If Bob Landsee ever needs a reminder, he can look in the mirror and examine the dent in his forehead.

That's where, 17 years ago, the aneurysm burst before Landsee even knew it was there.

At age 27, Bob Landsee should have been dead.

His survival is the story of a remarkable surgeon who himself was dying, but was determined to save as many people as he could before he was gone.

It's also the story of why Landsee still is here, back for a fourth season as coach of arenafootball2's Green Bay Blizzard, guiding young men who harbor long-shot NFL dreams instead of working with those who have fulfilled them.

"It's the story of my life I won't ever forget," Landsee said this week. "When people ask me, why do I do this, it's because I love the game, but I love helping people."

He almost didn't get the chance.

The headaches had nagged Landsee for months before he took his first professional coaching job, with the Arena Football League's Tampa Bay Storm. It was January 1992, about two years after Landsee's NFL career officially ended because of injuries, and he was living with an old University of Wisconsin buddy, Tampa Bay Buccaneers tackle Paul Gruber.

Soon, the headaches were bringing Landsee to his knees. One side of his mouth had begun to droop. He knew it wasn't simply too much Diet Mountain Dew.

One day, Landsee called his wife, Sharon, and said he needed to go home to Madison.

"I knew there was something that was seriously wrong," Sharon Landsee said, "because he would never have given that (job) up."

After some prodding, Bob Landsee went to the UW campus for tests and agreed to stay overnight in the hospital. When he awoke the next morning, he saw tears in the eyes of everyone in the room. The doctor said he had a brain aneurysm.

"I said, 'So, fix it,'" Landsee recalled. "He said, 'Bob, there's more to it than that.'"

It was a giant aneurysm, and it had burst and clotted on both sides of the artery above Landsee's left eye. Many people who suffer such a rupture die on the spot.

The doctors at UW wouldn't touch it. Landsee and his family could find only a couple of surgeons in the country who were willing to operate, given the severity of his condition.

One was a surgeon in Arizona whose method involved stopping the patient's heart, reducing the body's temperature to 72 degrees on ice and then jump-starting the heart like a car battery. Landsee wanted no part of that.

The other was a 61-year-old Korean War veteran at the Mayo Clinic named Thoralf Sundt.

"Dr. Sundt, I would call a master surgeon," said Dr. Fredric B. Meyer, chair of the Mayo Clinic's neurosurgery department. "A surgeon's surgeon."

Dr. Sundt also was a surgeon dying of bone marrow cancer.

He had been diagnosed with the disease six years earlier and given months to live. But he continued to operate, taking only those surgeries others deemed too difficult or dangerous, and claiming he drew strength from his patients even as his body withered around his strong surgeon's hands. Dr. Sundt's most famous patient was former President Ronald Reagan; the Landsees recalled seeing a "60 Minutes" interview with Dr. Sundt the previous fall and being amazed at how he was outliving the prognosis.

They got their first up-close look about 10 minutes after Landsee was wheeled into the clinic. Bald and weighing perhaps 90 pounds, Dr. Sundt had to be carried into Landsee's hospital room, because he no longer could walk.

Landsee hadn't felt right for nearly a year. But in that instant, seeing Dr. Sundt for the first time, Landsee swears his headache was gone.

"The presence, the aura that he had was just amazing," Sharon Landsee said. "You first noticed how he was (physically), but then it was like this calm serenity came over the room that he was in. It was unbelievable. I just felt at peace."

Perhaps it was all the pain medication, but Bob Landsee began to insist he was ready to go home.

Around 5 a.m. the next morning, a nurse was shaving Landsee's head when Dr. Sundt was wheeled in on a bed, until they were side by side. Whenever Dr. Sundt wasn't operating, he was lying down to preserve his strength.

"I said, 'Doc, I'm fine now. It's time to go,'" Landsee recalled. "He said, 'Bob, listen, you have a real problem here. I'm going to try to save your life.'"

Then, two people picked up Dr. Sundt and strapped him into a chair fitted with a body cast and arm rests that would allow him to use nothing but his hands while he performed the procedure.

Repairing a giant aneurysm is significantly more complex than a normal aneurysm procedure. Today, it usually requires the skills of a cerebrovascular surgeon who specializes in the problem. In 1992, though, "this wasn't something that was commonly done," said Dr. Meyer, who trained under Dr. Sundt for many years. "There really wasn't a specialty like that at the time."

The surgery lasted late into the evening. Dr. Sundt removed the artery and part of the frontal lobe of Landsee's brain, creating the dent, then wrapped the incision in Teflon.

When Landsee's wife and parents saw him afterward, he seemed normal. But then the area began to swell, Landsee lost the use of his left eye and his words began to come out as gibberish.

He vividly recalls returning home a couple of weeks after the surgery, head wrapped like a turban, shrunken from about 280 pounds to 189, and seeing two little girls sitting together. One he recognized as Sara, his 3-year-old daughter, but he didn't know about the other.

Told it was his infant daughter, Melissa, Landsee wandered across the room, sat in a recliner and began to cry. He didn't remember anything from the previous six months.

"It was a striking time in my life," Landsee said.

Thirty days after surgery, Landsee returned for the crucial test, an arthrogram that would show how well blood was flowing through the area. A score of 3 would be perfect, a 1 the worst; Dr. Sundt hoped for a 2.

Landsee took the test and then went into recovery. Later, Dr. Sundt was carried in, and Landsee once again awoke to see people in tears.

These were a different sort of tears, though. The test had come back a 3.

And that's when Dr. Sundt uttered the words Landsee tries to remember every day, even though his memory never has fully recovered.

"He said, 'Get out of here and go find things in the world you want to do,'" Landsee recalled.

"That's why I'm still here coaching. I've had opportunities at the NFL (level). I've had opportunities at Division I schools. (But) working with young men to give them the opportunity to ultimately get their dreams, get to the next level -- that's what triggers me."

Landsee returned to coaching in 1993 at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, then moved on to stints in the AFL, Canada and high school football before taking over the Blizzard in 2005. He missed the 2007 season because of another near-death experience, when he developed a staph infection in a surgically repaired knee. But he was back on the sideline last summer, continuing to give young people opportunities on just a slightly smaller scale than the opportunity Dr. Sundt gave him.

"He's going to make you a better person, and I think that's what a lot of guys take away from here when they leave," Blizzard quarterback Gino Guidugli said. "Coach Landsee cares about you as a player, and he's going to build you as a man the time that you're here."

The man who rebuilt Landsee wasn't around long enough to see it. Roughly seven months after performing the surgery, Dr. Sundt passed away.

There is a religious overtone here, a guardian-angel type of thing that meshes with Landsee's Catholic beliefs. In Landsee's mind, there is no doubt he has been saved.

But this story is not about believing in God, or believing in miracles.

This is about believing you have a purpose on this earth, and Bob Landsee has his.

"That's why I go to church every Sunday and just say thank you, ask for another day," said Landsee, who turned 45 last week, "and that's why I do things like this, teaching kids that are out there on the edge, that had a chance and didn't make it, or haven't had a chance and want to make it.

"These are the kind of people I want to work with in my life."

Somewhere, Dr. Sundt is smiling.

-- Tom Pelissero is assistant sports editor of the Press-Gazette. E-mail him at tpelisse@greenbaypressgazette.com