Let me tell you a story.

It’s about a boy and his dream. Coming from a strong, hard-working Catholic family, he always wanted to attend Notre Dame. He was a viable athlete throughout his youth, despite not having the same build or ability as his teammates on the football field. But his work ethic was like no one else’s, something he inherited from his father. His tenacity on the field and in the classroom set him apart. After years of hard work, he achieves his dream – to be accepted into the University of Notre Dame, and light candles in the famous grotto on campus. Next stop, the coach’s office. He introduces himself and asks when tryouts are. A few months later, this incredible, overachieving young man is sitting on the Irish bench donning a gold and blue uniform. Then, in a surprise move late in a game that has all but assured the Irish a win, his coach waves him in, to the loud applause of the fans in attendance. Almost as soon as he enters the game, he makes a play. The fans fill the air with a thunderous ovation while the young man raises his arms in the air.

You think you may have heard this story before, possibly even seen it on the big-screen in a movie.

However, the name of this young man from this story is not Dan Ruettiger. It’s Mike Edwards. Mike Edwards, Jr. to be exact.

As Mike grew up playing sports, he had to do it differently than his classmates. The son of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and oldest of five brothers, he was born with no tibia – specifically Loss of Tibia Type 2. The tibia is the largest and strongest of the two bones that connect the knee to the ankle. Basically, Mike was born with a free-floating foot attached to the fibula. Just be able to walk every day, he’d have to follow a certain rigorous regiment.

It started at 4:30 every morning. Mike would stagger down the hallway, waking his mother who would get up and fill a cooler with ice, then meet him in the bathroom where he would plunge his right foot in the ice. While his brothers were getting up and showering as they got ready for school, Mike was doing homework on the toilet with his leg in an ice-cold cooler, so he can bring the swelling down just enough to strap on his brace.

Mike’s brace consisted of two incredibly uncomfortable pieces of composite plastic that would have to be tightly tied together with Velcro. Once it was in place, he would try to walk. He had to hop a little, much as you would after spraining an ankle. Mike describes the pain as “unbearable.”

“If you take a sharp knife and jam it in your leg, and then run it up your leg, that’s what it felt like,” he says.

And that’s what he went through every morning.

As the day progressed, the pain would finally become “normal.”  Mike would just keep “hammering” it as he walked, jamming it on the pavement. As the day went on, his foot became more and more numb. It took five hours after getting up and experiencing excruciating pain in his leg before numbness would finally take over.

Mike would go through his school day, trying to be as normal as he could. He played sports with classmates, and played them well. He even made the junior varsity football team as a tight end and cornerback. But the pain never went away, and would increase as he grew and gained more weight. “I couldn’t stop” he says. “I just loved playing too much.”

The pain didn’t stop, and the issue was coming to a head.

Doctors would have to fit Mike with new braces as his legs grew. With each passing year, the “sharp knife-jamming” pain he described worsened. At the time, Mike and his family lived in Leavenworth, Kansas. When it was time for another brace, both Mikes – Sr. and Jr. – made the trip to St. Louis. There was a doctor at the St. Louis Shriner’s Hospital that had been working with the Edwards family for years. Making no promises, he told young Mike there was a possibility he could become uninhibited in his movement by doing something drastic. The pain could go away and not hold him back any longer. He would have to amputate part of the leg.

Mike was 13 when he heard the doctor tell him this. Imagine that. A month ago, I told you a story about going to Opening Day with my father when I was the same age. Mike’s dad drove nearly five hours to a hospital for his son to decide whether or not to keep part of a limb.

“When you think about the 13 years of this, the regiment I had to go through each day, the pain…and to be told there could be an opportunity for that to be over; [I thought] I’ll roll the dice,” says Mike.

Mike’s decision seems impossible for most of us – but he makes it sound like a no-brainer.  With his father by his side, supporting his decision, it was time to call mom. It was Mike Sr.’s decision to have Mike Jr. make the call. There was a reason she wasn’t there with them.

Annette Edwards didn’t attend hospital visits with her son. She had been through enough with her younger sons’ hospital visits. As I mentioned earlier, Mike is the oldest of five brothers. Next in line in the Edwards chain is Chris, about a year and half younger than Mike Jr. Chris was born with cerebral palsy, a disease that effects the nervous system and causes physical disability with motor functions. Chris was also a twin – but when Mike was three, Chris’s twin brother Jeff died of a heart murmur on the operating table.  He was 18 months old. Now Mike Jr. has to call his mother and tell her he wants to have his foot amputated.

Annette understood, and stood strong with her son and husband. The surgery was scheduled, and then completed.

When Mike woke up after the procedure, he sat up and looked down at where his foot and ankle used to be. There’s nothing but an empty sheet at the end of the hospital bed.  “I accepted it right away,” he says, acknowledging “there’s no going back.”

High School

After three months on crutches with nothing underneath his shin, a post was installed before a prosthesis could be attached. Mike was now a freshman at Leavenworth High School. This certainly wasn’t an easy way to fit in.  As a freshman, before the artificial limb was attached, Mike stayed involved in athletics. He served as manager of both the football and basketball teams, just so he could be around the atmosphere of competition.  Once the limb was applied, Mike tried out for the school’s marching drill team – specifically, precision drill.

If you’re not familiar with ROTC, military schools and marching, precision drill is marching step-in-step with your fellow members, spinning a rifle. It’s not easy, and doing it with a brand-new artificial foot makes it near impossible. But Mike doesn’t know impossible. “I’m not one of those people that make odds. That’s other people who make those. You just go with what you got,” he explains.

About 300 kids tried out for the Leavenworth squad, including Mike. A colonel told him if he didn’t make the squad, it’s only because of the artificial limb and how it hinders his movement with the team. The odds, according to the colonel, were against him.

Mike ended up being one of only 18 that made the team, out of the 300 or so that tried out. The team went on to win the National Championship at The Air Force Academy in Colorado that year. Mike defied the odds and accomplished what others had thought was unachievable.

I mentioned earlier that Mike Sr. was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. As an Army man’s son, Mike lived in 17 different places in 12 years. “I was always starting over, all the time.” Before the family lived in Kansas, they lived in Washington D.C. where Mike’s dad worked at The Pentagon in Intelligence. Mike Sr. was a tough individual and strict father who never let his son believe that his prognosis was going to hold him back. He was bedside at the hospital when his son woke from the amputation surgery. “All right.  Now it’s time to pay.  It’s time to go to work,” he told his boy.

After Mike’s junior year at Leavenworth, Mike Sr. got a job teaching ROTC at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. That brought Mike to Adams High in South Bend, a school of about 2,500 students. Mike grew up playing not just football, but also basketball. In Kansas, he could never play on the high school team after the surgery, but he did manage to play a great deal through his rehabilitation. And he was pretty good, too. Not just for playing with a prosthetic, either. His game was good, really good.

With another fresh start, Mike decides he wants to try out for coach Pat King’s varsity squad. As a senior, it’s varsity or bust – no JV. Mike doesn’t want attention drawn to the prosthetic. So he tries out wearing sweatpants and long socks, hiding his foot and leg. He says he wears a brace because of an ACL injury he suffered back in Kansas. He doesn’t shower with the team. He keeps it all a secret. He hid it well. No one at Adams knew.

After completing day after day of tryouts, Mike made the team, completely on merit.  But he knew he would eventually have to come clean about his situation.

On the van ride back from a preseason scrimmage, Mike decides to take off the leg, then turns it around and reattaches it. Half the team sees it, in total disbelief.  The other half discovers his secret as he walks into Burger King with his leg on backwards.

His teammates found it as hilarious as they did shocking, and according to Mike, the humorous way he presented it made them more comfortable with it. That year, the team went on to win their first ever Sectional Championship in the state of Indiana, with Mike as a contributor.

Notre Dame

Mike Sr. was a graduate of Xavier University here in Cincinnati, but got his master’s degree from Notre Dame. When Mike Jr. was six years old, he visited his dad in South Bend.  After that trip to the Golden Dome, he was hooked. For Mike, it was Notre Dame for college or bust. After the story broke about him playing varsity basketball for Adams High in the South Bend Tribune, some national media outlets picked up his story, giving Mike some notoriety in the region. But for a guy that dreamed of attending such a prestigious university, it’s a good thing his father pushed him just as hard in the classroom as he did on the field. That was what mattered most to Mike – school. Despite letters of interest from other schools offering opportunities on the basketball court, there was only one place he wanted to go for college. With a 3.9 GPA and a 1200 SAT score, his academic credentials got him into Notre Dame. He had attained a dream; one of them.

At the start of the school year, Mike makes his way to The Joyce Center, the basketball home of the Fighting Irish. He walks in to the basketball offices and finds assistant coach Fran McCaffery. Mike extends his hand and says “coach, my name is Mike Edwards and I wanna know when tryouts are.”

McCaffery, who is now head coach at the University of Iowa, tells Mike he knows who he is and that tryouts are in a week. He also explains to the eager freshman that they (Irish) wouldn’t take very many walk-ons, maybe one. The two amicably split after the short conversation and Mike walked back to his dorm.

When he arrived back at his campus home, he had a voicemail. It was coach McCaffery telling him to show up for practice tomorrow. More specifically, to get his “ass” to practice. “Your tryout was 18 years long,” McCaffery said. Mike returned his call. McCaffery told him “there’s a spot on this team for you, don’t mess it up. We’re gonna roll the dice but now it’s up to you.”

That was the beginning of another dream for Mike Edwards.  “I wasn’t going to stop until I played college basketball. And I got the chance.”

John MacLeod was in his eighth season as head coach of the team at the time. Prior to that, he served in the NBA as head coach of New York Knicks for a year after holding the same title in Phoenix for the Suns for 14 years. So you could say he had clout among the college players. While McCaffery made the phone call, the decision always comes down from the top, and MacLeod has fond memories of his disabled freshman.

“He always worked his tail off,” MacLeod recalls. “He left everything on the floor, was non-stop action. Always pushing the scholarship players, exactly what we needed.”

“He’s a Notre Dame kid, that’s the type of kid you get at Notre Dame.”

One Shining Moment

November 8, 1998

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are playing in an exhibition game at home in The Joyce Center versus Team Fokus. There’s just under a minute to go with the Irish in command.  The crowd of more than 8,000 knows full well who Mike Edwards is. After the South Bend Tribune broke the story at Adams High School, Mike appeared on the front page sports section of the Chicago Sun-Times. USA Today picked up his story as well. Dateline NBC aired a feature story on him the night before Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls finished off the Utah Jazz in game six of the 1998 NBA Finals. Not only was there anticipation from the gold and blue faithful, the national media was in attendance as well – hoping to catch an unforgettable moment.

Mike Edwards would not disappoint.

After getting the wave from coach MacLeod, and onto the floor comes the six-foot-five freshman. The Irish are on defense, so he looks around to find his man; assignment number one at the moment. The ball is inbounded, then following a Fokus missed shot and an Irish rebound, Mike races up court. Before hitting half-court he gets the outlet pass, takes two dribbles and buries a 15-footer – the only shot he ever attempted at Notre Dame.

“All I can remember was the smile on his face as the arena lit up,” MacLeod recalls.

“I was jumping up and down, everyone in the building was jumping up and down,” Edwards remembers “I went apesh*t.”

Life Moves On

Mike finished out his freshman year on Notre Dame’s basketball team under John MacLeod, playing in two games (along with the exhibition appearance, for which he did not receive statistical credit for playing or scoring). His sophomore year, Mike injured his knee. By then, after coach MacLeod’s resignation, the Irish were under a new head coach – former North Carolina head coach Matt Doherty.  According to Mike, coach Doherty liked him; but “It was time to stop.  I wanted a to live a more pain-free life from here on.  I had done what I set out to accomplish.”

After graduation, Mike Sr. stepped in to help guide Jr.’s career. “He made me get into sales, selling copiers,” Mike remembers.  “I was in an inflection point, and he wanted to be sure I knew would it was like to not be welcome and work hard getting business.”

Mike would continue to work hard.  He took a job as Athletics Director at Lafayette Central High School while his future wife Catherine, who he met shortly after graduation, finished her undergrad at Purdue. From there, Mike went back to school at Indiana University and received his MBA from the Kelly School of Business.

Mike and Catherine now reside in Loveland, Ohio. Mike works as an advisory consultant for Ernst & Young; probably a perfect role for him. If anyone is qualified to give advice, Mike Edwards certainly is.  He still speaks to schools and teams in the area, telling his incredible story of perseverance.

In less than a month, a new college basketball team will be crowned National Champion.  Over the years, many players and coaches have experienced the highs and lows of this yearly tradition. They’ve all had their moments. But not one has ever had quite a moment like Mike Edwards, back in that “meaningless” exhibition game for Notre Dame in 1998. Mike’s one shining moment lives on every day he takes a step – a step that, for over 30 years, he has always struggled to take. But he takes each one with a smile.