About 10 feet outside his office, in a long lighted hallway, the team pictures from all 17 squads of Baltimore Ravens players over the years adorn the walls. The 2000 Baltimore Ravens team photo features Brigance positioned right in front of Ray Lewis. Twelve years later, Lewis would play in Super Bowl XLVII that Brigance would watch from his wheel chair. Twelve years later, Brigance’s body is all but paralyzed and bound to a motor-operated device that allows him to communicate with anyone who has a few extra seconds of patience to allow him to use his eyeballs to connect phrases and words to create a unique conversation.
In a world of faux motivation and phony pep talks, the mere presence of Brigance has been an enduring, endearing, and daily point of motivation, strength, and courage for the entire Baltimore Ravens organization since his diagnosis in May 2008. And despite his illness, Brigance spends three hours getting ready each day to report to work four days a week.
New Ravens players are eager to learn the story of the man simply called Juice. If you’ve been with the team since 2008, you know the story and its impact on the team. Once the new arrivals see his office and the relationship he has with so many folks, they want to know as well. Who better to share an inspiring legend than Mufasa?
Joe Flacco and Ray Rice don’t ever remember him walking or speaking normally and they’ve been with the team five years. For anyone who arrived after 2008, they never saw O.J. Brigance walk, let alone fly around the field they way that they do every day at practice or on game days.
And once they hear his story – and see the pictures and videos — and there have been plenty of teammates beyond Lewis and other people in the building who can tell it because they’ve lived through it and witnessed every day. The new inductees are quickly reminded to never take a day for granted and never have a reason to complain.
Orienthal James Brigance, was born to teenage parents in Houston on September 29, 1969, the same year that another famous O.J. — Orenthal James Simpson – was the Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall draft choice of the Buffalo Bills out of USC. Brigance attended Rice University and was a three-year starter, graduating in four years in 1991 with a degree in managerial studies with an economics concentration. The Owls were 9-34-1 during his time at Rice, including 0-11 in his sophomore year.
After being undrafted by the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys and head coach Jimmy Johnson gave him a quick look at a spring mini-camp in 1991, but he was just 6-feet tall and barely 220 pounds, extremely undersized for any NFL linebacking corps.
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Brigance, undeterred and still following his dream of playing in the NFL, went to Vancouver to play for the B.C. Lions of the Canadian Football League. The CFL game, tailored for players of his size and speed, allowed him to immediately play, improve, and flourish. He barely made a living salary in Canada, but loved playing. He still believed he could play in the NFL one day and saw he was improving. He played three seasons with the Lions, and was an All-Conference linebacker.
In 1994, when Baltimore fetched a CFL team with an owner named Jim Speros, Brigance signed as a free agent to come to 33rd Street as a member of the Baltimore Stallions, who were initially calling themselves the “Colts” until the NFL and Bob Irsay issued a cease and desist order. Thousands of fans, hungry for local professional football, filled Memorial Stadium many nights in the summers of 1994 and 1995 to watch a team in blue and grey jerseys while studying the wacky CFL rulebook — complete with rouges, three-down possessions, 12-man sides and wider, 110-yard fields. Brigance was recruited to Baltimore by head coach Don Matthews, who had been a coach with the Saskatchewan Roughriders the previous season and knew that Brigance would be a difference maker for the new Stallions.
The roster rules of the CFL were that Canadian teams needed a minimum number of natives on their team,s but the teams in the United States – Baltimore, Birmingham, Memphis, Shreveport and San Antonio – didn’t have the same quota so the American teams were dominated with an outstanding crop of mostly speedy but undersized U.S college players whose bodies were more designed for the rules of the game.
