Denver Broncos Rookie Linebacker Jonathon Cooper Has 'New Outlook' After Trying Journey To The NFL
(CBS4) - "I don't take any of this for granted. This is a dream come true for me. Ever since I was a little kid, I dreamed of playing in the NFL," Jonathon Cooper said.
The odds have been stacked against Jonathon Cooper since birth. He was born 9 weeks premature with a caved-in chest. His mother, Jessica was just 18. But she refused to let Jonathon become a victim of circumstance.
"No matter what I go through in my life, I can make it through it because I've seen my mom make it through. All the stuff I go through, my mentality when it comes to life and handling adversity, I just give credit to her," Cooper said.
By the time he got to high school, Cooper was thriving and his athletic prowess was unfolding. Until complications from his premature birth showed up unexpectedly.
"My freshman year of high school I was like any other kid, and then my heart started beating really, really fast. It used to cause me a lot of pain. I used to tell my mom, 'I don't know what's going on but my chest hurts.' We went to the doctors and they couldn't find anything. So I got back out there, and it hurt again. I actually ended up passing out one time from it," Cooper said.
Doctors discovered Cooper had Wolff-Parkinson-White, a congenital heart condition that causes a rapid heart rate. After two successful cardiac ablations his freshman year of high school, Cooper made a quick return to the gridiron. He'd go on to achieve great success at Ohio State. As a two-time team captain, his leadership and his dominant defensive play caught the attention of NFL scouts. But just days before the NFL draft, something else caught the eye of NFL teams.
"When I had my EKG for the NFL, they ended up still seeing it there, seeing that it could still cause some risk of death and risks with going out here and playing football. I ended up having to get three more ablations."
Instead of attending rookie minicamp and OTAs, Cooper spent the month of May under the knife. He underwent three separate ablations, each lasting eight hours. Despite just being drafted by the Broncos in April, the rookie's NFL dreams were now in hanging in the balance and the reality of it hit hard.
"At some points I got really low. They were talking about pacemakers and the operation was really rare and very difficult to work on, hence the many ablations that I had. It kept getting riskier and riskier the more they kept doing operations on my heart. So it got scary. It gave me a new outlook on how quickly a sport that I love could be taken away from me."
All this adversity might have crushed others, but not Cooper. He attacks life with an inimitable strength and unyielding spirit, and the same goes for football.
"I don't take any of this for granted, honestly. Every single second I'm out here, whether I'm tired or exhausted, I just feel grateful. To be out here in camp with a great organization like the Broncos, it's a dream come true for me," Cooper said.