How you can join the Brigance Brigade to fight ALS
By Tim Graham | Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 12:02 AM

http://support.alscenter.org/site/TR...=1050&pg=entry


Sometimes a story is bigger than the space a newspaper article allows, which is why I’m writing more here about former Dolphins captain O.J. Brigance and his battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

ALS is an incurable and terminal disease. Motor neurons shut down, causing muscles to wither until the patient can no longer breathe. Half of all ALS patients die with three years. Only 20 percent reach five years.

Brigance is a devout Christian with faith he will be the first person to beat ALS. Despite his defiance, he is hoping his cachet as a former NFL player — a Super Bowl champ and director of player development for the Ravens — will help raise money for research.

He has formed the Brigance Brigade, has been working with the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins and is the honorary chair of the Fiesta 5K & Fun Run on May 3 in Baltimore. And you don’t have to be anywhere near the Patapsco River to get involved.

Good souls can click here to long onto the Fiesta 5K site and make a $20 siesta pledge (it’s a Cinco de Mayo theme) for sleeping in that day because, well, O.J. would want you to.

“The platform that I’ve been given can give tremendous exposure to ALS and an opportunity to do some good,” Brigance said. “When adversity strikes we often want to shrink back and go into our shell, and there’s a time to do that. But we also experience things so we have an opportunity to impact others.”

Brigance played with the Dolphins from 1996 through 1999 as a reserve linebacker, but his impact was made on special teams, in the locker room and in the community. He helped build homes in Little Havana through Habitat for Humanity and staged food drives. He has won awards for his selflesseness from the CFL, NFL and NFL Players Association to name a few organizations.

And he took in a couple young knuckleheads named Larry Izzo and Zach Thomas.

“It was easy to bounce questions off him,” said Izzo, a special teams Pro Bowler who modeled himself after Brigance and became a folk hero for the champion Patriots. “We would sit in the locker room and just discuss life. I can’t emphasize the amount of respect everybody who has met O.J. has for him.”

Brigance already has established a presence in Baltimore. Izzo said he would contact Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who runs an ALS foundation in Boston, on Brigance’s behalf.

It would be encouraging to see the folks of South Florida step up, too.

http://www.alscenter.org/