Joey Slye uses brother's fight with cancer to provide perspective as Patriots kicker

FOXBORO — The memories are ingrained in Joey Slye’s head. Favorite images of his brother, A.J., are forever etched in ink on his right arm and back.

A brother, a teammate, a built-in best friend.

A fighter.

Joey needed A.J. growing up in a military family. And A.J. needed Joey as the military family moved from New Mexico to California to Montana and back to California before settling in Virginia.

The most vivid memories for Slye, now in his first year as the Patriots’ kicker, are of A.J. from the last time they shared a football field clapping and hyping up his teammates before the game — a classic Virginia high school playoff semifinal against Phoebus High School that didn’t go North Stafford’s way.

They’re of A.J., a senior captain and undersized middle linebacker wearing No. 6 delivering and absorbing hit after hit against Phoebus running back Tony Pittman, who would go on to start at Marshall University. They’re of A.J.’s pads cracking against a fullback to blow up a lead block and allow his teammates to stop Pittman for no gain, of the two brothers combining for a tackle for loss on third-and-1, Joey, a sophomore, coming around the edge and A.J. bursting through the line for the stop.

A.J. and Joey Slye. Courtesy of the Slye family.

The Darling Stadium grass, brown and ravaged after 13 weeks of four high school teams sharing the field, covered A.J.’s all-white jersey as he crouched down before throwing his helmet in frustration after North Stafford came inches away from an overtime win. He cried in his parents’ arms. The word “Phoebus” still sends the Slye household into a tailspin.

The loss stung. A.J. had been envious that Joey was able to win a state championship in soccer. He wanted to share that glory on the football field.

“My brother was probably about 5’8”, 5’9” maybe 190, 200-ish pounds,” Joey told the Herald this week in the halls outside of the Patriots’ locker room. “Seeing my brother go toe to toe with a guy like (Pittman) on like every single play … and seeing him just hitting them, like bullying them, like just making plays against him. Just seeing how he kind of had that little-man mentality, and was going to show people how strong he was, just that showed his character.”

The next December, A.J. came home from his first semester at Salisbury University complaining of neck pain. The family initially wrote it off. He was coming off of his first college football season. Of course he had some aches and pains. Then Joey and A.J. were supposed to hang wreaths in nearby Arlington National Cemetary over the weekend. Most of the time, the Slye brothers would try to tough everything out. Hospital trips weren’t common, but A.J. couldn’t lift his arm above his head.

He went to urgent care with his father, David, hoping to get a muscle relaxer or painkiller, and his vitals were abnormal, so they sent him to Mary Washington Healthcare.

Joey and A.J. Slye. Courtesy of the Slye family.

“They came in about five hours later and said, ‘Your son has leukemia. Do you want to go to UVA or VCU,’” Laura Slye told the Herald on Saturday, via phone. “I said, ‘I don’t want to go to either. We’re in the bad back room. You’re obviously in the wrong room.’ And they took us by ambulance down to UVA at the University of Virginia, and that’s where our journey started.”

Acute myeloid leukemia is a brutal disease. It’s a cancer that begins in the bone marrow and usually spreads quickly into the blood. A.J. needed radiation and chemotherapy before undergoing a bone marrow transplant. A.J. had a minor heart attack from a cardiomyopathy, his skin burned from the inside out from graft-versus-host disease, his spleen swelled to five pounds and had to be removed.

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Laura spent most of the next 14 months of treatment with A.J. Joey could visit most when A.J. was at UVA University Hospital two hours away in Charlottesville, Virginia. After a brief stop home, A.J. was transferred to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where Joey could visit less often. Then A.J. went to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee after another stint home.

Joey had perfect attendance in high school, and he was urged to stay home as much as possible to maintain some normalcy. He continued playing soccer and football and even spent time at home by himself — where the community would watch after him from afar — while David would visit A.J. at the hospital for a couple of weeks at a time.

“We always said that Joey had to grow up really fast. There was never a time when we were worried that Joey would not do the right thing,” Laura said.

Joey thought back to A.J.’s mentality on the field.

“That was the same fight that he took when he battled leukemia,” Joey said. “You see this on-the-field dynamic, off-the-field dynamic of how he presented himself. And that’s why, when everything was going on, I was like, ‘OK, like, we’re fine. He’s gonna be able to beat this because, like, there’s no way you can beat this kid.’”

After A.J. underwent a bone marrow transplant at St. Jude’s he had a relapse. That meant more chemotherapy with the hopes that he could go into remission again and undergo another bone marrow transplant.

The next round of chemo didn’t work. A.J. had dropped down to 130 pounds. He caught a cold, had no immune system and was hooked up to a ventilator. Joey, then a senior in high school, flew out to Tennessee on the morning of the 27th.

He fell asleep holding A.J.’s hand. By the time Joey woke up, his brother had died. He was just 20 years old.

After A.J. died, Joey took out his emotions on the gas pedal. He weaved through the south, barrelled forward and cut his ETA from 15 hours down to 12 in Laura’s Toyota Sienna minivan, packed with A.J.’s belongings. Laura was trying to convince him to slow down, but surely, if a police officer pulled him over, he could explain the situation.

“I got behind the wheel, and I was locked into the white lines as I was going and didn’t want to stop,” Slye said.

The drive started quiet. Then Laura and Joey used it as a way to reconnect, to laugh and cry talking about A.J., after spending most of the last 14 months apart.

Joey went back to school.

Around 1,500 people were at A.J.’s funeral held a week later.

“It was damn near like a public event in our area,” Slye said. “I don’t pride myself on being able to compartmentalize things really well, but there was like, a little bit of a like, ‘I gotta help my mom, help my dad,’ just put myself to the side and just try to keep going. And so it’s helped me in a lot of different ways. But then, yeah, I mean, there’s those times where you’re just sitting there, like, ‘What the hell?’ Like, when we found out we were pregnant, I was like, I wish my brother was here. When I got married last year, wish my brother was here.”

Joey holds up six fingers after every field goal he hits to honor A.J. His right arm is tattooed with a picture of his brother and him, in uniform, before their final football game together. You can see it poking out from under his shoulder pads on Sundays. He has two more tattoos on his back honoring his brother, one of which is the logo for the SlyeStrong#6 Foundation.

New England Patriots place kicker Joey Slye #13 after kicking a field goal during the second half of the NFL pre-season game against the Philadelphia Eagles at Gillette Stadium. (Photo By Matt Stone/Boston Herald)

He uses his brother’s fight to put his football career into perspective as the Patriots get set to play in their “Crucial Catch” game, an NFL initiative that promotes prevention and early detection of cancer.

“It adds a different layer, where, one, you’re just like, I’ve gone through something that is legitimately horrible by losing a family member. But then there’s also, like, put yourself in their shoes. There’s times that you’d look in their eyes and you’re just like, ‘I couldn’t even imagine,’ and that’s where, for me, the direct correlation from that into my profession now,” Slye said.

“Like, I’ve missed kicks, I’ve missed game-winners, I’ve had embarrassing situations happen to me in my career. This isn’t me being like, ‘OK, I’m cool with that.’ Obviously trying to work myself to the point where those don’t happen. I work really, really hard to make sure those don’t happen. But at the same time, when I lay my head down and I’m frustrated, it’s also like, I am blessed to be doing what I’m doing. And it changes the whole dynamic of that, versus, to be honest, in certain situations in my career, there might have been times where I could have gone down a dark, deep (hole). … There’s a lot of stress that’s in this job that a lot of people don’t get, but at the same time, I get to play football, and my brother was fighting for his life.”

Slye got into kicking by seeing how far he could boot the football through a tree when he was playing with his brother in a field across the street from his parents’ house in Montana. He practiced field goals with his dad while he waited for A.J. to finish up middle school football practice. A.J.’s best friend, Austin Grebe, went on to kick at Navy and urged him to go to kicking camps and start working with a specialist. Slye walked on at Virginia Tech and could have gone down two paths.

He could kick, or he could be a walk-on linebacker, maybe play some special teams and go on to be a graduate assistant or work in strength and conditioning. He’d be well-equipped for it as the only kicker in the NFL with the frame of a linebacker. Patriots long snapper Joe Cardona said Slye is the only player he’s ever seen bench press 150-pound dumbbells.

Slye had made a promise to his brother that he would work as hard as he could to make it to the NFL.

He kicked. He got rookie tryout offers after going undrafted out of Virginia Tech in 2018 but didn’t catch on anywhere. So, he kept training and helped out with strength and conditioning at his high school.

He signed with the Giants in 2019 and was on and off the roster before latching on with the Panthers in training camp. He wished he could call his brother after he made the team and first walked onto an NFL field. He spent time with the Texans, 49ers, Commanders and Jaguars before signing with the Patriots on May 2.

“I think there’s still that part of Joey that’s trying to make his brother proud of him and pushing himself,” Laura said, fighting back tears.

Slye entered the spring as the underdog for the Patriots’ kicking job as he competed with 2023 fourth-round pick Chad Ryland. He won the job after outperforming Ryland in training camp and the preseason and is 8-of-9 on field goals and 4-of-4 on extra points through four games. He broke a team record with a 63-yard field goal in the Patriots’ Week 4 loss to the 49ers, another achievement he wished he could have called his brother about after the game.

A.J. set a strong precedent for his younger brother to follow. Joey viewed him as a third parent growing up, and sometimes the younger brother would be stubborn. Joey likes to tell a story from their days on the baseball diamond growing up. Both brothers pitched and served as the other one’s personal catcher.

Joey and A.J. Slye. Courtesy of the Slye family.

Joey was pitching, which meant A.J. was catching. They faced a hitter that already hit two home runs in the game. A.J. wanted to intentionally walk the batter. Joey shook him off. A.J. looked to his mom. “He’s not listening.”

Joey struck out the batter with three straight strikes down the middle. He still takes pride in the times he proved he was good enough to play with A.J. and his friends.

“He was a role model for me in a lot of different ways,” Slye said. “My brother really set the tone for my family on how my parents raised him to start, through school, through sports, through just how he presented himself. He was the role model for me to follow, and so he set a really, really high standard for me, which at some points was hard to meet, but was something that I was very thankful for, because I did have an image right in front of me of like, ‘Hey, like, this is how you present yourself. This is how you talk to adults. This is how you present yourself to school. This is how you do your homework. This is how you play with sportsmanship, things like that.’

“My brother was a really, really hard-working individual, instilled from my parents. For me, I could not do that. I think a lot of those lessons and things that he didn’t even realize he was teaching me. Being the younger brother — a lot of families can account for this — a lot of times, he’s kind of following their shadow until you finally get your opportunity to step out of it.”

The SlyeStrong#6 Foundation’s purpose is to find a cure for adult/childhood cancer by raising money in support of medical research, to raise community awareness of cancer, and to respond to the community in times of need.

“You carry a lot of your life and everything that motivates you to continue to work,” Slye said. “My brother’s instilled a lot of those principles of just being highly motivated, fighting for what you feel like you want to do with your life, continuing to just be the man that I am today for him and through him.

“I don’t want to say, like, I dedicate everything in my life to my brother, but a lot of the stuff that I’m trying to do and how I raised myself, hopefully I project myself outwardly to honor him.”

When diagnosed, infants to teenagers, like A.J., fall under the umbrella of pediatric cancer, which receives just 4% of federal funding for cancer in the United States. Most treatments are decades old, created for adults and will cause significant side effects during adulthood. From the National Cancer Institute: “It is estimated that, in 2024, a total of 14,910 children and adolescents ages 0 to 19 will be diagnosed with cancer and 1,590 will die of the disease in the United States. Among children (ages 0 to 14 years), it is estimated that 9,620 will be diagnosed with cancer and 1,040 will die of the disease. And among adolescents (ages 15 to 19 years), it is estimated that 5,290 will be diagnosed with cancer and 550 will die of the disease.” Cancer in children and adults is the leading cause of death by disease after infancy among children and adolescents in the United States.

“I think if he was still around, he’d be making a difference in some way, shape or form, especially post-cancer,” Slye said. “If he was able to beat it and get out of it. I think my brother would be doing a lot of life-changing things for people, and for me, that’s how I want to continue to honor him, is to try to do that as well.”

Joey and A.J. Slye. Courtesy of the Slye family.

Slye’s career has not been without its low points. He’s on his seventh NFL team. He’s been released six times, and a few of those cuts have come mere days after he was signed. But during those hard times, he thinks of his brother and how hard he fought through unimaginable circumstances. And it might not make things easier, but it does put them in perspective as he continues to fulfill the promise to his older brother.

Joey Slye uses brother’s fight with cancer to provide perspective as Patriots kicker

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