Leslie Harvey Elken at her Berwyn home with treasured memories: a portrait of Erik painted by a classmate and the championship trophy her son’s USC rugby team won after he scored the game-winner. Nicknamed the Gentle Giant from early childhood, Erik passed last November after a 10-month battle with a rare sarcoma. He was 22.
When doctors told Erik “Big E” Elken that the hip pain he couldn’t shake wasn’t another rugby injury – it was a rare and highly aggressive Stage 4 sarcoma, he waited two days to tell his coach.
The University of South Carolina Gamecocks were playing that weekend and the 6 ft. 5 in, 250-pound Scholastic All-American didn’t want to be a distraction.
Big E broke the news to Coach Roberts on Sunday: He had an 8-pound tumor – the size of a newborn – on his femur and was flying home to Berwyn for treatment.
With a linebacker’s build and a lion’s heart, Big E was a towering presence, inspiring teammates on and off the field.
“It hit me in the gut,” Roberts would recall later. Shook up and speechless, he never forgot Erik’s reaction: “Coach, are you alright? Coach, you’re gonna be OK.”
Nine months later, when teammates and friends gathered at a candlelit campus vigil to mourn “the Gentle Giant,” the fierce competitor with the baby face, Roberts spoke of that devastating day.
“This was someone facing the battle of his life, a young man who had just gotten the worst news [possible], and here he was, consoling me. He was thinking of others. That’s who Erik was.”
Selflessness was in Erik’s DNA.
Despite his imposing size and overt physicality, “Erik was an easy child to raise, conscientious and always concerned about others,” remembers his mother, Leslie Harvey Elken, an ’84 Conestoga graduate herself.
From an early age, Erik collected friends like baseball cards: on playgrounds at New Eagle Elementary and Valley Forge Middle School, at Great Valley Presbyterian Church, on school buses, team shuttles and on playing fields on the Main Line and far beyond.
Erik and friends at their 2022 Conestoga graduation.
And he didn’t just hang with jocks. “He wanted to be friends with everyone,” Leslie says. “He wasn’t interested in climbing the ladder. He just saw people as valuable – whether they were on sports teams or not.”
At that same vigil, Wayne native and St. Joe’s Prep alum Will McKernon, Erik’s USC roommate and rugby teammate since freshman year, extolled his fallen friend.
“Not only was he an amazing player, he was just a really caring guy. No matter what, he would have a smile on his face and help whoever needed it. Living with someone like that made you want to do better, to be a better person.”
So unselfish was Erik’s play freshman year, his mother had to gently suggest that holding onto the ball and scoring once in a while might just be in his team’s best interest. At his very next game, he scored the “try” that won the conference and sent his team to nationals.
With an abiding faith rooted in humility, Erik led the team in pre-game prayers and between-game Bible studies. Even when he was sidelined by injuries, he’d make his way to the huddle. In no time, he had a third nickname: Team Chaplain.
When his USC rugby teammates hosted a “Bald for Big E” fundraiser to help defray his family’s medical expenses in March, all but three of 70 players – even a few studying in Europe that semester – cheerfully had their heads shaved.
Wayne native Will McKernan, Erik’s USC roommate and teammate for five semesters, going “Bald for Big E” last March.
Watching the event on YouTube from his Berwyn living room, Erik was his usual selfless self. “Mom, my teammates are shaving their heads and I haven’t even lost my hair yet.”
That day would come soon enough, his mother assured him.
Erik’s diagnosis of NUT sarcoma was so rare, only four cases have been recorded.
Physicians at the Rare Cancers Program at Cooper University Medical Center quarterbacked his care but experts were consulted from as far away as MD Anderson in Houston, Dana Farber in Boston and Sloan-Kettering in New York.
With no treatment protocols and cancer already in his lymph nodes and lungs, Erik knew he was in the fight of his life. Leslie says her son “believed God was going to see him through with a miracle, one way or another. Sometimes, that miracle is a healing; sometimes, it’s being whole in heaven upon passing.”
Throughout his 10-month battle – January 2025 until November 18, Erik started each morning with daily devotionals, prayers that fortified him through six infusions of doxorubicin – the maximum lifetime dose of the “red devil” chemo drug with notoriously horrific side effects – and the difficult surgery and rehab challenges that followed.
Tragically, three days after starting a second round of chemo with a new drug, just as he was starting to regain weight and was feeling better than he had in months, he called his mom complaining of severe back pain. Leslie was up the road at Casey’s. Erik had convinced her to enjoy a rare night out with friends.
She hurried home to care for him and the next morning, when Erik couldn’t catch his breath, he was rushed by ambulance to Paoli Hospital.
Shortly before Erik was sedated for the final scan that would reveal fatally collapsed lungs, he found his mother’s eyes and smiled. “It’s going to be OK, Mom.”
Buddies from kindergarten through college rallied round. A few rushed from hundreds of miles away to hold their friend’s hand at his bedside, others spoke to Erik through phones held up to his ear: “We love you, Big E. We’re praying for you.”
Surrounded by his mother, his father, Kyle, and his only sibling, Kiersten, Erik passed quickly, just three minutes after the machines were silenced. Leslie was holding one hand; Kiersten was holding the other.
(Left) Erik Elken with his mother, Leslie, during his freshman year at USC and (right) with his sister, Kiersten, after his junior year at Conestoga.
In the weeks after his death, Erik’s teammates and friends vowed that his legacy – play hard, support one another, spread joy – would live on.
Their spring tournament would become the 1st Annual Big E Memorial Invitational, a day-into-night fundraiser for rare sarcoma research and youth rugby programs. Hundreds of players, spectators and friends are expected to attend the March 28 day-to-night festivities in Columbia, S. C.
Closer to home, Erik’s favorite restaurant, Christopher’s in Wayne, will donate 30 percent of sales to the same two causes this Thursday, March 19. Erik and Collin Todd, son of the restaurant’s owners, had been buddies since elementary school. The all-day fundraiser gives local friends who can’t make it to the tournament a chance to show their support on the Main Line, says Cindy McKernan, the mother of Erik’s USC roommate and an organizer of both events.
“It’s so fitting that it will be at Christopher’s,” Leslie says. “Our family has loved supporting the Todds over the years. If I was eating there without Erik and didn’t bring home an order of calamari and mussels Provencale, I was in trouble.”
Erik, Will McKernan, Leslie Elken and Cindy McKernan celebrating Will’s birthday last July in Avalon. Several months into chemo treatments, Erik cheered on his USC pals competing in a rugby tournament in Stone Harbor the same weekend.
Four months after his passing, concerned friends are always asking Leslie Elken how she’s doing. “Good enough,” she tells them.
Signs of love for her son surround and sustain her: memories from a memorial service so jammed, it filled two overflow rooms and required shuttle busses; a black notebook found in her mailbox filled with tributes penned by a dozen high school buddies; the touching “Big E’ tattoos that Erik’s friends made sure to show her; the trophy Erik’s coach insisted she keep to commemorate her son’s conference-winning score; the portrait painted by a Carolina classmate who sent a five-page letter with the canvas; and the steady stream of check-ins – phone calls and visits that started during Eric’s treatment and continue to this day.
“Erik never felt alone,” says his mother, marveling that so many “big sporty boys” lifted her son up those many months, told him time and again: I love you. I’m with you.
“It’s remarkable that these young people didn’t step away. They stepped in. I was shocked – in a good way. I’m so grateful.”
In rugby, a sport built on contact and camaraderie, no player runs alone. Someone always tails and protects the ball carrier, ready to step in and take the ball if he falls.
Big E’s teammates had his back on the field and they have it still, carrying the ball forward in his name.
To honor the memory of Erik Elken, Christopher’s in Wayne will donate 30 percent of sales this Thursday, May 19 to rare sarcoma research and local youth rugby programs. The public is also invited to support the first annual Big E Memorial Invitational rugby tournament and afterparty set for March 28 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. Details here.
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