Lifes not going to stop for anybody: Giants coordinator Thomas McGaughey reflects on his gr

May 21, 2024

While the rest of the Giants’ coaches and players were at practice three days before their game against the Texans last September, special teams coordinator Thomas McGaughey was lying on the floor of his office.

McGaughey was three days removed from the fifth chemotherapy treatment he underwent last year. The first 48 hours after each treatment were a struggle, but McGaughey could work through the ceaseless feeling of nausea. But by the third day, the side effects were debilitating.

“The hardest part was going through those days after the chemo. That third day, you never looked forward to it. You knew it was coming,” McGaughey said. “It’s like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and you can’t stop it. You see the bat swinging and you know it’s going to hit you in the head. You just sit there and brace for it. That third day is just a monster.”

McGaughey underwent six rounds of chemotherapy from June through October while maintaining his role as the leader of a special teams unit that improved from 32nd to third in Football Outsiders’ rankings. McGaughey recently detailed to The Athletic how he balanced his coaching duties with the grueling treatment for a life-threatening disease.

“Stuff happens and there’s nothing you can do about it,” McGaughey said. “Life’s going to throw you a curveball and you better be able to hit it. My attitude toward the whole thing was I’ve just got to get it right. Whatever it is, I’ve just got to get it right.”

McGaughey, 46, had never missed a day of work in the first 19 years of his coaching career before he became ill on the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend in 2017. Then in his second year as the Panthers’ special teams coordinator, McGaughey was with his wife Erika and their 16-year-old son Trent at a basketball camp in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

McGaughey figured he was coming down with the flu when he experienced chills and a fever. He took medication and felt better that night, but the symptoms returned the next morning. Erika demanded that he go to the hospital, where tests revealed that he had sepsis, a potentially deadly illness caused by a bacterial infection in his blood.

McGaughey was hospitalized for five days while antibiotics were used to treat the infection. An ultrasound detected what doctors believed was a kidney stone or gallstone, but McGaughey was told it wasn’t a major concern. He returned to coaching in 2017 with no further issues.

“I took all these antibiotics while I was there, the sepsis went away and I just kind of went on with life,” McGaughey said.

McGaughey wasn’t retained by the Panthers after the 2017 season and initially drew interest from the Browns for their special teams coordinator opening. But he turned down that job when presented the opportunity to return to New York, where he won a Super Bowl ring while serving as the assistant special teams coach under coordinator Tom Quinn from 2007-10.

McGaughey had bounced around after leaving the Giants, spending three years as the special teams coordinator at LSU before one year apiece in the same role with the Jets and 49ers. He was in Carolina for two years before returning to replace Quinn, who was fired after Pat Shurmur was hired as head coach last January.

McGaughey in 2015 coaching against the Giants while with the 49ers. (Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images)

“I was this far away from going to Cleveland,” McGaughey said as he held his fingers close together. “I really thought about it. I talked to my wife and I was like, ‘What the hell am I thinking?’ It’s not even close. There are some good people in Cleveland, but just as a franchise and just knowing what I’m going to get, I almost pulled a hamstring trying to get back here.”

Two months after landing his dream job, McGaughey’s health woes returned. He was alone in the family’s suburban Houston home when the same symptoms from 10 months earlier recurred. He was on a Facetime call with Erika, who had just landed in Houston after a flight from Los Angeles with their 23-year-old daughter Taylor, and again initially suggested that the chills and fever could be symptoms of the flu. But Erika feared it was more serious and convinced her husband to go to a local hospital.

“He went to stand up to grab his keys and he couldn’t really stand up that well,” Erika said. “I could see he was struggling to stand up and I said, ‘You know what? Never mind. I’m just going to call 911.’”

McGaughey again was in the hospital for nearly a week as antibiotics were used to treat the sepsis. Doctors saw the mass that was previously believed to be a kidney stone in his bile duct and conducted an endoscopy to examine his digestive tract. The mass was actually a tumor, but it was deemed benign after a biopsy.

McGaughey returned to New Jersey for the start of the Giants’ offseason program, planning to have the tumor removed during the summer. But head trainer Ronnie Barnes suggested a second opinion and he arranged an appointment for McGaughey that week at the renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

A biopsy at MD Anderson again indicated that the tumor was benign, but doctors didn’t want to wait to remove it since it was blocking McGaughey’s bile duct. That blockage allowed bile to get into his bloodstream, which led to the sepsis. Doctors ordered a complex operation called a Whipple procedure to remove the tumor last May.

“They took out the head of my pancreas, they took out my gallbladder, they took out my bile duct, put a new bile duct in, took the head of my stomach and sewed it into my small intestine,” McGaughey said.

During the 10-hour surgery, doctors performed a third biopsy. But unlike the first two endoscopic biopsies when the tumor was scraped to gather a sample, doctors were able to cut into the mass after it was removed. That biopsy revealed that the tumor was malignant. The cancer had spread to one of McGaughey’s lymph nodes, which was removed during the surgery.

Doctors didn’t immediately inform McGaughey that he had cancer since he first had to recover from the Whipple procedure, which caused him to lose 30 pounds in a month. He still had no idea when he was discharged from the hospital six days after the operation on May 8, which was his 45th birthday.

“They wanted to let me go home and not really dampen my spirits on my birthday and give me that nice birthday present,” McGaughey said.

McGaughey returned to the hospital with his 25-year-old son Tre the next week for what he believed to be a routine follow-up appointment.

“The doctor came in and he was like, ‘We found cancer.’ It hit me like a ton of bricks. I was just shocked. It was like the Charlie Brown teacher, ‘Wom-wom-wom,’ after he told me that they found it,” McGaughey said. “After that subsided and it kind of kicked in a little bit, then it was like, ‘Now what do we do?’”

McGaughey was diagnosed with periampullary cancer and told that he’d need four-to-six rounds of chemotherapy over the next six months. McGaughey said the Giants were unbelievably supportive throughout the process – Barnes and special assistant to the GM Jesse Armstead went to Houston for the entire week he was hospitalized after the Whipple procedure and the team provided first-class airfare for all of his flights for treatment – but the organization had to account for the uncertainty presented by the situation. So general manager Dave Gettleman turned to a familiar face, enlisting Quinn to return as an assistant special teams coach.

“He was still under contract. Dave was like, ‘We’re still paying him. It makes no sense not to bring him in just in case something happens with you,’” McGaughey said. “He had to protect the organization. That’s his job as a GM. Nobody knew what was going to go on with me. I didn’t know. I had no problem with it.”

Quinn’s re-hiring could have created an awkward dynamic, with the veteran coach returning to serve as an assistant to his former understudy. Quinn joined Anthony Blevins, an up-and-coming coach who had been hired months earlier to serve as McGaughey’s assistant.

“When it comes down to it, Quinny is a professional and Blev’s a professional and I view myself as a professional,” McGaughey said. “So we understand our roles and we all keep our egos in check. It ain’t about us. It’s about the team. It was never an issue.”

McGaughey had his first chemo treatment in mid-June, about a week after Gettleman announced that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma. McGaughey’s treatment plan called for a four-week cycle. He’d taken seven pills a day for three weeks and then have a week off before a chemo treatment. The cycle would then restart.

McGaughey said the pills were “just nasty. It was almost like being very nauseous all the time, just kind of right on the edge of throwing up and anything could make you sensitive and make you feel queasy.”

He had to be hospitalized a couple of times for dehydration that was exacerbated by the travel for treatments and the heat in Houston. He couldn’t touch or drink anything cold for the first 24 hours after treatment because the tips of his fingers would start tingling and his throat felt like it would close up. He also had to deal with “chemo brain,” which affected his short-term memory.

“It was almost like I was in a fog,” he said.

Despite all of those side effects from the treatment, McGaughey was able to function most days.

“You got used to it,” McGaughey said. “The body is amazing.”

McGaughey had two treatments in Houston before reporting for training camp in late July. Standing outside for two-hour practices posed a problem since one of his medication’s side effects was that sun exposure caused extreme fatigue. So McGaughey would watch most of practice from the team’s indoor facility, go outside for the brief special teams periods and then retreat back inside.

Later in the season, the weather presented another challenge. Whenever temperatures dropped below 50 degrees and he was standing still, neuropathy would kick in and McGaughey’s feet and fingertips would get numb.

“Every day I just had stuff on from head to toe. I was like an Eskimo,” McGaughey said. “You had to stay covered up and nothing could be exposed.”

McGaughey didn’t want to be away from the team during training camp, so he went to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for his third chemo treatment in early August. McGaughey said the treatment was different and “it just completely shut me down.”

A day or two after the treatment, he had a fever so severe that he couldn’t work. He spent five days in the hospital and was released on the eve of the Giants’ preseason opener. After coaching in that game, he decided he would return to Houston for his final three chemo treatments.

The Giants’ schedule was accommodating for McGaughey’s fourth chemo session because it came when the team had an extra day off after the preseason finale. His fifth treatment was on Sept. 17, the day after the Giants lost to the Cowboys in Dallas. He stayed with in-laws in Dallas on Sunday night and drove to Houston with Tre for treatment on Monday. As he typically did, McGaughey watched game film on his iPad while receiving chemotherapy intravenously through a port implanted in his chest during the three-hour session.

McGaughey returned to New Jersey on Tuesday and battled through the side effects from the chemo for the next two days. He managed to conduct the special teams meeting on the morning of the third day after the treatment, but when it was time for practice that afternoon, he was incapacitated. He spent five hours laying on the floor of his office on towels he had gathered from the training room.

“There were probably two times where it shut me down that I couldn’t do anything,” McGaughey said. “The first time it hit me, I just laid in the office. The second time it hit me, I went to the players’ lounge to the little recovery room and just closed the door. You just learn how to deal with it after that. You just have to stay on top of the nausea medicine. Any time you felt the nausea after that first day or so after the treatment, you just have to take that stuff. You can’t try to be Johnny tough-ass, like, ‘I don’t want to take that, I don’t want to put that in my body.’ You better take it. It didn’t take me long to figure it out.”

McGaughey’s struggle inspired his players. There were no complaints about practice reps or long meetings when players saw what their coach was going through.

“This man literally came in every single day while he was fighting for his life, even when he didn’t have it,” special teams captain Michael Thomas said. “When he wasn’t here, we knew what he was doing, what he was going through. For him to show that strength and still be out here fighting with us, that’s a testament to who he is. I wouldn’t want to play for another coach.”

McGaughey doesn’t want pity. Balancing chemotherapy and coaching in the NFL wasn’t easy, but there was no other option for him.

“I’m not going to let any chemotherapy or cancer or anything else get in the way of what I do,” McGaughey said when he publicly announced his diagnosis last September. “I’m a father and a football coach, and that’s what I do.”

McGaughey’s announcement created headlines – for a day. He has a pragmatic understanding that special teams coordinators don’t command the spotlight. But the attention from those most affected by the ordeal drove him to continue coaching.

“I’ve got a wife and kids that are depending on me and they were watching my every move during this process,” McGaughey said. “So am I going to show my kids that when life hits that you’re going to fold and stop doing what you’re doing? No. You’ve got to keep on pushing because life’s not going to stop for anybody.”

McGaughey underwent his final chemo treatment in October. A few days later, his PET scan results came back normal. He had a follow-up scan earlier this week and remains in remission.

Through the darkest moments of the past year, McGaughey never stopped fighting to get to this point.

“You’ve just got to keep moving,” McGaughey said. “That was my mindset the whole way: Just keep your head down, punch, counterpunch and just keep fighting and eventually you’ll win. But you just can’t quit.”

(Top photo by AP Photo/Tom Canavan, File)

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