From his youngest days, football was always Eric LeGrand’s favourite sport, and he learned to play it well enough to earn a scholarship to Rutgers. As a kid he loved to watch football, too, and the moment his 6-year-old self saw Terrell Davis’ orange jersey streak across the TV screen in his Avenel, NJ, home, LeGrand knew he’d found a favourite team.
When the Broncos take the field February 7 in Super Bowl 50, you can bet LeGrand will be rooting as hard as he can for them to beat the Panthers, that his mood will match every fellow Denver die-hard’s across the country, rising and falling with every snap. A life-altering football injury may have robbed him of his ability to play the game, but it did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for it.
Or for the Broncos.
“I’m a very happy man,” LeGrand said by phone Monday, the day after Denver held off the Patriots to win the AFC title. “We finally got the championship defense Peyton [Manning] needs. He’s going to ride out like [John] Elway or Ray Lewis, with a championship.”
Technically, LeGrand is an alumnus of the Buccaneers, not the Broncos, having signed an honorary free-agent contract with Tampa Bay in 2012, what would have been his draft year out of Rutgers. That he was unable to fulfil that football destiny has been a well-documented tale, the neck injury he sustained in an October 2010 game leaving him paralysed from the shoulders down. But rather than distance himself from the game that robbed his body of so much of its movement, LeGrand embraced it with all his heart.
“I could never turn on football,” he said. “My injury _ everyone who straps a helmet on knows the risk. Unfortunately these injuries happen.”
What’s become so apparent in the almost 5{ years since the injury is how much football has embraced him in return, keeping him connected to the world in important, fulfilling and memorable ways. As much as LeGrand has become one of our nation’s most inspirational figures, helping to raise countless dollars for research and treatment of spinal cord injuries, he remains eternally grateful to his football community for making his voice heard.
“Everyone in the football world, it’s a big family,” he said. “You may hate each other on Saturday or Sunday, be on opposite sides of the field. But everybody knows the grind, understands the bigger picture. It’s a family.”
One that has opened its arms to him, and not just from the obvious places such as Rutgers, where LeGrand returned to earn his degree and now works as a radio analyst for football games. It was Davis, who is in the Broncos Hall of Fame and who was recently named a semifinalist for the 2016 Pro Football Hall of Fame class, who opened the doors of the Broncos organisation to LeGrand.
LeGrand has made three trips to Denver across the last few years, meeting the team in the locker room and spending the pre-game on the field, meeting favourite players from Manning to Tim Tebow to Demaryius Thomas. But those are only scenes in what has been a Zelig-like post-injury life.
“I was at the Giants-Patriots game this year and at one point before the game, I’m on the field talking with Robert Kraft, Roger Goodell and Jon Bon Jovi,” LeGrand said. “I’m like ‘Whaaaat?’ Last year at the Jets game versus the Steelers I’m on the sidelines with Mike Tomlin, and Antonio Brown is throwing footballs in front of me. It’s crazy.”
For this Broncos devotee, however, it would be hard to top being on the pregame field for Super Bowl XLVIII, the one played two years ago at MetLife Stadium, when a former defensive tackle was greeted by some of the game’s best at the position.
“The whole Denver D-line came around me and huddled up,” LeGrand said. “They all came over to me, huddled up, and said, ‘We got this.’ “
That promise didn’t quite work out, with the Seahawks hanging a 43-8 blowout on the overmatched Broncos. But two years later, Manning and Co. are back in the big game, this time with a dominating defense of their own.“I don’t have a score yet, but I believe they are going to win,” LeGrand said, hope rising in his voice. “They can’t break my heart two of the last three years.”
As of now, LeGrand is planning on setting his wheelchair in front of the 65-inch flat screen TV in an upstairs room at home, to watch the Super Bowl surrounded by the memorabilia from his playing days and the ones after, a collection that ranges from autographed footballs to a Rutgers ‘Keep chopping’ ax hung above the door.
“That’s my tradition,” he said. “I have to watch the games by myself in my man cave.”
Of course, if there’s any way he can get his hands on a ticket (he mused about reaching out to noted Carolina fan Stephen Curry) and get a decent price on a hotel room, he’d be California-bound in an instant. “I couldn’t pass up an opportunity if anyone wants to throw me tickets,” he said with a laugh. In the world of football, anything seems possible.
“Football really is everything to me,” he said.
 “I pay attention to it; it’s my job working in college football. I’m a huge fan of the NFL. I’m even getting into fantasy football now. Without football, I don’t know where I’d be.”