![]() "I tried to give the thumbs up and it felt like I had a 1,000-pound weight on my hand," LeGrand told Newsweek during a recent interview. As they rolled him away from the field and into a tunnel at the stadium, someone from the Rutgers staff told LeGrand to give the crowd a thumbs up to let them know he'd be ok. He still couldn't move anything in his body, though. "At that point I thought I would be ok," he recalls. It's like new life had been breathed into him. The sudden, upward jolt allowed LeGrand to get a gasp of air. Then, they lifted the hefty player straight up into the air so they could place him on a gurney. While this was happening, paramedics rolled LeGrand onto his side so they could place a backboard underneath him. "I closed my eyes and said "God, take me at ease."" "I was laying on the ground and I couldn't move, and now I have to pray," LeGrand remembers. ![]() His collegiate coach at Rutgers, Greg Schiano, knelt by LeGrand's side and told his defensive tackle, "E, you have to pray right now." He spoke through gasped breath again: "I can't breathe." Although he said it as loud as he could, it came out as only a whisper. ![]() ![]() When paramedics asked if he was ok, he could only say one thing. He was wide awake, but he couldn't move and he couldn't breathe. ![]() An awkward collision on a routine play left Eric LeGrand motionless on the turf at MetLife Stadium 10 years ago in New Jersey. ![]()
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