When a Union fan needed a life-saving kidney transplant, another Union fan he didn’t know stepped up

At first, Ed McCusker seems like he has come straight out of Philadelphia sports fan central casting.

The 60-year-old grew up in Northeast Philly, attended Cardinal Dougherty and St. Joseph’s, and now lives in Thornton, Delaware County. He’s been an Eagles and Phillies season ticket-holder for decades — Section 725 of Veterans Stadium for the former, he says proudly — and has been going to Flyers games since their first season.

But another of his favorite sports, one that isn’t in the usual script, is the one that saved his life.

McCusker has also been a Union season ticket-holder since the team’s launch in 2010 and a longtime member of the Sons of Ben supporters’ club. He became a soccer fan in the 1970s thanks to relatives who played, and they went to Atoms and Fury games at the Vet.

Early in 2020, organ failure meant McCusker needed dialysis. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, upending things further. A friend who was a dialysis nurse encouraged him to seek a transplant, and a fellow St. Joe’s grad helped find a doctor in the University of Pennsylvania’s hospital system. That spring, McCusker applied for a Penn transplant program.

It took two years to get in, but, even then, a match was hard to find. So he reached out to the National Kidney Registry, which helped him build a website to get his message out.

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In April of last year, the Sons of Ben joined the effort. When Kate Buzby saw the group’s Instagram post, the Salem County, N.J., resident was immediately moved. A relatively new Union fan thanks to her husband, she had already wanted to be a kidney donor for someone, having previously worked for Meals on Wheels. Now she had another reason to step up, and her husband was on board.

Buzby got tested at Penn and found out she was a 100% match for McCusker. The following November, Penn called McCusker to tell him it had a donor — but, as is custom, he was not told who it was.

The transplant went well for McCusker and Buzby. A few weeks after the surgery, Penn staffers told McCusker that they had a letter from his donor and asked him if he wanted to accept it. He did, and only then did he learn how Buzby had found out about him.

“I just thought he should know that it was the Union and Sons of Ben that made all of this happen,” said Buzby, a 37-year-old originally from upstate New York.

“If I didn’t have Union tickets back to 2010 and be a member of the Sons of Ben,” McCusker told The Inquirer, “that avenue would not have been available to find the kidney, which, ultimately — I don’t want to be overdramatic, but [it] definitely changed my life tremendously and probably saved my life.”

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They had never met before then. As small as the Union’s fan base can feel sometimes, Subaru Park’s 18,500-seat capacity is still big enough for regulars to not know each other. Buzby’s usual seats are on a sideline a few sections over from McCusker’s longtime spot in the River End.

“The feeling I had in that stadium before I did this … it’s part of the reason why it felt so special to be signing up to donate to someone within that stadium, within that community,” Buzby said. “Honestly, it’s been, like, the most important thing that I’ve ever done in my life.”

After a few conversations, McCusker reached out to one of the Union’s season-ticket sales staffers. The team and Penn Medicine then arranged for McCusker and Buzby to meet at the stadium in July, with the team’s video crew on hand. (Penn Medicine also is one of the Union’s major sponsors, but it was just a coincidence that McCusker was treated there.)

“We were just really excited to help Ed and Kate bring their story to life for other people to hear and get on board with helping to raise awareness for living organ donation,” said Allie Gentile, the Union’s director of community relations. “Obviously, first and foremost, we’re a soccer team, but what we do outside of the game is also incredibly important to us, and helping the community and sharing these stories is so important. And to be able to do that through soccer, for both Ed and Kate’s passion for the Union, was just something that felt really special to us, and so authentic.”

Buzby admitted to being nervous before the meeting, but said the event felt “almost like meeting a family member that you’ve never met.”

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Charlie Slonaker, a longtime Union staffer who’s now the team’s chief revenue officer, also was part of the effort. He has watched the team grow as much as it has and knows it can and should grow a lot more. Perhaps someday, the fan base will be too big for something like this to be so feasible — it’s hard to imagine it happening through the Eagles or Phillies, for example.

“I do think that we have a tighter-knit community than some of the other teams, and I think a part of that is that it’s soccer,” he said. “I think a lot of people around the Philadelphia Union take great pride in wanting to grow the game.”

Gentile hopes these moments aren’t lost in the future.

“Ideally, as we continue to grow, [increasing] our capacity and our ability to just tell more of these stories and impact even more people is, I think, what our hope would be,” Gentile said. “With community being such a forefront for us, I can’t see us ever losing the desire and the passion for being able to tell stories about how soccer connected people but in ways that have nothing to do with soccer.”

Soccer undoubtedly is growing, even around here. Especially with the men’s World Cup coming in two years and a half-dozen locally bred players — all with ties to the Union — competing to make the U.S. team.

“I think if you said something 10 years ago, people would have looked at you sideways,” McCusker said. “A lot of people now, especially after 2022 [when the Union made MLS’s championship game], are like, ‘Hey, you going to the Union game tonight?’”

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It reminds McCusker of how he felt about the Flyers in their early years.

“I remember being a kid on Alcott Street in Northeast, and we had a neighbor who was a baseball guy,” he said. “When the Flyers won the first [Stanley] Cup on a Sunday, he was watching a baseball game. We all thought he was crazy because we’re all watching — May 19, 1974 — the Stanley Cup Final.”

And if McCusker is an archetypal Philly sports fan, he knows another one who has become more interested in the Union than he expected.

“My 82-year-old dad was watching games on Channel 17, and then I gave him my Apple pass this year, and he loaded Apple on his smart TV and he watches all the games on Apple,” he said. “So it really is amazing that it’s not as crazy as it used to be.”

McCusker’s story won’t be so crazy in the future if he and Buzby can raise awareness about organ donation. That’s their goal now, with the Union’s help and the website he built.

» READ MORE: Visit Ed McCusker's website on kidney donation

“I’m very introverted — I wouldn’t call myself shy; I just like to keep to myself,” Buzby said. “But it’s a cause that I feel very strongly about. Obviously, I’m very closely connected to it. So it just kind of feels like it’s something important that I need to do.”

McCusker certainly isn’t shy, but he’s just as committed.

“I think there are a lot of misconceptions about kidney donors,” he said. “People think that the only way to donate is the check the box on your driver’s license — which is great. It’s a big help, but a living donor is much better for the recipient, because the living donor program long-term success rates are much better.”

He’s just as open about how bad this year was for the Union on the field. But the survival story made for his own happy ending.

“When I was at the last game where they got eliminated [from playoff contention], Allie was right in front of me, and she just [said], ‘Sorry about our not qualifying,’” McCusker said. “I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter to me — I got what I wanted.’”