New York Jets

R.I.P. Dennis Byrd

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

foxsports

“When the Helen Keller Services for the Blind took a group of physically impaired adults to visit the Jet training camp last summer, a few of the players were uncomfortable with the visitors, some of whom had little control over their bodies. But after practice Byrd waded into the group and found a blind woman who was sitting on the grass because she had no use of her legs. Byrd sat beside her, took her hand and explained who he was, what position he played and what his job was like. When she touched his helmet and seemed interested in it, Byrd put it on her head. She screamed, out of happiness. She threw her arms around Byrd, and he threw his arms around her, and the people who saw it say their hug lasted for five minutes.

“Last summer, Byrd reported late to a defensive team film session because he wouldn't leave the field until he had fulfilled every request for his autograph, which took 45 minutes. ‘The day I don’t have time to sign an autograph for a kid,’ he said, ‘is the day I get out of football.’”

So when his jersey had to be cut off him that day in 1992, and when he went through through weeks of rehab (“Day after day, just staring at his toe, trying to move it,” good friend Jeff Lageman recalled Sunday), his battle became New York’s battle, and the area never forgot him. In January 2011, when the Jets were prepping for a playoff game against the Patriots—who’d beaten them 45-3 a few weeks earlier—Byrd sent that cut jersey to coach Rex Ryan, hoping it would inspire the team. Ryan invited him to the hotel the night before the game to speak to the players. “The room was dead silent,” said then-GM Mike Tannenbaum on Sunday. “The message was, ‘When an opportunity is given, you never know if it’s the last one you’ll ever have.’”

But Byrd was distancing himself from teammates then, and from his family. He used to take annual hunting trips with Lageman to the Navajo Nation out west, and inexplicably, they just stopped. His roommate with the Jets, Marvin Washington, told me Sunday: “I believe Dennis was suffering from CTE. He was struggling.” Washington is hoping his family will allow his brain to be examined for evidence of CTE, the brain disease many troubled former football players have been found to have after death.

Washington, a black man from Dallas, and Byrd, a white man from rural Oklahoma, became very close after the Jets drafted them four rounds apart in 1989. Washington told me that before they’d go to sleep the night before games, the routine was the same.

“I love you, Marvin,” Byrd would say.

“I love you, Dennis,’’ Washington would say.

“Dennis was such a good man,” Washington said. “And he was a great football player. I played with some great three-techniques [disruptive rush tackles] … Bryant Young, Trevor Pryce. I put Dennis right up there with both of them.”

Lageman was so broken up he couldn’t talk Saturday. On Sunday he said: “That 17-year-old kid who was the driver of the other car, Dennis would feel for him. I can guarantee you Dennis would forgive him. He’d say, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.’”

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