The eyes of soccer fans around the globe caught a glimpse of a 13-year-old boy from Watertown as he took part in the pre-game ceremony on June 13 before the Scotland-Haiti game in Foxborough.
Graham Phillips served as an official Coca-Cola Youth Program flag bearer for the first FIFA World Cup 2026 game at Boston’s World Cup venue. He represented Boston Children’s Hospital as a former patient and cancer survivor.
Holding a Scottish flag, Graham walked out through the tunnel onto the field in front of nearly 65,000 fans and helped form the two linee through which the players of both squads passed on the way onto the field usually used by the New England Patriots.
“It went great,” Graham said a few days after the game. “It was a little frightening at first, but then when I got out there it was fine.”
Graham took part in the memorable experience just three years after he was hospitalized for several months while being treated for non‑Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said his father Jonathan.
“Brain was in the hospital for about five months and got to come home for a couple days in between treatments, but he was going through some rapid fire cycles of chemotherapy and other treatments,” Jonathan said.
After the treatments at Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana‑Farber Cancer Institute, Graham entered remission in November 2023. Currently, he is a healthy seventh‑grader at Learning Prep School in Newton, swims competitively on a local swim team, and even runs his own cooking channel on YouTube.
Being selected as a flag bearer for Boston Children’s Hospital came as a surprise.
“My mom got an email, to ask if we wanted to do it, and so we said ‘yeah,'” Graham said.
The other flag bearers also had been patients at Boston Children’s Hospital at some point, Jonathan said, with some coming from as far as New Hampshire and New York. The group had to show up in Dedham at 4 p.m. Then they were bused to the stadium for the 9 p.m. game.
“We did a practice before the game,” Graham said.
While he got to see the soccer players up close, the flag bearers were instructed not to distract them.
Jonathan was Graham’s plus-one and they both got to watch Scotland defeat Haiti 1-0 from the stands.
Graham got a taste of fame. Someone at his brother Ben’s school recognized him and said “Oh, I saw you.”
Jonathan was thankful that his son could have such a unique experience.
“It’s enough that Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber, who helped him through (the cancer treatment), did that for him. And then they also keep in touch, like, three years later and reach out to give him opportunities to do things like this to celebrate the life that they actually ended up giving him,” Johnathan said. “That’s just incredible.”