Email
PrintFormer TU football player Dennis Byrd triumphs over tragedy
How faith guided Dennis Byrd through his darkest days.
It was one of the video-taped replays that made you flinch, cringe and then turn away.
The sense of pain: involuntary. Fear and apprehension about the player being injured; real enough to taste.
You’d seen it before.
Once even live.
That Thanksgiving Day game when it was down near the goal line and the Heisman trophy winner from the University of Oklahoma was handed the ball when he was the go-to man on a go-to down for the Detroit Lions.
As soon as you saw his leg bend in a direction that nature did not intend, you knew that Steve Owens had played his last down of football.
Sad, yes. But, not tragic.
He would retire, but he would also continue to walk.
Then there was the other one that seemed to be replayed forever as if it could not be believed that a bone could break in that direction.
Joe Theisman. Quarterback. Washington Redskins.
Yes, something of a hot dog, Notre Dame quarterback, but he played in Canada to prove himself fit for the pros and then ran back kicks as a part of paying his dues before he got his chance at quarterback in the NFL.
Then, at the peak of his career.
The human leg is not designed to fold where nature had neglected to place a hinge.
But this. This new scene on the television screen was different.
There was a head in the green helmet of the New York Jets smashing into the chest of a teammate as he lunged toward the Kansas City quarterback. Looked like he was trying to swat at the football. Then a sickening silence.
A man comes over and seems to say, “Get up.” The man hit in the chest gets up slowly. The wind knocked out of him by the blow.
The man whose head hit his teammate in the chest is not getting up at all.
Another teammate and roommate and best friend, Marvin Washington, begins crying.
Memories of only a couple days before when the Detroit Lions paid tribute to a fallen teammate.
A teammate who had been hit in much the same manner. A man who now occupies a wheelchair.
Memories of another player. This one walked away. He only had his bell rung. Maybe this will be one of those.
But, you know better. This was no bell-ringer.
The impact you saw on tape replay doesn’t leave headaches.
It leaves heartaches.
Broken neck?
Broken lives?
Then your distance from what you’ve witnessed shortens. Reality comes closer to home.
The number of the player is 90. The player, the local announcer whose station is showing the tape, says, “is former TU star, Dennis Byrd,” and doctors won’t know much until later, but the prognosis in these kind of neck injured is rarely good.
Dennis Byrd.
Someone you watched at Skelly Stadium. An Oklahoma kid from that town with that great only-in-Oklahoma name, Mustang.
Worked hard to win a scholarship to the University of Tulsa which, they say, was the only way he could have attended college.
Married his high school sweetheart.
Don’t they have a little girl?
Say, he still lives around here, doesn’t he?
Haven’t heard that much about him since he left for New York.
Well, we don’t get too many Jet’s games broadcast here.
Pretty good guy, wasn’t, I mean, isn’t he?
Then the December issue of Sports Illustrated comes out and you find out that he is not only a pretty good guy when it comes to charities, chums, and church - he’s an absolute prince of a guy.
His coach, Bruce Coslet of the Jets, sums it up best, “It’s a damn shame people didn’t get to know about him until this happened.”
It was a broken C-5 vertebrae.
Lying on the field, he can’t move. He knows then that his football career is over.
After being strapped down, a scene that chills the stands and players on both sides of the field, he sees his wife, Angela, and on the way to the hospital asks if he’ll be paralyzed. She says to him that he’ll be all right. What else is there to say?
There’s a crush of media attention.
This is, after all, the world’s media center, New York. Also, Dennis Byrd is young, good looking and not even the cynical New York media and its mentality can puncture holes in his honesty earned positive image.
Occasionally a work about something he and his wife call their “faith” is mentioned. But, not too much. Reporters tend to get nervous and look a lot at the lack of shine on their shoes when words like “faith” and “commitment” are spoken.
And the words “Jesus Christ” come freely to most of them only when said in frustration or condemnation.
Athletes who say those words in relationship to their beliefs are quickly assigned to the “God Squad” - as if promiscuity, drugs and alcohol were easier to deal with, as a reporter, than deeply held beliefs.
In a world where those who kept quiet about the spiritual side seem to be held in greater esteem than those who don’t, Dennis and Angela Byrd speak of the Book of Job in the Bible. The story of a man who had everything and lost it as a test of his faith in God.
The Byrds talk about their faith and Dennis’s plans to continue to be a witness for his faith.
The kind of talk that makes some people nervous.
Progress is reported. His announced plans to return home and start the long months of rehabilitation in Tulsa are fulfilled and on February 12 he comes home.
Some six months after falling to the turf of the Meadowlands on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Dennis Byrd will walk up to a microphone in the Mabee Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Some will say he is a living testimony to the miracle of modern medicine and science.
Others will say he is an example of what hard work at rehabilitation and the ability to overcome pain can do.
Still others say it is luck.
To the more than 6,000 people in the Mabee Center at the annual Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet in Tulsa, he will say what he believes and knows it is.
