At age 18, Joseph Tegerdine, of Springville, Utah, has driven his 2020 Ford Mustang for just a few weeks, but the pony car is part of his mission to squeeze happiness from every minute of every day in this life — before it ends.
“I’ve just liked Mustangs for as long as I can remember. Six-year-old me liked it, the headlights looked cool, and I stuck with it,” he told the Detroit Free Press on Wednesday. “I used to drive this Ford Bronco. It was a big truck, basically. I’d get compliments and I’d feel so manly. We sold that and I started driving my mom’s minivan, a Honda Odyssey. I felt like my testosterone was being drained away. Not great.”
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He laughed, continuing: “In a Mustang I feel like a man again. It’s the silliest thing. When you get in and start it, the car just rumbles around you. It’s not a noise, it’s a feeling. When you take corners, you can feel you’re being pushed through the corner from the back. I like the way rear-wheel drive feels. When you turn the (steering) wheel, what I feel are cleaner turns.”
He hoped to save up money for a Mustang working at Sodalicious, but his father didn’t want him to wait any longer. Dad, the general manager North America for Reencle home composting systems, went ahead and scratched off a wish list item for his son, and then wrote about the decision on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
“For those wondering why I’d buy my 18yr old son a 330hp Mustang, well, he’s been given months to live and can’t work long enough to buy one himself. His comment on the way home, ‘Dad, I’m going to squeeze a few extra months of life just to be able to drive this.’ #cancersucks”
That March 2 post by Wednesday had garnered 13.7 million views, 177,000 likes and more than 3,200 comments.
For those wondering why I’d buy my 18yr old son a 330hp Mustang, well, he’s been given months to live and can’t work long enough to buy one himself. His comment on the way home, “ Dad, I’m going to squeeze a few extra months of life just to be able to drive this.” #cancersucks pic.twitter.com/SWNq6bJ4nd
— Joe Tegerdine (@JoeTegerdine) March 3, 2024
“With all that’s happening, and we found out he has more tumors in his lungs. … We needed to buy the car,” said the father, Joe Tegerdine (who bears the same name as his son. For clarity, we’ll refer to him as Joe and his son as Joseph).
A young football player with a sore knee
It all started when Joseph, then a seventh grader, complained of soreness after football. He told his mother, Kerry, a nurse, that knee pain was keeping him up at night.
So the parents — living in Melissa, Texas, at the time — took their boy for X-rays, and doctors noticed what appeared to be a calcium deposit on the right knee. They did an MRI to be sure, and called to confirm it was osteosarcoma, a form of cancer. A biopsy came next, and then chemotherapy, Joe Tegerdine said.
“Life is just going in a certain direction and then, it’s hard to even explain how quickly things changed for the entire family,” the father said. “I can’t remember how many weeks passed and treatments but they had to take a big portion of his right leg to remove the tumor. He had a ‘rotationplasty,’ where they cut out the bad bone and rotate your lower leg, take the tibia and fibula, and reattach to the femur. They take out the compromised bone. He has a prosthesis now.”
Joseph Tegerdine said, “In seventh grade, I was 5-6 and taller than everyone else on the football team. So they had me playing center and also running back. Then I grew 8 inches in a year, and I’m 5-11 now. One of the hallmarks of bone cancer is sudden and extreme growth.”
The father provided a medical report from the doctor to the Free Press explaining detail of the medical situation involving his son, who has endured multiple cancer surgeries. He tested out of high school because cancer treatments have dominated these past five years.
“He’s really bright. When he went to take the GED, they asked him questions about drugs and whether he was recently out of juvenile prison. He was like, ‘No, I can’t go to school when I’m in the hospital.’ He wanted to go into engineering.”
Ford CEO responds personally on social media
When Joseph was tiny, he would climb into his toy Ford Mustang and play in the driveway.
A day after Tegerdine posted about his son’s Mustang, Ford CEO Jim Farley tweeted in response: “Hi Joe, I’m so sorry to hear what your family is going through. Please let me know if you and your son would like to attend @FPRacingSchool to experience a @FordMustang Dark Horse on the track. DM me and we’ll make it happen.”
Tegerdine said he reached out to connect privately with Farley about the offer to attend Ford Performance Racing School, as Farley instructed. And the response was immediate.
Hi Joe, I’m so sorry to hear what your family is going through. Please let me know if you and your son would like to attend @FPRacingSchool to experience a @FordMustang Dark Horse on the track. DM me and we’ll make it happen.
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) March 3, 2024
“It was really crazy. That tweet was just kind of random,” Joe Tergerdine told the Free Press. “He sent a direct message to me, saying, ‘Hey, you want me to do this?’ If it’s OK, his guys would get everything set up … at the Ford Performance Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. They’re flying us out there. It’s just really cool, and we’ll stay in Charlotte for a couple of days. There’s a big dinner before school. Then Joseph will be on the track with the (Mustang) Dark Horse.”
Ford is paying for the flight on Delta Air Lines and a stay with Marriott, he said.
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Joseph Tegerdine is eager to learn all there is to know about driving a Mustang, especially how to make a controlled skid sideways through a turn and smoke the tires.
“I don’t know how to drift. I’ve always been too scared to go to a parking lot to figure that out, because I’d just hit a light pole or something,” he said. “I need an instructor, a trainer. Also, I get to drive one of the most powerful Ford track Mustangs there is. This is going to be sick.”
A Ford spokesman declined to comment further on the situation, saying Farley had spoken.
‘Curse God’ or choose to be grateful
“Over the years, I’ve known many parents who have lost their children to sudden tragedy, who never got a chance to say goodbye,” Joe Tegerdine posted on X on March 11.
“When my son was first diagnosed I had to make a decision. Either curse God and die or try to make the best of a really bad situation. With the perspective of what it would be like to experience sudden loss, I decided to be grateful. Grateful that we’ve had the 18 years to build memories and enjoy him,” he wrote. “Even now, with the only treatments left to prolong life and manage pain, I’m thankful he’s still with us, squeezing out the best that life can offer under less than ideal circumstances. My heart is still broken, but I know it could be a lot worse.”
Farley has not lost a child to cancer but he and his wife, Lia, did mourn the loss of twins born prematurely. Farley retweeted a 2020 post from model Chrissy Teigen after her miscarriage and alluded to her husband, singer John Legend, and wrote, “Thinking of John, Chrissy and all of us who have lost children — that we will always love….”
Thinking of John, Chrissy and all of us who have lost children – that we will always love…. https://t.co/yvJb9T7ebf
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) October 1, 2020
Osteosarcoma can start in any bone, according to the Mayo Clinic website. It’s most often found in the long bones of the legs, and sometimes the arms. Symptoms include bone or joint pain that may come and go, and can be mistaken for growing pains, pain related to a bone that breaks for no obvious reason or swelling near a bone.
When asked for words of wisdom, Joseph Tegerdine questioned whether someone can really trust words of wisdom from people as young as he is. But then he shared his thoughts, just before getting ready for bed in Osaka, Japan — traveling with family, scratching off another bucket list item. He described serene gardens and unique architecture designed to blend with nature in Japan.
“You have to live day by day because, day by day, if you look at my life, it’s actually fantastic. I’m in Japan right now. I’ve got a car of my dreams, I’m surrounded by tons of people I absolutely adore and I’m going to driving school,” he said. “Then you look at the future, and it all starts to break down. I don’t really need to look at the future. Morbidly, I don’t really have one. I can’t be, like, ‘In a year —’ If I get a year, I’ll be extremely lucky.”
Radiation treatment will resume again, and then chemo and then surgery and so on, he said.
Joe Tegerdine said he is grateful for families who share their stories. “A lot of people suffer in silence with cancer. All of us know somebody who’s lost somebody. We felt like, we don’t mind talking about it. We hope it provides support and encouragement to other people, so they don’t feel alone.”
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Contact Phoebe Wall Howard: 313-618-1034 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on X at @phoebesaid
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dad buys Mustang for son battling cancer, gets offer from Ford CEO
