POWERFUL MOTIVATION: K.J. Stroud (15), with former Rutgers player Eric LeGrand who was paralyzed during a game in 2010, draws inspiration from his ex-teammate as he tries to make the Jets as a wide receiver (right). (AP; N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg)
CORTLAND — It is a Twitter mantra for a long-shot dreamer from Brooklyn named K.J. Stroud: “wake up and stare at the ceiling you’re alive what a beautiful feeling.”
Stroud is a 6-foot-3, 205-pound wide receiver in training camp with the Jets who comes from Rutgers and Bethune-Cookman, by way of Canarsie and Fort Hamilton High School and Fork Union Military Academy. Before he transferred from Rutgers so he could be a collegiate go-to guy, Oct. 16, 2010, became a day that will never leave him.
“My teammate Eric LeGrand, you know, he was paralyzed,” Stroud says, and soon tears well in his eyes. “That feeling and what it did to our team, it was just like shattering in a sense, so I just say it to myself, I wake up, I stare at the ceiling. That I’m alive, what a beautiful feeling. I never take the day for granted that you get to wake up, and that’s something that I’m thankful for.”
Stroud was on the MetLife Stadium sidelines when fate changed LeGrand’s life forever. And maybe his, too.
“In that stadium, the crowd noise echoes off the stadium walls,” Stroud recalls. “When you see a guy that’s 270 running down on kickoff, runs a 4.6 … it sounded like a car crash.”
LeGrand, his C3 and C4 cervical vertebrae fractured, was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center, paralyzed from the neck down. No one in Greg Schiano’s tearful Rutgers locker room that day knew LeGrand one day would regain movement in his shoulders.
“You just see all the work that he put in going into that season, and then just like that, it was all taken away,” Stroud says. “On one play.”
So Stroud is thankful for his chance to chase a boyhood dream that began at age 7 with the Brownsville Skyriders then the Mobetter Jaguars. And he is thankful for the help he received along the way, from a former Hofstra and NFL receiver named Devale Ellis and from the late Ruben Sanchez, his high school receivers coach. When Stroud begins talking about Sanchez, there are many more tears and a voice choked with emotion.
“He just always told me to take pride whenever the football came my way … That’s something still to this day I take pride in, whenever the ball comes my way, I have to make a play on it,” Stroud says. “He used to always say to me, ‘Look ’em in.’ In every text message before he passed away, he would tell me, even in the hospital bed: ‘Look ’em in.’ ”
Sanchez passed away June 29 from cancer. He was 61.
“It started in his pancreas,” Stroud said. “We were out to eat in April, and then June he was gone.”
Stroud attended the funeral in Bay Ridge.
“I was 12 when I met him at my Little League,” Stroud said. “I grew up in a pretty bad area, and he gave me a magnet to high school. Being 12, I really didn’t really know much, I kind of brushed it off. He reappeared again that following weekend, I went to his high school game where he was coaching at, they were playing the championship. And then a couple of months later, I’m a freshman in his high school.
“If he didn’t come to the bad neighborhood I was in, who knows where I would have ended up? So, I mean, he changed my life when I was 12 until now.”
Sanchez would drive to watch Stroud play on the East Coast whenever he could.
“I remember being bit by him, pinched by him,” Stroud said. “I never took offense to hard coaching, ’cause I knew he cared so much.”
You think about him every day?
“All the time, ’cause I just know how he is about this game,” Stroud said. “I know that me playing in Detroit, I would guarantee that he would be there. He would drive eight hours to see me play.”
He will be wearing No. 83 Friday night in his NFL debut, in the Jets’ preseason opener against the Lions.
“At the professional level, you have so many different things being thrown at you, so many different distractions, but you just got to zone in on what matters most to you, and that’s the same thing growing up in the New York City area,” he says.
Dream come true.
“Not nervous,” Stroud says.
Do you think you have a shot to make the roster?
“I don’t see why not.”