I texted Pat Quinn on Saturday night and hoped he would respond. Send me a text, I thought, while I stared helplessly at my phone. I knew that Pat had been in and out of the hospital recently so a response would have told me he was still OK. The text never came.
When I woke up Sunday, there was a text from Patrick Quinn, Pat’s father, telling me that Pat had passed away shortly after 2 a.m. I read the text once, twice, three times and tried to absorb it. Each time, the reality became more devastating. After a seven-year battle with ALS, a real-life hero was gone at 37.
He was brave, he was tough, he was smart and he was witty. Man, he was so strikingly brave, pushing himself to advocate for ALS patients and becoming one of the faces of the fight against this insidious disease. We can judge our lives in endless ways, including how much we have done to help others. In that judgment, Quinn filled his 37 years with a fierce generosity and advocacy that will always define him.
Forever optimistic and impenetrably courageous, Quinn refused to be idled by ALS. During his heroic journey, Quinn and Pete Frates, his friend and fellow ALS sufferer, brought awareness to what they were enduring by helping promote the Ice Bucket Challenge. They poured buckets of water on their heads and encouraged others to do the same. From that simple yet powerful act, the donations poured in to help fight ALS.
With the grassroots help from Quinn and Frates, the challenge became phenomenally successful and spread throughout the world. In the summer of 2014, the challenge raised $115 million for the ALS Association and $220 million for ALS research, according to the ALS Association. Quinn, the feisty New York kid, and Frates, his Boston buddy, helped millions of people by raising millions of dollars.
For anyone who knew Quinn, a native of Yonkers, New York, his passion and persistence in preaching about ALS wasn’t surprising. When Quinn was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 30 in 2013, he vowed to fight the progressive neurodegenerative disorder and not lament what had happened to him. Suddenly, his life turned into a one-on-one battle with a disease that leads to full paralysis and that is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“It’s almost like I feel it was my reason for being put on this earth,” Quinn said. “It was to make a difference and to try to make a change.”
And he succeeded in making that change and making people more aware of ALS. On a sweltering August day at Yankee Stadium in 2015, I spied a man wearing gray shorts and a Gehrig jersey sitting in the Yankees dugout. The first pitch was less than an hour away so I knew this fan wasn’t just any random fan. He had to be a VIP.
He was. It was Pat and he was being honored for his work with the Ice Bucket Challenge.
Within minutes, I learned everything I needed to know about Pat’s personality. He was a determined dude, a tough New York kid with a mission. He wasn’t going to let ALS stifle him. No way, he emphasized. He was a fighter and he hoped to become the first person to survive ALS. Our first conversation was as memorable as any first discussion I’ve ever had. Pat was forthright in sharing his plans, major plans and maybe even improbable plans.
And, during our dugout chat, I also learned that Pat was a passionate Yankees fan. Rabid, really. He analyzed the team so expertly that I almost gave him my YES Network microphone and let him do my pregame report that day. My affinity and respect for Pat was instant, and we became fast friends.
Honestly, I don’t know how Pat stayed so upbeat as he fought ALS. But, in all of our text and email exchanges, he was relentlessly optimistic and excited about his next event or his next interview. In his texts, he would call me “my man” or “my brother,” his optimism oozing out of the phone.
After Pat once completed an interview with a Boston-based reporter, he texted me, “Don’t worry. I kept the YES Network on TV the whole time.” In the way that Pat lived his life with such vigor and enthusiasm, he did beat ALS. He simply wouldn’t let ALS silence him, even when it did.
As ALS continued to ravage Pat’s body, he lost the ability to use his voice. He was devastated. But, through an ALS initiative called “Project Re-voice,” Pat’s voice was digitally re-created from previous interviews and he could hear himself speak again. Pat used eye-gaze technology to type letters into a computer and create words that were then transmitted into his voice, not a computerized version of his voice.
Naturally, Pat was ecstatic about this development, his texts overflowing with joy. The YES Network decided to do a feature on how Pat had regained his voice. Pat asked me to send him the questions ahead of time so he could prepare his answers with his new technology.
On the day we visited Pat in 2018, he gave insightful answers, cruising through the list I had sent him. Toward the end of the interview, there was a lull. And that’s when Pat veered away from the script and gave a distinct baseball assessment. “Boston sucks,” he said, his eyes gleaming.
It was a hilarious moment, It was a mic-drop moment. It was what any competitive Yankees fan would say to show his New York allegiance. Pat wasn’t being snide or nasty. He was simply having some fun, saying something that he knew would make all the people in the room chuckle. Of course, we all laughed with him.
The YES Network won an Emmy for that feature on Pat, but we didn’t really win an Emmy. Pat won the Emmy. It was his riveting story and the way he shared it that allowed us to win an award. In 2019, we surprised Pat by presenting him with his own Emmy at the Stadium. His eyes, which were always darting because they were his lifeline, couldn’t stop staring at that gold statue. The next day, Pat texted me.
“My man!” he wrote. “That was absolutely amazing. I can’t thank you enough for the on-field presentation. I will be sure to get a great spot for that Emmy. So cool! Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
No, Pat. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A million times, thank you. You were a real-life hero. Now you’ve become an Angel.
