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BY ANDY BAGGOT
MADISON, Wis. — Jaxson Hinkens was only 6 years old when his ordeal began, so, of course, many of the details are sketchy for him.
This was September of 2009. Hinkens had just been diagnosed with Stage 4 neuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer typically found in kids his age. He had just made the trip from Appleton, Wisconsin to Madison, accompanied by his parents, Greg and Mary, to check into American Family Children's Hospital.
Hinkens has vague memories of the 150-mile car ride, the vibe of concern from his father, mother and two older sisters. He recalls pangs of fear and confusion as he settled into a fourth-floor room that would become his pseudo-home for the better part of the next 15 months. He recalls sensing that a challenge was ahead — tests and scans revealed that Jaxson had cancer in his bone marrow, spine, abdomen, hips and legs and his survival rate was 50 percent — but he didn't have a full grasp of what was going on.
"I knew something was wrong with me," Jaxson said. "I just didn't know what it was."
One vivid recollection from that time endures. It was a Friday afternoon in the early stages of treatment and Jaxson was having a particularly nasty go of it. His head throbbed from a brutal headache that refused to subside and he was nauseated by the cancer drugs coursing through his veins. He was in a funk when one of his physicians stopped by his room and asked if he was up for some visitors from the Wisconsin football team.
Suddenly, the vibe changed.
Jaxson, a huge sports fan, perked up instantly when the foursome of punter Brad Nortman, quarterbacks Curt Phillips and Scott Tolzien and defensive end J.J. Watt popped their heads into his room. They were wearing their game day Badgers jerseys — Nortman No. 98, Phillips No. 10, Tolzien No. 16 and Watt No. 99 — and big grins. The next 30 minutes were spent talking football and sports, of course. The four visitors kept the banter light. They left a lasting impression on the youngster.
"Amazing" is how Jaxson described the moment. "They made my day so much better."
Hinkens had no way of knowing at the time that an impromptu visit from strangers would give way to a life-long relationship that has enriched more than one family. Tolzien not only became a regular visitor to Jaxson's room, he did so with genuine, caring intentions. Their interactions got longer — sometimes for hours — and Tolzien called and texted regularly. By the end of the 2009 season, Hinkens, through Tolzien's initiatives as the starting quarterback, had become an inspiring, well-known character among other UW players and coaches. Their relationship continued to grow in 2010 when Tolzien, then a senior, helped guide the Badgers to the Big Ten Conference title and a Rose Bowl berth.
"A special experience," Jaxson said.
More than a decade has passed and Hinkens is now a 17-year-old high school senior living in St. Charles, Illinois. He's a 4.0 honor student with his heart set on pursuing a degree in computer programming, focusing on statistics, perhaps at Wisconsin. He's fought through multiple relapses and surgeries. He's endured chemotherapy, radiation treatments, a stem cell transplant and immunotherapy. He said Tolzien has become the supportive older brother he never had.
"One of the most influential and great people I've met," Jaxson said.
Tolzien, meanwhile, is a husband, father, and NFL coaching assistant with Dallas, this after an award-winning stint with the Badgers and seven seasons in the NFL with San Diego, San Francisco, Green Bay and Indianapolis. He said Jaxson has been a guide for fatherhood and life.
"He's certainly given me a lot," Tolzien said.
The two still text and talk regularly. Closer to home, Jaxon's father and mother have cultivated a growing friendship with Tolzien's parents, Mike and Ginny, who live in nearby Rolling Meadows, Illinois.
Both families are part of a robust legacy that's grown by leaps and bounds, affecting thousands of people, over the last three decades.
The current concept of football players visiting children in the hospital in Madison goes back to the early 1990s when Barry Alvarez was hired as Wisconsin football coach and the campus medical center was known as UW Children's Hospital. It continues today as part of Badgers Give Back, a full-time, staffed operation with a breath-taking assortment of participants, volunteers, ideas, investments and story lines focused on American Family Children's Hospital.
What began as a semi-organized, word-of-mouth project called "Badger Fridays" — the day before home games at Camp Randall Stadium, players donned their jerseys, piled into 15-person passenger vans right after lunch and were driven to the hospital by support staffers — has become one of the most popular, substantive undertakings on campus.
Badgers Give Back is open to volunteering student-athletes from all 23 sports. In addition to expanding its involvement at AFCH — featuring activities like Caleb's Pitch and Wish Upon a Badger — it has branched out to Madison-area schools and community centers with reading and mentoring programs. Initially organized into Badgers Give Back in 2012 by former UW community relations coordinator Kayla Gross, BGB now has a full-time director in Jackie Davenport who was hired in 2015 and a dedicated fleet of vans for transportation.
The spirit of the BGB approach actually started to come to life not long after Alvarez took over in 1990. Don Davey was a standout defensive lineman, a team co-captain as a senior who went on to play eight seasons in the NFL with Green Bay and Jacksonville. He recalled being inspired by an early edict from Alvarez.
"When Barry took over the program, he made it crystal clear that he expected every one of us to represent the program with class both on campus and in the community," Davey wrote in an email. "As a team captain, I took that responsibility very seriously and tried to take advantage of every community service opportunity we were presented with, especially those that involved children."
Davey, now an equity manager in Jacksonville, Florida, recalled that there was an informal sign-up sheet in the UW football office and players could choose ones that interested them. He said there was a "standing invitation" for he and his teammates to appear at the children's hospital.
Davey remembers his first visit there. He and a handful of teammates checked in on four patients, all girls. One 10-year-old had just had surgery to remove a brain tumor.
"She looked so weak and frail when we walked into her room, but I will never forget how her face lit up with the hugest smile when she saw us with our Badger jerseys," he wrote. "She had no idea who we were. She just knew that the Badgers cared enough to visit her."
The experience was so profound that Davey made hospital visits part of his routine. He continued it in the NFL with the Packers and Jaguars and remains active in related charitable events, including one for pediatric cancer in the Jacksonville area.
"Even though I retired almost 20 years ago, it is a thrill to know I can still put a smile on the faces of kids who are battling such hardship, just by showing them I care," he wrote.
At first, Mary Kaminski was unaware of the size and reach of the BGB footprint. Then she marveled at it.
Before she became a teacher in the Beloit School District, Kaminski coordinated special events and activities at AFCH from 1993 to 2009. She planted some of the first seeds that grew into Badgers Give Back. She reached out to one of Alvarez's assistant coaches, Madisonian Jay Norvell, and pitched the idea of regularly-scheduled visits by the football players. Things grew from there to include other sports, most notably men's and women's basketball and men's hockey.
"It's hard for me to get my arms around it because it started out as something so simple," Kaminski said. "I'm very proud to hear that, that it's grown to where it has."
John Chadima, the director of football operations at the time, said 10 to 12 players would typically sign up for each hospital visit and bring items to autograph along with them.
"It just became kind of a tradition," he said. "But I didn't know it would develop into what it is today."
Chadima, now a businessman in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said hospital visits, especially for those who had never done it before, took some getting used to.
"If I remember right, there were some nerves there starting out," he said. "We were all in our infancy.
"You see those kids, you see their families, it gave you great pause every time I went. It really puts life in perspective and that's what it did for those athletes. There's no way it couldn't."
Tolzien initially felt the hospital environment was too intimidating. It's got a funny smell and people are depressed and ailing, he thought. But he was coaxed into visiting AFCH by kicking specialists Taylor Mehlhaff and Ken DeBauche. The intro was profound.
"You're a college kid," Tolzien explained. "You've got minimal focus. You're living the tunnel-vision life of football and your next test and the stresses of playing in front of 80,000 fans. You go over there the day before a game — when all the tension is building up for game day — and then you walk away going, 'It's just a game.' You got to make someone else's day and they made your day. You walk out of there thinking there's more to life than just football. It was kind of a reality check more than anything."
Tolzien said AFCH wasn't what he expected. He thought it would be about sad faces and a depressing atmosphere. Instead he encountered "great vibes" and described the staff as "incredible." Every time he came and left, he felt a renewed sense of humility and appreciation.
Tolzien said he cultivated close relationships with the families of five children over a two-year span. Three have died.
"The humbling side is you see how powerful cancer is and how sad that is for these families," he said.
Tolzien gravitated toward kids like Jaxson because the youngsters kept it real.
"They're just kids," Tolzien said. "They want to talk about cartoons or the movies or the newest video game to come out."
Or, in the case of Hinkens, they want to innocently critique the starting quarterback for the Badgers.
"Why are you throwing into double-coverage?" Jaxson once asked Tolzien, the 2010 winner of the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award as the nation's top senior quarterback.
One trip to AFCH did it for Tolzien.
"We tried to start recruiting more guys," he said. "The cool thing about it was, once someone went, they wanted to go back. They got something out of it that made them want to go back and do it again."
The payback, Tolzien said, was perspective.
"One thing that drew guys back is how it energized them," he said.
Tolzien, who was 21-5 as a starter for the Badgers, said the BGB operation is "unbelievable" because of what it's become.
"It's neat to see how the partnership is now," he said. "It's known throughout the athletic program and everyone wants to go there."
Like so much in life, the weekly Friday visits by UW student-athletes to the children's hospital have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Since in-person interactions are prohibited, Davenport initially planned to have teams use sidewalk chalk to create artwork and send messages to the kids from outside the facility. That project was shut down when coronavirus cases spiked recently on campus. Undaunted, Davenport directed the student-athletes to fashion drawings and messages on sidewalk areas around the athletic facilities, then email photos of their work to the children.
Davenport, who arranges AFCH activities with development program coordinator Lori Schultz, was asked for her vision for Badgers Give Back. What will it look like five years, 10 years from now?
"I've been saying this to people the last couple years, that we used to give student-athletes community service," she said. "My goal for them now is to teach them. I don't want to give them fish. I want to teach them how to fish so that when they leave here they're equipped and they know how to do community service."
Davenport said her fundamental objective is to see to it that UW student-athletes, through the lens of community service, will see how to best become individuals that will change the world.
Tolzien knows what she's talking about. What would he tell one of his BGB successors who would be visiting American Family Children's Hospital for the first time?
"The Cliff's Notes version is, 'Go. It's going to change you. Find a way to promise yourself you're going to do it once. Just let it happen,'" he said.
"The long side of it is, you're able to describe to them exactly how they're going to change and what it's going to do for the families there and what it's going to do for themselves. You don't realize the impact you have on one of them."
While we can't visit patients at @uwhealthkids, the Badgers have been creating "Sidewalk of Hope" chalk art to share with patients on TVs inside the hospital. Stay strong! We're with you! @BadgerWrestling#BadgersGiveBack pic.twitter.com/SukJcV5S54
— Wisconsin Badgers (@UWBadgers) October 30, 2020
Hinkens can speak to that. He said the day Tolzien, Nortman, Phillips and Watt popped their heads into his room he began to focus on the fight he was facing. Like Tolzien, all made subsequent visits to see and inspire him.
"They helped me find that perspective," Jaxson said.
Tolzien recounted a moment when he was a UW senior. One of the "Wish Upon a Badger" families came to practice and the mother asked to address the team.
"You guys have no idea that when you come, that's the best 10 minutes of my son's week," she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "Because of that, it's the best 10 minutes of my week."
Her message was powerful and enduring.
"It's not a small difference you make," Tolzien said. "It's a big difference."
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Changing lives. One visit and smile at a time. - University of Wisconsin Badgers
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