Biggest little fan
CSU football players bond with young fan
By Tom Archdeacon, The Dayton Daily News
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
If you’re looking for a winner today, look no further than the Central State Marauders.
And I’m not even talking about their very first victory of the season on Saturday, a last-second, 28-27 triumph at Savannah State in the final game of their abbreviated six-game season.
They were winners long before Saturday.
You saw that in the way they made Timmy Hayes one of their own this season. That’s a real victory story — the tale of how a team was able to master something that no one else — not doctors, teachers or anyone in the Hayes family — had quite been able to do this year.
It was evident again one raw evening after practice this past week. Before heading to the dressing room, the cold and tired players — from big, rumpled linemen to lean, high-stepping receivers — lined up with their coaches in front of the 10-year-old Fairborn boy who was sitting in his wheelchair at the edge of the field sporting an expectant grin and a gold CSU game jersey that was visible beneath the bulky Delphi coat of his grandpa’s he wore.
The Marauders didn’t move until they got Timmy to do what others mostly can not get him to do: Leaning back and to one side in his chair to get a better angle, Timmy slowly worked his left arm — the one that’s limited in movement because of his cerebral palsy — higher and higher.
When the boy’s left hand finally was raised, the players approached one by one and, often with give-and-take chatter, gave him a high five.
It’s the kind of exchange that has gone on two and three times a week all season. And on this day — as has sometimes happened before — Vicky Hayes, Timmy’s grandmother, stood quietly off to the side, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I don’t know quite how to word it,” she finally said. “The motivation, the will, the goals and dreams — these guys have made Timmy do things nobody else has been able to get him to do.”
In the beginning, he kept that left hand low, but they got him to use his muscles, to bring it up and do more.
“Timmy wants to do what they do. When they go through exercises, he wants to get on his mat and work with them. He tries to throw the ball. He wants to be like them.”
The bond between Timmy and the Marauders is one of the most beautiful you’ll find in football this season. It’s about people simply being good to each other no matter their differences in age, health or race.
Central State is a historically black college. Most of its football players are black. Timmy is a blue-eyed, sandy-haired white kid. But together on the football field, they’re all just maroon and gold.
The Marauders had a tough season. It was the school’s first year playing football again since 1996 and there were no scholarships to offer and plenty of roster turnover — all of which contributed to the 1-5 campaign.
Timmy had a tough year himself. Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth and found to have Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy at age 5, he was forced to give up his walker for a wheelchair last October.
But Vicky and her husband, Gary — the grandparents Timmy calls MaMaw and PaPaw — always have tried to encourage him to push beyond his bounds.
“We never tell him he can’t do something,” Vicky said. “We just don’t give up.”
When Timmy was participating in the Special Olympics last year at CSU’s McPherson Stadium, he met Marauders assistant coach Henderson Mosley and some of the players who were helping run the competition.
“When they introduced us and said I was a football coach, Timmy lit up a little bit,” Mosley said. “I asked him some questions and he answered them and I felt a connection. That’s when I asked if he’d like to come to our practices.”
Vicky was a little hesitant at first: “So many people have made promises to Timmy and never come through with them. And I didn’t want his hopes to get dashed again. But then Coach Mo called. He kept his word.”
As Gary put it: “That call just made our hearts bust open. We’re tremendously grateful.”
Vicky nodded: “Coach Mo opened a door and we took it. We figure it’s our job to help Timmy experience everything he can because we don’t know from weeks to months to years how much time he has. The one thing we do know is that time is not on our side.”
Gary said when Timmy was born to their then 16-year-old daughter, Christy, she didn’t get proper medical attention, a claim supported by a successful malpractice suit later on: “Timmy flat-lined about four minutes at birth. Basically, he was dead when he was born,” Gary said.
Although his temporal lobes were damaged, Timmy survived and spent his first 47 days in the hospital.
He and Vicky have legal custody of their grandson, although Christy lives nearby and is a big part of Timmy’s life, while she also raises her 3-year-old son, Jordan, who has MD, as well.
While Timmy attends regular fourth- and fifth-grade classes at Fairborn Intermediate School, his prognosis is sobering.
“They say it’s terminal, that most kids live to be around 17 to 20 years old,” Gary said quietly. “We’re hoping for longer.”
One positive, Vicky said, is that Timmy recently was accepted into a special muscular dystrophy gene research project at Ohio State University’s Medical Center.
He goes once a week and, as Vicky explained, “gets an infusion with antibiotics that we hope will stimulate the DNA that helps him make healthy muscles.”
He’s also taking water therapy for his cerebral palsy.
Some of his best medicine, though, has come from the Marauders.
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