endure last summer.

If it were simply a game, the ties that bound the Sobels to Frank Romano — from the first meeting at former Maryland coach Jerry Caliborne’s National Football Foundation Hall of Fame induction at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1999, to the phone call from “Big Paul” Vellano, father of current Terrapins captain Joe Vellano, asking Romano to pull to the side of the road and just listen on that fateful night — wouldn’t have existed.

“Being on a football team, that’s the biggest fraternity there is,” said Romano. “The friendships will always come to the top. You went through a lot together and you always remember that. It follows you around after you leave school. You talk to guys from other schools and the stories tend to be the same.”

It was July 16, and Sobel, a Monmouth County orthopedic surgeon and former walk-on defensive end at Maryland, and his wife had just lost their 17-year-old son, Mark Jr., who had played football at both Middletown High School South and North, due to complications from acute myocarditis, an infection of the heart.

Read more: http://www.app.com/article/20111208/NJNEWS/312080016/The-pass-that-saved-a-life