linebacker Derick Hall made his mark on NFL history when he came up with a tone-setting strip sack in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots this February.
There’s a low percent chance that any football player will get a moment like that in his career. But Hall had to beat much greater odds. Hall had a 1% chance of survival when he was at just 23 weeks gestation, born without a heartbeat and suffering from a brain bleed.
“I wasnt born⦠breathing,” he told Fox News Digital. “I was born dead.
For his mother, Stacy Gooden-Crandle, those first days of her son’s life were filled with uncertainty and fear.
“Emotional, a lot of uncertainty, scared,” she said of her emotions in the days that followed her son’s premature birth. “But⦠those werent the feelings that I was feeling during Derricks birth. I just trusted that God would work everything out.”
That belief became the center of how the family made sense of everything that followed.
“It is probably the most important thing that we share,” Gooden-Crandle said of their .
“We are people of faith and have been for most of my lifetime. I joined church when I was 16 years old, and Ive just grown up as a woman of faith. Ive raised my children in the church and instilled faith in them and just allowed them to flourish in their faith in their walk with Christ.”
For Hall, growing up inside that environment gave meaning to struggles he didnt yet understand.
“It was huge. It was amazing because I never really understood why me or why my family had to go through what I was going through,” Hall said said.
“My pastor always told me, you werent dying for this, you are blessed to be in this position and God has something greater for you, and I think that helped me be at ease with the situation and the things that me and my family were enduring during the time.
“I always speak to my faith because obviously Im a miracle child, and I dont say Im doing good, I say Im blessed, I cant complain, Im above ground and Im blessed… You cant tell me that a child with a one percent chance to live and not supposed to be walking, not supposed to be talking, not even supposed to be alive, ends up being a one day without the Lord being in their lives.”
Even after surviving infancy, the challenges didnt disappear, and his childhood looked very different from other kids.
“My hardest time period was from about the age of four or five to about the age of 12 or 13,” Hall said. “I could go out and play, but it was only for about five minutes at a time and I would have to go sit down for an hour just to allow my body and my lungs to catch back up, and to this day my lungs are still underdeveloped, they always will be, theyll always be three years behind.”
Those limits extended into nearly every part of his life, including the seasons when other kids were outside playing freely.
But through it all, Hall discovered football, and his condition wasn’t going to keep him from the game that would define his life.
“I started playing football at the age of four because I was trying to develop my body and get to the point where I was able to do things, and I fell in love with it because it was the first thing that I was able to do to make me feel like a normal kid,” he said.
For his mom, that moment came with a difficult decision about her son’s wellbeing.
“It was difficult to make the decision to allow him to play, so I allowed him to play flag football in the beginning, but making that jump to allow him to play tackle football when we were still seeing a neurologist every six months for a brain bleed, it was a difficult decision,” she said.
“I made sure all the coaches had pumps and rescue inhalers, and I gave one to the coaches, the trainers, I kept one, to make sure if somebody needed to get to him they had what he needed… And as he progressed, I was getting more and more comfortable.”
The faith
