Gregg Doyle
National Columnist
cbssports.com
They said the interview would blow me away. That's what they said. They said O.J. Brigance would be so eloquent, so thoughtful, so engaging and charming that I would forget he was talking with his eyeballs.
Brigance, part of the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens' front office, has ALS. He was diagnosed with it six years ago, and has outlived his prognosis. People with ALS are given 3-5 years to live, because the disease doesn't quit. It shuts off motor neurons the brain sends to the spinal cord and ALS patients get weaker, stop walking, stop talking. Swallowing becomes difficult. Breathing, eventually, becomes impossible.
But O.J. Brigance doesn't quit, either. As an undersized linebacker he went from Rice in 1991 to the Canadian Football League, and when a few years later the NFL still wouldn't call him, he called the NFL. Twenty-eight teams he called, asking for a tryout, and 28 teams told him no. The 29th team was the Miami Dolphins. Brigance played four years in Miami, then won a Super Bowl with Baltimore. On the opening kickoff he made the first tackle of Super Bowl XXXV.
Indomitable man, O.J. Brigance.
The day he learned he had ALS, Brigance cried. Soon he was telling people he would be the first person to beat this disease. Someone was going to beat it eventually, he figured. Why not him? Six years later he's still alive. He's in a wheelchair and he can't talk, but he's still here. Still alive.
Still emailing.
That's how Brigance communicates with people, by email, and his emails are a thing of beauty. That's what they told me. I'm waiting for an email back from Brigance, with answers to eight or 10 questions I had for him, and in my head the bar for Brigance's email is high. Maybe too high, but I know what I know, and what I know is that Ravens coach John Harbaugh has a thick stack of emails from Brigance, correspondence from the past five years. Brigance writes so powerfully, so positively, that Harbaugh has saved every word.
Brigance wrote those words with his eyeballs.
He has a DynaVox computer with eye-recognition software that chooses a letter when he blinks at it. After a few letters it gives him some word choices. He keeps identifying letters until the word he wants pops onto the screen. Then he looks at that word and blinks. Letters become words become sentences become emails, the kind that John Harbaugh won't delete.
That's how Brigance communicates. As the Ravens' senior adviser to player development, he emails every player on the roster to motivate or advise or just connect with them. He was the guy emailing cornerback Lardarius Webb regularly last season after Webb tore his ACL. Brigance emails Harbaugh. Soon he'll email me. That's what we're waiting on. An email from O.J. Brigance. It'll blow us away. That's what they said.
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