ALS has broken ex-Alabama football player Kerry Goode's body, but can't break his spirit

TOWN CREEK, Ala. — The First Missionary Baptist Church where Kerry Goode's inimitable spirit was forged is still standing and serving this tiny community, still just a few steps from the home he grew up in on Highway 20. So close, you can read its marquee from the Goode front porch.

Clyde Goode Jr., 81, and his wife Vernell, married 60 years, have just come from there on this sun-splashed April Sunday. Back when they were raising five children, Kerry never felt the restless itch some kids have for Sunday services to let out; he always enjoyed attending. Not far away, he was baptized in a muddy creek that gave his hometown its name.

Like the church he was raised in, the former Alabama running back's faith is as strong today as ever.

It has to be, because his body is not.

Goode, 58, suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. It is a vicious killer for which there is no cure, and its patients typically live only two to four years. Goode, counting the year he began noticing symptoms before doctors could give him an accurate diagnosis, is approaching Year 11 with the disease.

Still wearing his Sunday best, his father sits at the kitchen counter and ponders the helpless feeling of terminal illness. His family has also been ravaged by cancer, having lost his youngest son, Clyde III, to leukemia. His oldest son, Chris, is cancer survivor. And now Kerry, too, is fighting a rare blood cancer known as polycythemia vera.

"We've been through hurt before," Clyde said. "… As a father, when it’s something you can’t do anything about, what do you do to help your child? It’s got to be a higher power."

To call Town Creek a small town is to do an injustice to the word small. Located about 50 miles west of Huntsville, it's home to just 1,052 people, according to the most recent U.S. Census count. Not enough to fill an average high school gymnasium. It lies around the intersection of Routes 20 and 101, and you can't arrive from any direction without being greeted by a sign that reads "Welcome to Town Creek. Where Champions are Born."

That's a reference to Hazlewood High, home of 44 state championships, 11 of them in football. In 1982, Hazlewood was reclassified from 1A to 2A by the Alabama High School Athletic Association, and two of four Goode brothers − Kerry and Pierre − led a Golden Bears team that became the first in AHSAA history to win a state football title in its first year at a higher classification.

From the Goode porch, however, one can only point to where Hazlewood High once stood.

Unlike the church, the school where the Goodes established themselves as the most athletically gifted family Town Creek's ever seen is now gone. A demolition crew razed its buildings two years ago. Clyde Goode Jr. was its last principal before it shuttered in 2009. Town Creek kids were initially displaced to R.A. Hubbard in nearby Courtland, until that school also closed, and now commute to Hatton High.

Like the high school where he built a legacy, Kerry Goode's body has been torn down. A progressive neurodegenerative condition, ALS mercilessly attacks the brain's ability to initiate and control muscle movement. Goode's struggle with it, now about three times as long as the average survival rate, has confined him to a wheelchair and requires the full-time care of his wife, Tanja.

His voice has been reduced to a whisper. But his faith and a positive attitude fight the disease in a way that his body can't.

And those are two things ALS can never take from him.

MORE ON THE GOODES: The Goode family tailgate named Tuscaloosa's best pre-game party

NOT TO RETURN: After 2022 mistreatment, former Alabama football RB Kerry Goode won't return to Neyland Stadium

Keep on, Kerry

Vernell Goode points to the chair where her husband is seated at their kitchen counter and recalls the moment she knew Kerry's health was taking a turn for the worse.

"He was home for Christmas, sitting right there eating some gumbo I had made," she said. "His hand started shaking and the gumbo fell out all over his clothes, and I said, 'Are you going to tell me more about this?'"

Her son, however, didn't have all the answers right away. Older brother Chris noticed a slump in Kerry's posture at the Goode family's well-known tailgate party before an Alabama football game.

"His pants weren't fitting him quite the same," said Chris. "Something was just off about it."

Numbness and pain in his hands, along with stomach cramps, were Goode's first indications that something wasn't right. His family had noticed his rapid weight loss – Goode dropped 50 pounds over several months – but it would be more than a year, and a series of doctors who couldn't identify the problem, before a neurologist finally gave him his official diagnosis of ALS in the summer of 2015.

Nationwide, about 30,000 people live with ALS. No more than 10% of them, for no reason that ALS research can yet explain, live well beyond the typical survival rate of a few years. At nearly nine years since his diagnosis and more than 10 since the onset of his symptoms, Goode's explanation for his extended battle is predictable enough.

"God's plan," he said.

The Goode Foundation is how he's chosen to execute that plan. The foundation offers financial, educational and other kinds of assistance to ALS sufferers and their families. It helps, Goode says, for ALS patients to connect with others who have had the disease for a longer time so they can learn about more about what new challenges to expect.

Former Alabama fullback Kevin Turner was Goode's first such contact. In 2014, when ALS donations spiked from the "Ice Bucket Challenge" craze on Facebook, Kerry posted a video taking his icy splash for Turner, with no idea that the disease would soon take hold of him. Some two years later, Turner lost his battle with ALS, barely six months after Goode's diagnosis. As one of the 10% who has beaten the expected survival rate, it's not so easy for Goode to find people who've had the disease longer than he has, but Tommy May is one such contact.

May has his share of titles − a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran, a bank CEO who is in the University of Arkansas Business Hall of Fame, and a 17-year ALS sufferer who serves on the ALS Association board. May says the ALSA hopes research breakthroughs pave the way for ALS to be "a livable disease" by 2030.

One thing ALS doesn't often affect is brain function and cognizance, and with that blessing, Goode's positivity makes it as livable, for him, as it can be. He still travels, goes on vacation and doesn't miss important events. Quite a few subjects interviewed for this story had to pause to withhold tears while discussing Goode's plight − his former coach at UA, Bill Curry, and Alabama football special assistant Cedric Burns among them − and Goode's seen plenty of tears shed on his behalf. Invariably, he responds with his signature smile.

"I've not had a single conversation with him that was a downer. I called him to pump him up, and I end up being the one that gets all the positive out of the conversation," May said. "There are givers and takers in this world we live in, and Kerry is definitely a giver."

ALS, on the other hand, is a taker of the worst kind.

Goode's 2022 book, "Goode and Faithful Servant," recounts all kinds of disappointing markers in his journey to dependence on full-time care. His climb up the staircase in his Fairburn, Georgia, home to go to bed, before a chairlift was installed, could take as long as 15 minutes. He took a fall that marked the last time he tried to answer his doorbell. An inability to make a right-hand turn − he turned on his hazard lights with car horns blaring behind him − ended his last attempt at driving.

He's signed his last autograph.

At Game 3 of the 2021 World Series in Atlanta, he lost control of the right hand that he used to operate the joystick of his electric wheelchair and crashed into a wall in a parking garage. Soon after, he began using a computerized device that allowed him to direct his wheelchair with eye movement. He's had a tracheotomy and takes food through a tube. He's survived ALS long enough to see a Facebook rumor of his death. And he does it with an indomitable spirit.

"Once you get it," he said, "you have to make your mind up to fight your ass off."

Now, atop ALS, he has the blood cancer polycythemia vera, which requires him to drain a pint of blood each month to help control hemoglobin levels, as well as exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, which he now jokingly calls "the star of the show."

"It's giving ALS a run for the money," he wrote in an email. "It's going to take more than one thing to beat me. LOL"

Captain of captains

The Alabama football Walk of Fame around Denny Chimes displays, in concrete, the handprints and cleat marks of each team's captains. It commemorates the impact that some of the best players in the history of the sport had on the Crimson Tide.

Joe Namath. Ozzie Newsome. Ken Stabler.

But because the honor is for captains only, there are Pro Football Hall of Famers from Alabama who aren't on the Walk of Fame. On the west side of the chimes tower, right between Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Thomas and three-time All-American Cornelius Bennett, is the handprint of 1987 Alabama captain Kerry Goode.

He wasn't an All-American or even All-SEC. He rushed for all of 303 yards and one touchdown that year, his last as a fifth-year senior. But he was voted captain for leadership impact, not statistical impact.

It was a nod to the inspiration he was.

And it was a nod to what should have been, had Goode's knee not exploded at the very moment his career was doing the same.

Goode was named SEC Freshman of the Year in 1983 after rushing for 693 yards on only 103 carries. In his first season, he'd ripped UA rivals Tennessee for 125 yards and Auburn for 142. The following year, he began his sophomore campaign with an incredible 297 all-purpose yards in a little more than a half against Boston College. That included a 99-yard kickoff return for a touchdown to open the second half that the nation saw on an ABC broadcast, with legendary play-by-play man Keith Jackson on the call at Legion Field.

"He was so fast, it was like his feet never touched the ground," said UA punter Chris Mohr.

UA strength coach Al Miller had been imploring Goode, who arrived at UA already blessed with blazing speed, to get even faster by pumping his arms harder when he ran.

"He came straight to me after that kickoff return and said, 'Did you see my arms, coach? They were really moving,'" Miller recalled.

It would be the last thrill Goode could give Alabama fans that season. Later in the quarter, on a toss sweep, he suffered torn ligaments in his right knee. Repairing the damage required not his first knee surgery, but his third. Athletically, he was never quite the same again, and finished his career as a backup to star running back Bobby Humphrey.

As a teammate, however, he was just getting started.

He'd been the best kind of teammate since his days at Hazlewood High, where he was student body president. His coach there, David Hogan, remembers moving toward one of his players who was coming to the sideline after being flagged for a 15-yard personal foul, and he wasn't going to be nice about it. He stopped when he saw Kerry Goode put his arm around the player and speak a few words without anger.

"I never said a word to that kid," Hogan said. "I knew I didn't need to."

Goode's comeback effort from his knee injury at Alabama, and the encouragement he continued to have for players who'd passed him on the depth chart, were inspirational. He played more sparingly for the remainder of his career, but his hustle and enthusiasm, teammates insist, were unmatched. What made him a team captain as a fifth-year senior in 1987?

No single play answers that question better than a 40-yard halfback pass he completed in a 22-10 Alabama win over fifth-ranked LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With the game in doubt in the second half, Goode took a pitch right, pulled up, and fired a long pass to wide receiver Marco Battle, who made the catch and was tackled at the LSU 25-yard-line. Goode was at the Alabama 28 when he released the pass, 47 yards away, and sprinted past his teammates so fast to greet Battle, he was the first UA player to help him up off the turf.

A captain's move.

"I wanted to join the celebration," Goode said.

The letter

Doug Childers has read the letter so many times now, he knows the words by heart.

Still, because it's displayed in his home right beside the front door, framed and hanged, it's the reason he might be a minute late getting somewhere.

"Sometimes," he says, "I'll even stand there and read it twice."

The first time he's asked about what Kerry's letter means to him, Childers has to stop mid-sentence. Yet another one who gets choked up on the Goode subject. He was Goode's youth football coach in the mid-1970s, back when he was still in his 20s. Back before he turned his life upside down. In 1990, Childers got into a fight at the Wagon Wheel lounge in Muscle Shoals and killed his attacker with a firearm. According to public records, witness testimony indicated the victim, Jerry Wayne Collins, was the aggressor in the altercation, and Childers' attorney argued self-defense. Indicted for murder but convicted on a lesser charge of manslaughter, Childers was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The letter of encouragement from Goode arrived for Childers at Elmore Correctional Center. It was undated, and Childers' best recollection is that it was sent in 2008 or 2009 − "those years run together for me," he said − at which point he still had seven or eight years left on his sentence. It mentioned nothing about the altercation in the bar or the resulting prison sentence. Instead, it was full of Goode's remembrances of playing for Childers and how those experiences helped shape him in a positive way. It closes with a reference to Childers calling a play known as "Power 24", which went for Goode's first-ever youth touchdown.

"Straight up the middle, defenders coming from both sides but no one could touch or catch me. I remember as I got closer to the goal line, I was afraid someone was behind me that I couldn't see or something would happen and I wouldn't score," the letter ends. "Needless to say I made it, and you will make it. When things get tough, call Power 24, hit it head on. Straight up (the) gut. Love ya, coach."

Childers said he read the letter every day for months, and stored it in his cell in a box that each inmate had for toiletries, commissary snacks and personal items. Inmate boxes were at risk for theft and damage, however, so Childers eventually mailed the letter to his daughter, Bridget, for safekeeping. She had grown up with Kerry and was a Hazlewood cheerleader; when Goode wanted Childers' address at Elmore Correctional, he reached out to Bridget for it.

"He has touched a lot kids' lives. Kids who are now grown men. Just because people make a mistake, society wants to throw them away," Goode said. "I wanted him to remember the good. … I imagined he had some dark days but I wanted to hopefully brighten his outlook."

For 12 years, Bridget hung onto the letter. Childers was released in 2016, and for Father's Day two years ago, she had it framed for him.

"It just lifted me up in some hard times," Childers said. "And it still does."

He now lives just a few miles north of the Goode home. On this day, the lifelong Alabama fan is in his recliner with an Alabama rug under his feet and Alabama football pictures on the wall. Kerry's book sits on an end table to his left. Childers is battling the buttons on his remote control, but the interface between his flatscreen TV and a DVD player is stubborn to comply. He's excited to show his 50-year-old videos of Kerry's youth games, but thinks he'd have an easier time doing it with 50-year-old technology.

"Somewhere I've still got two cans of 16-millimeter film on these games," he says.

At last, the DVD complies.

He's forgotten Kerry used to kick off, but it's not hard for Childers to time travel when he can skip over 20 years he'd rather forget. In one game, the grainy film is in black and white, and all 22 players on the field look like they're wearing the same uniform. But Childers, now 76, can still pick Kerry Goode out.

"That's him," he points. "I can tell by the way he runs."

Father figure

A photo of Kerry Goode's niece, Sydney, joins photos of his children on display in his Fairburn, Georgia, home.

She's not his daughter, but she might as well be.

She's a cousin of Kerry's youngest, Ariel, but the two are like sisters.

Before the youngest of the Goode brothers, Clyde III, succumbed to leukemia in the summer of 2012, he turned to Kerry to finish the most important task for which he wouldn't be around. Clyde's daughter, Sydney, was only 10, and Clyde asked Kerry, who at the time wasn't yet suffering any ALS symptoms, to finish raising her after his death.

Of the people Clyde considered asking, Sydney said, Kerry was the best fit for multiple reasons. She had three older sisters in Alabama she wanted to stay close to, and Kerry didn't live terribly far away. Plus, Clyde thought she would benefit from growing up with Ariel, who was just a few years younger.

Sydney knew Kerry and wife Tanja well from family vacations and holidays, but day-to-day living under their guardianship required a natural adjustment period. She was placed in a private school for the first time and didn't care for wearing a uniform. There were a few more rules than what she was used to, Sydney acknowledges, and her sister-like relationship with Ariel took some time to build.

"I wasn’t used to someone younger than me and asking me questions. I wasn’t used to a big sister role. At first, I didn’t want to be bothered," Sydney said. "As the years went by, I tolerated her, then she was cool. But she did help me with the transition of moving in, because she was the other younger person in the house. We became best friends."

Less than three years after Sydney moved in, Kerry began experiencing his initial symptoms of ALS. Both girls had an inkling that something was wrong. He'd lost weight, and felt occasional abdominal cramping.

"Certain things he would pick up, he'd have to drop them, and I'd wonder why," Ariel said. "But I was only 9, so I didn't think too deep into it."

Post-diagnosis, the girls didn't know what to expect. And they couldn't be told, because with ALS, nobody quite knows what to expect. Loss of muscle control is the certainty, but some patients experience symptoms that others don't. Common symptoms don't always present with the same severity, or in the same sequential order, and the typical life expectancy, as the Goodes would be blessed to later experience first-hand, is beatable for a small fraction of ALS patients.

In 2016, when Tanja began caretaking for her husband full-time, the girls would help with certain tasks. They were faced with a few realities that sped up their maturity, but what they noticed about Kerry's disposition was that he was unchanged as a committed, engaged father.

"You never get the half of him," Sydney said. "You only get the full, everything him."

In time, the girls became volunteers for the Goode Foundation, usually kicking into high gear to help prepare for the foundation's annual golf tournament. Kerry, for his part, is as present a father as he can be to both. And he's fathering for the future, as well. The introduction to his book includes two open letters − one to his sons, the other to Ariel and Sydney − that reference life advice after he's gone. To the girls, he cautions about heartbreak, encourages charity and advises them to hold their faith close.

"If you ever need me, talk to God," he wrote in closing. "He knows how to get a hold of me."

The giver

"I've met so many other people that we tried to help through this ALS journey, and they're no longer around," Kerry said. "Each time one of them passes away, a part of you goes with them."

Count Becky Kidd among those who took a piece of the former Alabama star running back with her. According to her obituary, she was a marathon runner, a devout Christian, an active volunteer and devoted to family. She passed away of ALS some six years ago at age 58 and was treated for the disease at Emory ALS Center in Atlanta, where one of the nation's foremost experts on ALS, Dr. Jonathan Glass, serves as director. It was there she met Kerry, who also goes to Emory for treatment. A few weeks after she died on Nov. 28, 2018, Kerry, Tanja, Sydney and Ariel drove to Avondale Estates, on the eastern side of Atlanta, to offer some fellowship and comfort to Becky's husband Bryan and their son, Will.

The Goode Foundation brings a lot of financial help to ALS families, but education and fellowship is a big part of the foundation, too.

"They drove up a couple days before Christmas and met us at our house, gave us cards and some kind words, and it really meant a lot," said Will Kidd. "They live at least an hour away, and Kerry needed to be moved in his wheelchair so that took effort and planning. They made sure we had some company over the holidays during a very hard time."

A couple years later, Will received a scholarship check from the Goode Foundation to help pay for his education at Oglethorpe University. Outreach is an important aspect of the foundation to Kerry and his wife.

"We asked God, how do you want us to live out this disgusting disease? How do you want us to walk?" Tanja said. "So our foundation is about talking to people. We're not counselors. We just talk to them like humans. We're not trained in counseling, but we're trained in peopling and lifting."

Among the progressive ideas at work at Emory is a scheduling plan that allows an ALS patient to visit with multiple doctors and specialists in a single day at the same facility. For an ALS patient, leaving the house isn't as easy as a caregiver grabbing the keys. For an 8 a.m. appointment at Emory, Tanja wakes Kerry up at 3 a.m. to begin preparing him to leave. The prospect of 3 a.m. alarms for multiple doctor visits in a single week is a daunting one for ALS patients and their caregivers. To relieve that grind, the Goode Foundation's travel assistance program has been known to pay for a hotel room either the night before or the night after an ALS patient's visit to the Emory ALS Center, particularly those driving in from farther away, to eliminate the burden of traveling both ways in one day.

ALS is a shockingly expensive disease to live with. Annual costs can range from $150,000-$250,000. Home renovations can be needed for better access, not to mention handicap-accessible vehicles. Patients with advanced cases can require mobile ventilators for assisted breathing. Motorized wheelchairs need replacement parts, and for patients who can no longer control a joystick, such as Kerry, an eye-drive computer allows them to control a wheelchair with eye movement. The Dynavox, a speech-generating device, is important when ALS strips patients of their voices. Expensive equipment cycles out of usefulness as the disease progresses and has to be replaced by more expensive equipment. The chairlift that now takes Kerry upstairs in his home came with a price tag of $14,000.

Throw in the cost of an in-home health aid and prescription medication, and it's easy to see how the total cost pushes its way into six figures a year. Kevin Turner was part of the inspiration for the Goode Foundation, because when Turner no longer needed his wheelchair or other equipment, he gave what he had to Kerry. In turn, Kerry has done the same for others, and through the foundation, has arranged for equipment to be passed along from one patient to another.

Sam Bryant, a close friend who serves on the Goode Foundation board of directors and helps Kerry get around, said outreach to the children of ALS patients is also a key pillar of the foundation. The Kerry's Kidz 4 Joy program provides education and coping assistance to those youngsters, as well as peer interaction and recreational activity.

"I think that part evolved after seeing the impact it had on Ariel and Sydney. The emotional drains and strains," Bryant said. "Kerry’s Kidz 4 Joy partners with camps around the Southeast to create an environment for kids to get away and go be kids."

The milestones

In the darkness of early morning on Saturday, May 4, the Goode alarm will go off at 3 a.m. again, if not earlier.

But not for another doctor appointment.

This time, Kerry and Tanja have to get to the University of Montevallo, south of Birmingham, by 9 a.m. On the campus' Flowerhill Lawn, they'll watch Sydney graduate from college with a degree in exercise and nutrition science. Nine years ago, when he was diagnosed, Kerry began thinking of the milestones in his children's lives that doctors expected him to miss.

Birthdays. Graduations. Weddings.

He couldn't be sure what he would be around to see. So many of the ALS patients he's known never got to witness many such moments. He's seen his sons graduate from college, and now Sydney is doing the same. He's seen his youngest, Ariel, graduate from high school, and his oldest, Brooks, graduate from law school.

When Sydney's commencement ceremony ends, a brunch will follow. Then the Goodes will hit I-65 and head north to the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame's induction banquet and ceremony. There, Kerry will be honored as the ASHOF's 2024 Distinguished Alabama Sportsman. He'll be the 20th such honoree in ASHOF history, a list that includes late Alabama athletics director Mal Moore and John Croyle, a former Alabama defensive end who founded the Big Oak Ranch for abused and neglected children. Family and friends from all walks of Goode's life will be there. Doug Childers plans to be there.

"I'm thrilled about it, if for no other reason than that I'll get an opportunity to thank the people that have been in my life," Goode said.

It'll be a long, exhausting day, but a fulfilling one for someone who believes in living with ALS, not dying with it. And there is so much more to live for. In June, Kerry will see two of his sons − Roman and Devin − get married. Sydney will soon be off to physical therapy school, and Ariel's graduation from the University of Alabama is just around the corner in 2027.

Kerry Goode's body is broken. But his spirit for living, and giving, remains the same as it's always been.

"I don't have any grandbabies," he says. "I guess that's what I'm looking at next."

The Goode Foundation's 7th annual Celebrity Golf Tournament & BBQ Tailgate will be held May 18 at the Canongate Golf Club in Sharpsburg, Ga. For more information, visit goodefoundation.org . Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: ALS has broken ex-Alabama football player Kerry Goode's body, but can't break his spirit