As we learned last week, some teams are more willing than others to work with players with certain medical conditions.
But the Giants had no such qualms about drafting safety Cooper Taylor in the fifth round, even though he had a lengthy medical report including a heart condition which was diagnosed in 2009.
During a game his sophomore season at Georgia Tech, his heart began racing, he felt dizzy and blacked out. He was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a rare issue with the electrical pathways in the heart. He had a procedure the next day, and was assured it wouldn’t prevent him from playing again.
“When it comes to heart conditions,” he told Ralph Vacchiano of the New York Daily News, “it’s a good one to have because they can fix it 100 percent.”
Of course, he had plenty of other health issues as well, during a college caerer that included a transfer to Richmond. He had the usual assortment of knee sprains and broken bones, and also missed most of 2010 with a “heat-related illness,” which he said was unrelated to the WPW.
But the heart problem was the one teams were careful to check out, causing him to travel with a full file of documents.
“A lot of teams wanted to make sure that I had all the doctors’ records,” Taylor said. “So I was travelling with a stack of notes and papers that I had from the best doctors in Atlanta and whoever I was seeing up in Richmond when I transferred that said the heart pathways have been fixed and there should be no other problems. So any team that needed it, I had that information right there for them.”
The Giants said they didn’t consider him a medical risk after checking his file, giving Taylor a chance to fulfill a dream he thought was taken away from him years ago.