At Northwestern, Ryan Padgett was the one reading Shakespeare on team flights. When his roommate awoke at 7 a.m. to use the bathroom, he would notice Padgett studying index cards that contained the Latin roots of medical terms.
When the Wildcats flew to play Stanford in 1992, coach Gary Barnett noticed Padgett moving to the rear of the plane after a meal. Why?
"Going to brush my teeth," Padgett replied.
When Mary Barnett heard that, the coach's wife remarked: "I want (daughter) Courtney to marry him."
Padgett arrived on campus at 17, having skipped a grade in grammar school. By the end of his true freshman season, he was a starter at the game's most physically demanding position.
"He was a rough and tumble guy too," Gary Barnett recalled. "An offensive lineman has to love the grind, getting down and dirty, and Ryan did."
In March, Barnett was added to a text chain that described a dire situation _ a member of the Northwestern family was on life support because of COVID-19. Barnett saw #teamryan and texted coach Pat Fitzgerald: IS THIS PAT RYAN?
No, it was Padgett, an emergency medicine specialist in Kirkland, Wash., outside Seattle. In late February, EvergreenHealth _ the hospital where he works _ became America's ground zero for the coronavirus pandemic.
"I was on the night we got the confirmation a person had died," Padgett said. "The first case. We had a little huddle amongst the ER doctors. We knew the world was going to change."
Padgett, 45, became a doctor because of sports. As a teenager, he tore his rotator cuff pitching and injured both knees playing football. At Northwestern, he watched in awe as team physician Howard Sweeney performed a knee replacement.
His post-college health was exemplary. He took just five sick days in 21 years, and some of those were necessitated by back surgeries.
But days after treating elderly patients gasping for air, he developed headaches and muscle soreness. Then a fever of 104 and a dry cough. His oxygen levels dropped and his heart rate soared. Did he have the flu? Pneumonia? Padgett was in denial.
Connie, his fiance and now wife, insisted he return to his hospital as a patient. Within eight hours, he was on a ventilator.
But not even that could save a man strong enough and tough enough to start in the Rose Bowl.
