Laughing at missed NFL field goal, Kentucky Derby expert gets lifesaving diagnosis

A laugh over a missed field goal became a life-saving alarm for Mark Toothaker, a 59-year-old Kentucky thoroughbred expert whose seizure led doctors to find a tennis-ball-sized tumor on the left side of his brain. What first looked like a joke in his Lexington home turned into an emergency that likely prevented a far more dangerous episode later, possibly while he was on the road or in the air for work.

Toothaker was watching the New York Giants play the New England Patriots on Monday Night Football in December 2025 when Giants kicker Younghoe Koo whiffed on a field goal attempt. Toothaker rewound the play and laughed so hard he had a seizure. His wife, Malory, a nurse at a rehabilitation hospital who works for a brain-injury doctor, initially thought he was joking, then called 911. Paramedics took him to a hospital, where a CT scan showed the tumor had pushed his brain 6 millimeters to the right.

The discovery came after months of constant travel for Toothaker, who works at Spendthrift Farm as a stallion season manager and stallion sales manager. He had been driving and flying all over the country for work, including a trip to Louisville the previous Saturday to see Further Ado win the Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes. Toothaker said he had no symptoms before the seizure and came to see it as a miracle, because the diagnosis arrived before the mass could have caused a crisis away from home.

Doctors transferred him to the University of Kentucky hospital, where surgeons removed the tumor. It turned out to be benign. Toothaker was back home by the end of the week with no lasting damage. Now, as Spendthrift Farm-owned Further Ado heads to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, the race carries a deeper meaning for a man whose own near-miss came not on the track, but in his living room.

His case is a reminder that a first seizure in an adult should never be brushed aside, especially when there is no history of epilepsy. Bystanders should call 911, keep the person from injury, and treat the episode as an urgent medical event. Silent brain tumors, bleeding, infection and other neurological problems can announce themselves this way, and rapid imaging and neurosurgical care can make the difference between a manageable diagnosis and a catastrophe.