Bucs equipment director Brad Berlin has much more to celebrate than the playoffs

Greg Auman

NFC South Reporter

TAMPA, Fla. — As the Buccaneers’ equipment director, Brad Berlin is responsible for everything the team wears and uses — about 25,000 pounds of helmets, pads, jerseys and everything else, enough to fill a 53-foot tractor trailer or the entire belly of a 767 wide-body jet.

For the past two seasons, one of the smallest pieces a Bucs player or coach could wear was a tiny red bracelet with the words BERLIN STRONG in capital letters.

Berlin, 57, first knew something was wrong nearly three years ago, just days after the Bucs won the Super Bowl, when an end-of-year physical with the team doctor showed an abnormality in his blood-protein levels. When the 2021 season started, more labs showed the same, and the Bucs sent him to Tampa’s Moffitt Cancer Center, one of the nation’s top cancer facilities.

“That’s a gut punch,” Berlin said, remembering the reality of what would be ahead for him. “[The doctor is] like, ‘I’m going to set you up with a hematologist over there. I want you to go talk to him. It may not be anything, but we’re going to make sure it’s not that.'”

But it was that. A bone-marrow biopsy and other tests showed in October 2021 that Berlin had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow. It usually attacks the bone, but to complicate matters, Berlin had a rare case in which it attacked his heart, causing a condition called amyloidosis, a buildup of proteins that can stiffen the heart and reduce the circulation of blood to the rest of the body.

Days after the Bucs lost to the Rams in the playoffs in January 2022, Berlin started chemotherapy treatments, going every week for a year, then every two weeks for the past year. Through all the treatments, through all the uncertainty of what he was dealing with and how severe it could be, Berlin leaned on his job and the normalcy and routine of work, the daily challenges and distractions it gave him.

“He’s such a…

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Publish date : 2024-01-15 13:00:20

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