Fifteen years in the past, Alex Cohen knew one thing was flawed. Always smiling and upbeat, she was used to being on her toes all day, rarely slowing down or pacing herself. Now, her foot continuously harm, she skilled reminiscence loss and fatigue, and different neurological points. At occasions, Cohen couldn’t get away from bed or keep in mind the place she lived. Simple duties similar to driving by herself turned terrifying.
Alex’s husband, hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, a assured cash supervisor and often unflappable, grew extra fearful about his spouse as her situation turned extra irritating. Doctor after physician, professional after professional, was unable to pinpoint a root trigger. Multiple occasions, she was misdiagnosed. Motherhood made no room for her limitations. No matter how a lot Cohen, then 43, was ailing, she nonetheless had younger children, together with a five-year-old daughter, to care for whereas tending to her personal well being issues. Her children nonetheless wanted to go to highschool early within the morning, and once they got here residence, someone wanted to be there to assist with their homework.
After two years, and a whole lot of {dollars} spent, Cohen was finally recognized with Lyme illness in 2009. Cohen tried plenty of totally different dietary supplements and antibiotics, nevertheless it wasn’t till she flew to Germany 5 years in the past, for hyperthermia therapy that was not but authorized within the United States, that Cohen’s mind started functioning usually once more. She underwent two weeks of intensive therapy at Klinik St. Georg, and recovered after three months, lastly Lyme-free.
“That really stopped me in my tracks and I said, number one, my life is so important,” Cohen stated in an interview with the Daily News. “My health is so important. So I had to give up being the busy woman that I was.”
Receiving the prognosis and reclaiming her life had been strong first steps, however they weren’t sufficient for Cohen, who has 20 years of philanthropy work behind her on the Steve and Alex Foundation, which was based the day after 9/11.
“I believe that I got Lyme because I was going to be the one to change things,” Cohen stated.
To date, she has given $73.7 million towards Lyme illness analysis, therapy and growth efforts, together with $16 million to Columbia University for the Cohen Center for Health and Recovery from Tickborne Diseases. In New York, the Cohen Center was the primary of its sort.
Today, a 12 months and a half after the Cohens bought the Mets, Alex stays one thing of an unknown to most Mets followers. She will not be concerned with baseball operations, however has carried a lifetime {of professional} expertise, and a not-small quantity of private expertise, into a job as president of the Amazin’ Mets Foundation, the place she is concentrated on increasing the group’s efforts to help underserved teams all through Queens.
It’s a job completely suited to Cohen’s life and upbringing, which was made up of equal elements Tom Seaver and Tom Aquinas.
A motion of the soul towards charity and Flushing
Cohen was born in Harlem and grew up in Washington Heights, or as she calls it, Bronx West. Her mom, Rosa, was very non secular, attending mass daily, and her father, Ralph, labored within the submit workplace. “So we were a typical Latino family,” Cohen stated. “The mom stayed home and the dad went to work.” Alex attended the identical Catholic faculty the place her mom labored, the close by St. Elizabeth’s.
When Cohen wasn’t at college, serving to her neighborhood or spending summers in Puerto Rico, she was watching Mets video games each evening together with her dad, 90-year-old Ralph Garcia, now higher referred to as Mets Grandpa. There was one TV in her Washington Heights childhood residence, and everybody within the household knew to not contact the distant.
“It was always the Mets that were playing, that’s all we watched,” Cohen stated. “My father would have a bad day if the Mets lost. The whole day was ruined – for everybody – because he was annoyed. He’d gnaw off the edge of his mustache all the time. So he always had half a mustache because the Mets were always giving him a hard time.”
While the Mets fandom could have come from Ralph, it was Alex’s mom, Rosa, who instilled in her the ethic of charity. When Rosa wasn’t at church or dealing with the brunt of her home tasks, she would spend her time rummaging by way of a thrift store. Cohen would go to a rummage sale retailer after faculty, to work. For about two hours after faculty, Cohen would arrange at a desk, and do her homework there, however she would additionally assist costume and wash the dolls within the retailer, all of which might be re-sold for the church.
Cohen’s love for humanitarianism started, not less than partially, in that rummage sale retailer. But the act of giving and generosity basically was all the time current in her Washington Heights neighborhood. Cohen grew up in a neighborhood that was very shut. If somebody had a brand new child they usually didn’t have any cash, Cohen’s household would arrange the child bathe and ensure the neighbors pooled collectively to purchase one thing.
“Even if it cost a dollar,” Cohen stated. “We would show them that we were a part of the family. Growing up, whatever money we made, I helped my parents or if someone in the building needed it, I helped them. We grew up in such a connected community, which you don’t see as much anymore. If you don’t really know your neighbors, you wouldn’t know if someone needs help. We didn’t have that kind of life. We grew up helping anybody who needed it.”
Around 20 years in the past, Cohen began giving freely tickets and upgrading seats for followers sitting within the higher degree at Shea Stadium. Now, as Mets proprietor, Cohen nonetheless retains up this custom by strolling by way of Citi Field’s low-cost seats, often taking pictures the breeze with Mets trustworthy and listening to their tales about how they turned followers, earlier than upgrading them to one of the best seats in the home – area degree and proper behind residence plate. It brings her pleasure to provide to folks, however largely, Cohen stated: “It’s just who I am and I couldn’t change it if I tried.”
“She’s so normal and she’s not affected by the wealth,” stated Jeanne Melino, now on the Mets’ board of administrators and one in every of Cohen’s greatest associates of 20 years. “Very down to earth.”
Mets lifer and assembly Steve
Another factor Cohen can’t change? She can solely ever be seen carrying denims and a t-shirt. She has over 300 t-shirts in her closet, so a lot of them Mets-related, and he or she tries to put on each shirt that folks, together with followers, will purchase and ship to her. “I tell people that are having a dinner party, ‘If I can’t wear jeans, I’m not coming,’” she stated.
Cohen stated their possession of the Mets is exclusive partially as a result of they’ve an open-door coverage and since they emphasize the significance of household. Before Max Scherzer signed with the Mets final December, Scherzer’s spouse, Erica, stated she needed to speak to Alex first. Cohen stated Scherzer wouldn’t signal with the Mets till they made positive that Steve and Alex had a profitable imaginative and prescient for the group.
“Buying the Mets has been weird,” Cohen stated. “There’s a lot more pressure. People say, are you going to do this? And I’m like, I don’t have anything to do with this – like guys on the field. My dad is going to be 91 in August. I’m like, they gotta win a World Series for this man before he leaves this earth!”
This 12 months, Steve and Alex Cohen will rejoice their thirtieth marriage ceremony anniversary after assembly for the primary time in 1990 by way of a relationship service. They every obtained binders full of images and details about one another. Alex was 25 when she first met Steve, and although she had hesitations about being with him at first, finally his attraction and humor gained her over. They met on a Friday, she referred to as him once more on a Sunday, they usually’ve been inseparable ever since.
“I met Steve, and I said, ‘If you marry me, you marry my family,’” Cohen recalled. “And my parents moved in with us. They lived with us until I was 47, and then someone gave me a t-shirt that said, “I Still Live With My Parents” and I used to be like, ‘Uhhh, you guys gotta go.’ So we constructed them a home proper subsequent door. So they’re all the time near us.”
“Giving back is my way of life”
While Cohen’s philanthropic mentality was instilled in her by her mother from a younger age, her efforts to provide again kicked into gear after the terrorist assaults on the Twin Towers. One day after 9/11, the Cohen’s pledged $5 million to assist households of the victims of the assaults.
“She lets what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in her life really direct her giving and what the foundation does,” stated Melino. “It’s personal. She’s just a good person. It’s so genuine. She’s not looking for attention.”
Now, 20 years later, the Steve and Alex Foundation has given a complete of $989 million to causes which have a private connection, together with enhancing kids’s healthcare and schooling, preventing starvation, serving to underserved populations and communities, defending the atmosphere, enhancing entry to the psychological well being for veterans, and furthering medical analysis, notably within the areas of COVID-19 and Lyme illness.
Cohen stated: “People ask Steve, ‘Does Alex spend a lot of money?’ And he says, ‘No, she gives it all away.’”
But Cohen doesn’t simply sit at an workplace and write checks all day. She additionally takes her present on the highway, as together with her Giving Tour in 2016, which noticed her take household and associates on a bus journey throughout the center of America in quest of nonprofit organizations to help.
“She’d be like, ‘How many people are working today, including your busboys and your dishwasher?’ And everyone would get $100,” Melino stated of the Giving Tour. “We were just passing through. It really meant a lot to her to see what was happening in the middle of the country.”
And when the COVID-19 pandemic started to crest in March 2020, she took to calling hospitals and easily asking them, “What do you need?” New York City hospitals wanted iPads so relations may talk with their in-patient family members. So Cohen purchased and donated lots of of iPads.
Now Cohen’s fundamental function for the Mets is rising the Amazin’ Mets Foundation, which raised simply over $3.8 million in its first 12 months and funded round $1.9 million in grants and contributions to about 58 organizations that help underserved communities in Queens. Some notable grant recipients embody the Chinese-American Planning Council, New York Hall of Science, Flushing YMCA, Queens Public Library, and Korean Community Services.
Cohen loves taking an energetic function in her basis – with workplaces primarily based out of Stanford, Connecticut, Hudson Yards, and Citi Field – even when it means being on her toes, generally for 12 hours a day, liaising with neighborhood companions, dotting Citi Field, chatting up Mets diehards, and in these treasured in-between moments, carving out high quality time with the New York native’s associates and family members.
But she’s nonetheless studying easy methods to govern a self-described Type-A character with some remaining well being Lyme-related well being constraints, like cognitive disabilities. Unless there’s an occasion, Cohen deliberately ends her day at 4 o’clock. Embedded into all the things that comes with being Tia Alex and Uncle Steve, Cohen has discovered to decompress with meditations, taking breaks with walks, consuming higher and worrying much less.
Managing her well being is way extra necessary than managing all the things else, even the Mets. But nonetheless, she is satisfied even the constraints she started to expertise 15 years in the past permit her to depart a permanent legacy. Cohen is totally conscious she was capable of largely recuperate from Lyme illness largely due to her wealth. But she doesn’t need individuals who don’t have that privilege to endure in silence. Her legacy, she hopes, will resound even louder than the streets of Flushing on an October evening if her hometown staff can recapture their glory.
“We’re the largest private funder of Lyme disease research in the world right now,” Cohen stated. “We have changed things. For me, that’s important. There are people who get cancer, they heal, and they just move on with their life. But they’ve been given that for a reason. For me, Lyme disease became a goal of not only finding a diagnostic, but of finding a cure and a treatment. And I’ll always have that goal.”
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Source: www.bostonherald.com