CHICAGO – Ransom Hatch skipped breakfast one morning in 2013 when he was a University of Washington student, so the free granola bars drew him to the registration drive DKMS was holding on campus.

Hatch didn’t know anything about the nonprofit organization that aims to fight blood cancer by registering people to be potential blood stem cell donors and helping facilitate transplants. But it seemed like a cool cause, and the snack was a plus. He swabbed his cheek, gave the sample back to the registrar and received a letter that he was in the donor pool a couple of weeks later.

And then he forgot all about it.

Seven years later, after moving to Chicago to work with Benny the Bull as a Chicago Bulls entertainment assistant, he received a call from DKMS. He was a match for a 43-year-old woman with a blood disease.

“Would you be interested in donating with DKMS to potentially help save a life?” he was asked last spring.

Hatch had a question before he could make his decision.

Hatch’s father, Daniel, suffers from kidney disease and is on the kidney transplant list in Washington. Hatch and much of his family have been tested and are not a match for a transplant, but there’s a possibility down the road Hatch could participate in a paired kidney donation for someone who matches with his father.

After Hatch made sure the stem cell donation wouldn’t interfere with that future possibility, he didn’t need to give it more thought.

“If I could help just one other person spread just a little bit of positivity, especially in the middle of the pandemic, where there are so many uncertainties, I was like, of course I’m going to do this,” Hatch said. “I think about that person that I donated to a lot. I don’t know what they look like or anything. But I think about the fact that I hope they’re recovering.”

The experience was so inspirational that the 27-year-old recently set out to spread information about DKMS and its cause.

Providing a voice

About eight years after having the granola bar, Hatch was livestreaming himself on Twitch eating his second Carolina Reaper in 25 minutes.

He planned to eat only one of the peppers, which are among the hottest in the world, if his 12-hour stream raised $5,000 for DKMS. But his Twitch followers persuaded him to commit to a second pepper if they could raise another $1,000 in the final minutes.

His community came through, and Hatch hopped around his video-gaming station after the second ingestion, shoveling spoonfuls of yogurt and Italian ice in his mouth and drinking directly from a gallon of milk to try to fight the burn.

It was a captivating show, not surprising given Hatch has made sports entertainment his living.

Bulls fans might recognize Hatch as the guy who always is hanging around beloved mascot Benny the Bull at games and public appearances.

“Benny’s right-hand man,” Hatch said.

The United Center is the largest arena in the NBA in terms of square footage. So before the COVID-19 pandemic, it took meticulous planning to make sure Benny was everywhere he needed to be on game nights – mingling with fans in the 300 level, greeting VIP guests, performing on the court, making costume changes.

Hatch helped make Benny’s schedule tick.

“When Benny is up on the 300 level, it’s like the Beatles,” said Michelle McComas, Bulls senior director of entertainment and events. “So Ransom is very important in that sense in making sure Benny can be everywhere he has to be on a game night.”

McComas said Hatch plays a larger creative role across the department, which has eight employees overseeing game production, team events and the entertainment operation that includes Benny, the Luvabulls and the Bucket Boys, to name a few. Hatch also helps to book entertainment appearances.

The department, of course, has changed how it does things during the pandemic, but Benny still performs at least once during games for TV, makes virtual appearances and tries to stay connected to fans on social media. Hatch is alongside him, often providing the narration.

Check out Benny the Bull’s TikTok account – 3.9 million people follow it – and you’ll see and hear Hatch occasionally playing a part in Benny’s antics. The pair recently hosted a TikTok fundraiser for After-School All-Stars that raised nearly $3,500.

“He himself is a performer,” McComas said of Hatch. “He is the voice of Benny. He will help the fans to understand what Benny is thinking or feeling and sort of bringing whatever story they’re telling to life. … Benny can’t be anywhere without Ransom.”

Hatch one day would love to be an entertainment director. He was pre-law at Washington when a cheerleader mentioned the school was looking for someone to be Harry the Husky. She thought Hatch’s goofiness and energy would be a good fit, so he became Harry.

“It was my love of sports and my love of performing that have combined into one,” Hatch said. “It was a creative outlet.”

Hatch advised with the mascot program after he graduated, worked with the Seattle Storm and went back to get his master’s degree in sports administration. He joined the Bulls in 2018, and he said he has done some amazing things while working alongside “everybody’s best friend,” Benny, including working at the 2020 NBA All-Star Game and Lollapalooza.

It’s Hatch’s knack for entertaining that has helped him build a following of nearly 1,000 followers under the alias Uncle Cranston on Twitch, the video-game streaming service that has taken off during the COVID-19 pandemic. He observed other Twitch fundraisers since starting to stream in the fall and in December contacted DKMS to see if they wanted to pair for an event.

For most of his fundraiser, Hatch played Crash Bandicoot 4, except when he stopped to interview a blood disorder patient who received a transplant a year earlier and the 45 minutes he spent at the end of the stream eating the peppers.

By the next morning, Hatch’s endeavor – and pain – raised $6,216 for DKMS.

“It was not fun for my stomach,” Hatch said. “It was very hot. But we were able to get through it, and I would do it again if that meant getting more registrants for DKMS to possibly save more lives.”

An anonymous lifeline

According to DKMS, 70% of patients who need blood stem cell donation don’t find a donor within their family and must turn to the national registry, resulting in more than 14,000 patients a year looking for unrelated matching donors globally.

DKMS said they have registered more than 10.6 million potential donors, resulting in 91,000 transplants, including 1.1 million donors and 4,500 transplants in the United States.

In the middle of his stream, Hatch swapped stories with Chris Esposito, an American living in Hamburg, Germany, who a year earlier received a stem cell transplant.

Esposito told the story of how he felt weak and tired while traveling with his wife near Machu Picchu. He didn’t think to go to a doctor until his wife got a bout of food poisoning. While at a hospital with her, doctors checked him out and realized his hemoglobin levels were way off. He later was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome.

Later, when Esposito needed a transplant, neither his brother nor sister was a match for him, so he turned to DKMS. He and Hatch traded stories about what the process meant to them.

“As far as giving back in this world, as far as the ways to actually make a difference, to actually save a life by sitting there for six hours is pretty incredible,” Esposito said.

On each of the four days before Hatch’s donation over the summer, a nurse came to his home to administer a medication that causes bone marrow to make and release stem cells. It left Hatch feeling sore, as if he had been through a wrestling tournament. But it was “easy enough to handle,” he said.

On the fifth day, he received his last dose before starting the process of donation at the hospital. Hatch had both of his arms hooked up to tubes, one that pulled the blood out and removed the stem cells and one that deposited the blood back into his other arm. He had to remain still and passed the time by watching Netflix, eating lunch and taking a nap.

“If you watch Netflix, it’s the same as just vegging out on the couch and just hanging out,” Hatch said.

When he was done, Hatch held a small bag that looked like tomato juice, filled with his stem cells. He felt drained over the next few days but said he was back to normal within a week.

Hatch never was told who received his donation, but, a few months later, he was allowed to write an anonymous letter to her.

“I just told them I hope one day I can give you a huge hug and rejoice with you and celebrate that you beat the cancer,” Hatch said. “So my hope is they’re getting strength from that, and I think about them a lot.”

Hatch’s experience has more meaning to him as he and his family wait for a possible kidney donor for his father.

“That’s been huge for me,” Hatch said. “When I got the call from DKMS, it was like, if I were in a situation where I could give a kidney to my dad directly, I would. So the fact that I could give bone marrow stem cells to someone else, absolutely I would want to do that and pay that forward and pay that love. And hopefully it comes back around to us one day.”

By the final minutes of Hatch’s 12½-hour stream, he had recovered enough from the peppers that he was able to thank those who had donated to DKMS.org.

He explained the money would help pay for kits to get more people in the donor registry – so perhaps the next hungry college kid could try to help.

“I’m very, very proud of it,” Hatch said. “It was all of the community and all of the people coming in. … I can talk until I’m blue in the face, but, at the end of the day, it was their donations that came through.”