Ex-Rice star stricken by ALS out to deliver message of hope
03:36 AM CDT on Sunday, April 26, 2009
Once an effervescent star at Rice and in the Canadian Football League, then an overachieving, 6-foot, 236-pound special teams ace on a Super Bowl champion, O.J. Brigance fights just to hold his head up these days.
Lawrence Ghoram leaned in to hear what Brigance had to tell him last week. The voice was weak. The message was clear.
"Enjoy every moment."
His body ravaged by Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, a fatal motor-neuron disease that inexorably weakens its victims, making every movement, every word, an impossible struggle, Brigance nevertheless pounded his point.
"Enjoy every moment."
He said it three times. Ghoram got it.
The former Rice linebacker and Ghoram, a junior guard on Rice's basketball team, met on the university campus last week. Brigance grew up in Houston and attended Willowridge High. Now director of player development for the Baltimore Ravens, the team he helped to the 2001 Super Bowl title, he was in his hometown with his wife, Chanda, and an assistant to help raise funds for an endowed scholarship in his name and to raise contributions for the Brigance Brigade, dedicated to ALS research.
Only a shadow of the specimen he once was, Brigance, 39, makes a powerful witness for his cause. On an NFL Films video made last fall, True Courage, he recalls his reaction upon learning in the spring of 2007 that most ALS patients die within two to five years.
"I'm going to be dead by the age of 40."
In the six-minute video, Brigance's withered arms and legs tremble as he walks, but his rich baritone still rumbles.
Now, seven months later, his voice is little more than a whisper. When he's tired, his assistant reads his lips.
But there's no mistaking the smile.
"He's still the same guy," said Donald Hollas, a former NFL quarterback who played with Brigance at Rice in the early '90s. "He always had a great attitude. In practice, he'd do anything to help. He'd finish his work on defense, then play on the scout team for us or run plays at fullback.
"He changed the whole environment at Rice."
He still does.
Ghoram was struck by the message in the video. He thought about his own life. A sister died of leukemia. He's suffered injuries, losses, depression. Big problems and small, like all of us. And his reaction has been just as universal.
"Why is this happening to me?"
He met Brigance, and he was cured of that question. Maybe it was seeing how an ALS victim lives what's left of his life.
Maybe it was something he told him.
"Never ask why."
He said it three times. Ghoram got that message, too. So should we all.
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