A Hit Left Eric LeGrand Paralyzed, But His Love Of Football Endures

Five years after a hit left him paralyzed, the former Rutgers standout says his lifelong love of football still sustains him. To understand why, you must see his daily grind through his eyes.

- Justin Heckert

It’s your nose this time. You try to do what you can for it, sitting alone in your bedroom, arms resting on each side of a $40,000 wheelchair. You are parked beneath a giant TV, watching football. You scrunch your eyes and flex your cheeks, wriggle each nostril, stretch your mouth, until your entire face is dancing. But the itch won’t go away, so you call out to your ma for the third time in the past hour.

“MAAAAAA!”

She was just in your bedroom, her fingers  weeping your dreadlocks out of your face. She was just grumbling, “It’s 80 degrees in here, Eric,” as the portable heater hummed next to the bed with metal rails where you sleep. She was just scratching the eczema around the edge of your forehead—the reprieve of nails digging across your skin, the joy of being able to feel—and applying layers of ChapStick to your lips.

You hear her scream back, exhausted, from downstairs: “WHAAAAAAAT!?” You hear her familiar thumping up the steps and through the wide doorway to your bedroom and adjoining man cave, with the free admission to those who believe sign on the door and the autographed footballs from a dozen NFL teams in cases on the wall. Your jersey from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is also on the wall, with paintings of you when you were a defensive tackle for Rutgers, No. 52. You hear her huffing, finally, behind you.