Sam Fantauzzo is the owner of the pizza chain Salvatore's. You may know him as Soccer Sam. He’s a lover of soccer and is the owner of the Rochester Lancers. In 2009, the charismatic, iconic figure’s life forever changed after undergoing weight loss surgery. 

Soccer Sam’s surgery was a success, or so he thought. He lost 200 pounds. But then things took a turn. He had internal bleeding from a tear in his stomach. Unfortunately, it was not detected in time and he suffered a stroke, which caused him to lose his memory. He had to relearn everything. So much blood was lost, and he almost didn't make it to tell his story.

"They were about to give up on me,” Fantauzzo said. “The preachers there and all that kind of give me my last rites and do the prayer thing. By the next thing you know, the bleeding seemed to stop. I was getting conscious again and realizing who I was. The priest and the doctor were kind of like fighting each other, like who saved me.”

Fantauzzo had to adjust to a new way of living.

“I said, 'Hey, how do I turn this negative about learning, which was a pain to learn, about making it fun?'" Fantauzzo said. “And the toughest part is dealing with people you knew in your first life. When I would meet family members or old friends, I'd be like, this anxiety thing would go through me because I knew they knew I wasn't the same person. And you just can't go along with it. If they had a soccer logo on their shirt, I knew them from soccer. You know, if they had a Chilean accent, I knew, I knew them. There are probably friends with my parents or, you know, I went to an Italian club or Italian dinners with them or whatever. I can almost kind of like navigate through it. Soccer really helped me because I had tapes. I had videos. And I had gold cassettes of shows I did.”

Fantauzzo says his love of soccer helped to save him.

"You know, it took almost a year and a half, two years to kind of come back,” Fantauzzo said. “The hardest part, honestly, is your family. You realize that your kids realize that you don't remember important times in their life. And you realize your wife doesn't remember important times in her life. That's why it's tough for me sometimes to be around people for my first life because I feel like I'm going to let them down if I don't remember something they say."

In part two, Soccer Sam shares his advice for Buffalo Bills co-owner Kim Pegula, Bills safety Damar Hamlin and anyone else who may be dealing with this life-changing medical condition. For that story, click here.