Sioux Falls, South Dakota – It’s not often that you get to sing with one of country music’s biggest stars, but a Volga, South Dakota man did, and he received an emotional round of applause.
Not for the song he sang, but because he was given the opportunity to sing.
We met Hayden Ruesink three years ago while he was playing basketball for Sioux Valley after battling leg cancer as a child.
He told us it was a terrible experience.
“There was a point when I didn’t want to be alive. It felt like, “Why me, God?” Why did I have to do this? Why must I go through this? Hayden Ruesink explained.
However, his traumatic experience at the time would later become a once-in-a-lifetime experience today.
“Hi, my name is Hayden Ruesink, and I’m from South Dakota,” Ruesink told the concertgoers.
Ruesink, who was celebrating his birthday, was asked to join country singer Zach Bryan on stage at a concert in San Francisco last week.
“Me and my brother were kind of vacationing around, we first went to go see him in Colorado at Red Rocks and got the opportunity to go see him and then for another birthday present my brother ended up getting me tickets to the San Francisco Golden Gate Park concert,” according to Ruesink.
But that wasn’t everything his brother did for him. He also made him this sign to hold during the concert.
“First thing was beat cancer, checked box, the second was Red Rocks with Zach with another checked box, and the last thing that wasn’t checked was it said ‘Play Heading South’ and honestly I had no clue that my brother was going to do that for me,” says Ruesink.
“So I just held the sign up the entire time with hopes I can get up and he notices and he ended up noticing and I ended up going up there,” Ruesink told me.
It was spontaneous, but it was accurate.
Don: How did the crowd react? Hayden: It was unbelievable; pure happiness, crying, laughing, and everything in between.
“I tried not to be emotional, but as soon as I heard the roar of the crowd after the final chorus, I about lost it, it was really hard for me to reel it back in,” Ruesink told reporters.
Ruesink remains hopeful about his cancer.
“It’s been dormant so far, but these last two years it came back a little bit, so I went back on chemo two years ago, but currently right now it’s dormant and now I’m off of chemo, but I just play it day by day and I go in for a checkup in October to see what it looks like,” Ruesink told me.
And hopefully Ruesink will be able to check one more box: cancer-free.
Ruesink claims that after he finished singing, Zach Bryan complimented him on his performance and handed over the guitar.
