Kim Hassell has to pause to fight tears, because the memory of her son’s words that day are words a mother can never forget when her heart pierces as it was, even 20 years later.
The boy was in nursery school when he hit him and hit him terribly hard, that no one else had a left hand that resembled his, a small deformed hand at birth with only the appearance of a rose and an inch maybe an inch in size, half of the hand tilted. And he went to his mother’s house in Titusville, Florida, that day and asked:
“How is it that God did not make me like my friends? How come God didn’t make me like the rest of the kids in my class? If I just die, I can be born again and maybe I can be like everyone else. ”
The boy remembers. Absolutely.
“Just being next to other kids and seeing them happy all the time and then being able to do things every day with both hands, I didn’t understand why it was different,” JT Hassell told The Post after practicing Jets on Wednesday. “I started hating myself in a way and hating my way of being born.”
This Christmas day, Hassell can look back on a remarkable journey that has somehow, somehow, taken him to the Jets. Somehow they became the Jets 1-13 the day he debuted with the team and blocked a kick that set up a field goal in the Rams ’23-20 upset with a ban on producing a miracle. , which will send Trevor Lawrence to the Jaguars.
Hassell can look in the mirror now and can be inspired not only for his mother, but also for everyone with disabilities, for everyone forced to endure the cruel slings and arrows of small-minded bullies, for everyone who he has lost his best friend. gun violence, to everyone who grew up fighting in a single-parent home, to anyone looking for a father figure, to anyone who refuses to respond and can write a story about the triumph of the human spirit.
He can smile through the ups and downs of a lifetime and the precarious NFL career he dreamed of as a kid, now believing that God never hated him, but always loved him.
“For me to be in this situation by phone with you right now, everything is God,” Hassell said. “I do not even know how I do it sometimes. I’m the kind of person I have to find a way. Sometimes it can be as if there is no path or there is no opportunity for certain reasons, but I just have to go a long way.
A way to make gadgets with gloves sewn by his mother. A way to lift weights on your Pro Day. A way to go from the state of South Dakota, to Florida Tech, to being a free agent without recruiting, to play four games safely and in special teams with the 2019 Browns, in the staff of Patriots training for several days, at the Jets.
“I am grateful for all the things I experience because it allows me to help others,” Hassell said. “A lot of people come to me for help and motivation and they just want to talk to me about themselves, because they know I’ve been through it all. They just see a smile on their face every day, no matter what I’m going through. Seeing the strength, courage and passion I have every day of my life, no matter what I’m going through, is someone you want me to be, and someone who motivates you to live a happy life. ”
They say sometimes a people is needed.
“Teachers wouldn’t allow people to make fun of him,” Kim Hassell said. “They wouldn’t allow him to be treated in any way.”
He worked three jobs to try to get the two bosses and has driven a school bus for the Brevard County School Board for 19 years. He never missed the JT high school games, first at Titusville HS, then at Astronaut HS. And he only missed a game at Florida Tech, an hour’s drive from his home, due to an impending hurricane.
“I’m the mom who’s always there,” Kim said. “I would donate my plasma and save my low-season money on my plasma card, so I could travel to go to their college games.”
He offered to have a prosthesis made when he was about ten, but JT refused.
“I want to be like God made me,” he said.
She is one of the biggest motivations of her life, along with her son Cameron, who turns 7 in February. She and a small group of families exploded when she blocked this point against the Rams.
“We got out of our chairs and everyone is standing screaming!” Kim said.
I knew exactly what it meant to live that NFL dream.
“Seeing that he is able to achieve a goal he has achieved for a lifetime is very stimulating for me,” Kim said. “It would be the first to be in practice and the last to go into practice. On the weekends children sleep there, not my son. At six in the morning, “can you drive me to the gym?” ”
“Before that play happened,” JT said, “I was literally talking to my teammates on the sideline, telling me,‘ I can’t believe I’m on the sideline playing right now in this game. ’ , I was just at my mom’s house.
“And then I went and blocked the point, and it gave me so much joy for myself and my teammates.”
He just wishes Johntay Gowdie could have shared it with him too.
“My best friend was shot in the head when I was younger, he was like a close brother to me, we grew up playing football together. I still think about it every day, ”JT said.
Today he is proud of himself and deserves to be, and has just written a book about his 25-year life.
“Even out of the hand situation, I’ve gone through a lot of things in my life,” Hassell said. “It doesn’t matter who lives, I continue. … I am more proud than anyone. I’m my big fan. Not everyone knows the things I’ve been through or how hard it is to get to this point in my life. “
Against all odds, he got there. “Now being here,” said JT Hassell, “is really a dream come true.”
A dream Christmas.