Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/219972
under the DOME Centers Of Learning Torn MCL sidelines center Nick Martin, and Matt Hegarty takes over By Lou Somogyi A nother week, another season-ending injury. Junior Nick Martin, the starting center in the first 11 games this year, became the 13th Notre Dame player since August to have his season truncated with a medical/health issue when he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament (MCL) late in the first quarter against BYU Nov. 23. He is projected to rehab for about six months and will be shelved during 2014 spring drills. Replacing him the final three quarters against the Cougars, and then making his first career start Nov. 30 at Stanford, was classmate Matt Hegarty, who knows something about bouncing back from a major health issue. Hegarty's football career seemed over a year ago, but he found himself in the starting lineup by the end of this November. photo by bill panzica On Nov. 8, 2012, Hegarty was running through non-contact drills when suddenly he couldn't speak. Coaches yelled for him to make his line calls. He tried to yell back, and when his voice failed him a second time he knew he had a problem. Team doctors discovered that Hegarty was born with two small holes in his heart that had left him deprived of oxygen for the first 20 years of his life. During that particular practice, those holes started re-routing the flow of blood in Hegarty's heart in the wrong direction, forming a clot that traveled into his brain and caused the mini-stroke that rendered him speechless.