Ben Abercrombie was feted on a Thursday late last May, on the top floor of the tallest building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Roughly 60 of us were gathered in an industrial event space on graduation day at Harvard, looking eight floors down from an outdoor deck at the students milling below in caps and gowns. The owner of the space, and its famed first-floor taqueria El Jefe, was greeting new arrivals and handing out drinks, acting as the evening’s major domo. For years, John Schall had been a champion for Ben, holding countless fundraisers in this room for Ben’s staggering medical costs. But this party wasn’t to pass the plate or to cheer on Ben’s recovery. Instead, it was to celebrate his stunning comeback: graduating from Harvard with a finance degree seven years after being catastrophically injured in his first game of Harvard .
Everyone in the room seemed to know each other, laughing and clinking glasses in lively clusters. Ben’s college teammates mingled with his friends from high school, the latter having traveled from Hoover, Alabama, to tell stories of Ben’s stardom as a schoolboy phenom. I stood on the periphery, making small talk with guests while waiting on Ben’s arrival. I was the only obvious ringer in the place: a high-school junior from Greenwich, Connecticut, who’d driven three hours north to meet Ben. He’d been my inspiration — as an athlete and a man — since I learned about his injury in 2020. Back then, at age 12, I signed up for the inaugural 3.2 for Ben, an annual road race, now staged in dozens of states, that has raised more than a million dollars for his care. I’ve since become a precinct captain for the event, signing up hundreds of people to run in Connecticut on a Saturday in November each year.
Ben with his mother Sherri after a Hoover High School football game in November 2015.
Courtesy of Ben and Sherri Abercrombie
Ben and his family arrived late to the party; he looked wiped after a long, hot day in cap and gown. Steering his wheelchair via a tube in his mouth, he traversed the room to get to the Tex-Mex buffet. After dinner, the lights dimmed and a screen blinked on. In the montage that played, there were no hero shots of Ben as a whippet free safety for Harvard. Instead, we saw stills of him battling in recovery to regain a trace of movement in his hands. We watched clips of him being fed and dressed by his parents, who’d uprooted themselves from suburban Alabama to live on his dorm floor for years. And then there were pics of Ben several years on, driving himself to class through the rutted streets of Cambridge in his motorized chair, or engulfed on the sideline by his teammates at the annual Yale-Harvard classic. It was a lot to take in, even for a stranger: a seven-year crucible in a 12-minute reel. It was all I could do not to bawl.
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When the speeches started, I stood at the back of the room, feeling five heavy feelings at once. There was Ben’s head coach Tim Murphy (now retired), recalling Ben’s speed and ferocity on-field, which had earned him the nickname Badger. There was Ben’s dad Marty, talking about journeys: the one Ben had made from the post-op ward, where he breathed through a ventilator and nearly died of pneumonia, to powering himself across the graduation stage with the class of ’25 at Harvard. Then Schall got up and talked about the meaning of “recovery.” It didn’t, he said, entail taking the field again or qualifying for a college diploma. It meant getting yourself positioned to make your imprint on the world — and on that count, Ben had recovered in full. He’d left a deep mark on every person he met, showing them how a warrior meets his moment.
Ben with his mother Sherri and dad Marty during Harvard Commencement in May. The Abercrombies moved into the Harvard dorms after their son’s injury to help care for him.
Courtesy of Ben and Sherri Abercrombie
After the speeches, I went over to Ben to introduce myself. He was surrounded by his boys from Alabama, trading cracks with a bleary grin. A couple of the friends parted to let me in: I blurted out how much it meant to finally meet Ben, and to be of use to him in some small way. He tilted forward slightly, bidding me closer. “Thank you for coming here and saying that to me. It’s what helps me keep keeping on.”
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I GREW UP IN Connecticut watching football with my father, aping his knuckle-gnawing, trunk-twisting spasms as our New York Jets flushed sure wins down the drain. Those Sundays writhing on the couch with him were our simian language of love. For a man who’d played defensive line at Harvard but could only sit and seethe while watching now, my dad communicated in swallowed curses — but I’ve never felt closer to anyone in my life.
On Saturdays in autumn, our blood ran crimson watching Harvard football. Then one Saturday in 2020, someone sent him a reel from a game we’d missed, one that took place in 2017. In an early-season roadie against Rhode Island University, a Harvard safety streaked upfield to lay a blind-side shot on a wide-out. It looked like a heavy but perfectly legal hit, the kind you see a dozen times a game. Sure enough, the wide-out bounced right up, but the safety — Ben Abercrombie — fell back as if frozen, and then stopped moving altogether.
We watched the clip, mortified, then jumped on Google to find further news of Ben. He’d fractured the top of his spine that day and been paralyzed from the neck on down. Miraculously, though, he came back two years after that play, returning to Harvard as a student on a modified courseload. His parents had left their home and careers to come live beside him, moving into the Winthrop House dorm on the Charles River. Ben, with no function in his arms or legs, relied on his folks for everything. His mom Sherri, a registered nurse, directed his medical care. His dad Marty, an entrepreneur, did the yeoman’s work, lifting Ben out of bed and into his chair, then bathing and feeding him each day. Ben’s parents slept in twin beds in an adjoining room, and for that first couple of years, suffered the lacrosse bros down the hall, who seemed to throw continuous ragers every weekend.
I went back to that clip — an ESPN Game Day feature — and saw something that hadn’t quite landed the first time. With no fake sentiment, it showed father and son struggling to bolt Ben’s life back together. Watching and rewatching Marty spoon-feed his son, fathering him in a way no dad should ever have to, I felt something inside me unlock. Like my dad and me, football had bonded those two for life — then, after breaking Ben, it had knit them closer than ever.
As a big-for-my-age kid who’d signed up for every sport — T-ball at three; tournament tennis at six; a black belt in tae kwon do by 11— I’d grown up with outsized ambitions in sports but a saboteur’s mindset on court. I’d kill myself over a pair of missed free throws, or kick dirt after olé-ed grounders at third base. It was the same deal — or worse — in the classroom. I’d eat myself alive over a B-plus on tests; anything less than an A would fry my soul.
But watching Ben lose the thing he loved most, then climb back into the fight, made me want to run through a wall. It wasn’t enough merely to send him a check — I needed to win for him. Scanning the web, I found the 3.2 for Ben link and signed up my whole family. Three weeks later, we were on a hill in New Canaan: my parents, my younger sister, and me. As we ran the 3.2 for Ben, I had a bracing thought: This race had nothing to do with grades or stat-lines. I’d finally seen what real goals looked like: being of use to an athlete who could easily have been me, and whose family needed our help. All I wanted to do now was support the Abercrombies — but first, I wanted to outrun my dad.
THAT FALL DAY, I brought five people to the run for Ben, then many multiples of that number in the years that followed. But it gnawed at me that there was more to be done. So I reached out to Matt Farber, the co-founder of 3.2 for Ben. A former linebacker at Harvard who was now finishing medical school there, he’d been on the field the day that Ben got hurt, watching helplessly as they wheeled him away. In the weeks that followed, Farber and his teammates huddled, brainstorming ways to support Ben. “Raishan [McGhee], a teammate, came up with Bowl for Ben,” says Farber. “It was a night for alums to come back and have a blast while giving to the [Ben Abercrombie] Fund.”
The Bowl for Ben party was a grand success, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first two years. “But then Covid hits, and the question becomes: How do we keep this thing going?” says Farber. So he and McGhee hit on the race, which participants could do remotely during lockdown. That first year, more than 500 people turned out and raised tens of thousands of dollars. Watching from Alabama, Ben was moved to tears. “It meant a ton to me,” he says from his home in Hoover. “The way they cared so much and kept me in their hearts — it made me feel like I was still a part of Harvard football.”
Post-Covid, the run kept growing each year. Almost 800 people turned out last fall, raising $100,000 in one swoop. But the 3.2 for Ben hadn’t gotten traction on socials, and I thought my Gen-Z skills could be of use there. I signed on as an intern for them last spring, and spent the summer writing posts for the race while recruiting new corporate sponsors. I also ginned up the nerve to Zoom with Ben. He’d landed a remote job with Wells Fargo Bank as a financial manager in training. He’ll start there later this fall, after he passes his Series Seven exams.
“I’ll be working from home in my basement office, assisting my boss till I’m done with training, then getting my own clients,” he said. He was sitting in his living room back in Alabama on a late afternoon, the sun slanting in through a picture window. His mom sat beside him but stayed off-screen, reaching to adjust his glasses from time to time. Being back home had been great, Ben said. He got to go outside whenever he wanted, and to reconnect with his friends. “I went to one guy’s engagement party two weeks ago and had a blast,” he said.
He was still going hard in recovery, he added, riding an adaptive bike that did the pedaling for him while stimulating the fibers in his legs, and putting on gloves that squeezed and stretched his fingers. Recently, he’d regained some feeling in his hand, enough to squeeze the left glove back. Best of all, there was news of an experimental enzyme that had given Ben and his family hope. It was being developed by NervGen, a Vancouver biotech focused on treatments to repair the nervous system.
Ben on a Lokomat assisted walking therapy machine at Journey Forward in Canton, Massachusetts, in 2023, assisted by therapist Jude Alamo.
Courtesy of Ben and Sherri Abercrombie
“The reason your spinal cord doesn’t heal after injury is because scar tissue builds up around the [point of fracture], blocking electrical impulses from the brain,” said Marty, joining the Zoom from another location. “NervGen’s peptide goes to that point of injury, and depletes the scar tissue” so the signals get through. The drug had fast-track status at the FDA, and had recently been proven safe in a Phase One trial. The next step, said Marty, was to get Ben into a Phase Two trial and undergo the peptide injections in Chicago. “[3.2 for Ben] will pay our costs to and from Chicago,” he said, “and will also help fund other Harvard athletes who suffer spinal injuries.”
In the meantime, there was joy from another quarter: Ben had heard from his former high school defensive coordinator, who had big plans for him. “He’s now the head coach of our rival [school],” said Ben. “He asked me to come out and speak to the boys and break down game tape with them.” Though it hurt Ben’s heart to fraternize with the enemy, the chance to get back into football fired him up. “It’d be cool to be an assistant, doing X’s and O’s and being part of a team again,” he said. As it was, he couldn’t stop thinking about the game: He spent all his free time sizing up ’Bama’s recruiting class of ’26.
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That brought to mind the questions I’d been burning to ask him: How did he feel about the sport that broke his back? Has the injury cast a shadow on the game that once defined him?
He sat and thought for several moments. Something seemed to flit before his eyes, perhaps a glimpse of himself flying across a football field, all velocity and bad intentions. “I mean, I was born in Alabama, where football is life,” he said. “It’s taught me lessons beyond the game and given me all these memories.” He paused for a moment to gather his breath, and in that instant, I wondered if those memories were gifts — or ghosts that came calling at night. He looked at me again through the lens of his laptop with eyes that once terrorized tailbacks. “It’s always been a part of me and it always will be. Whether I want it or not.”
