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A Funny Little Story about Brook's Legacy


In 2nd grade, so about 2002, I got in a fight in the middle of art class with a kid who said he didn't care Berringer had died. Now I was only a year & a half old when he died. I had no memory of actually seeing him play, but I grew up hearing stories about him. I heard about his selflessness, his humility, his strong faith & his eagerness to give back to the community. For this little punk (and lets be honest, he was just being your typical smart-ass 8 year old) to say he didn't care was unfathomable.

Everyone I knew loved Brook!

It had never even registered in my mind that someone could feel any other way. We even had this poster hanging in our basement. Look how awesome he is!

So I got up and used my safety scissors to cut his art project to ribbons. My enraged teacher, Ms. Brown (a very appropriate name for an art teacher, by the way) told me to go pull a ticket, a method of punishment in which you start the day on green, but pull tickets from yellow, orange and then red, each one representing an higher level of punishment. So I went and pulled that fresh green ticket and then promptly ripped it in half.

The next day everyone's tickets were laminated & remained so for the rest of my time in elementary school.

What strikes me most about that story isn't my willingness to defend Brook's honor. Most of that was just dumb, 8 year old pride. It's that I became so enraged over someone's indifference toward a guy I had never met, never seen play and never even heard of outside of the stories people told about him. Disregarding the fact that I wasn't really living up to Brook's example very well in that moment, that's the power those stories had over me.

When I tell people that a huge part of why I love Nebraska football so much is because of the community it fosters, they just kind of shrug it off as if saying "yeah, that sounds nice and fluffy, but lets be honest we all just want to win."

While that mindset of only wanting to win is certainly true for some people, stories like Brook's prove that most of us care about something a little deeper than that. We almost all crave the communal aspect of sports, even if we don't consciously realize it. Nebraska fans just tend to wear that part of it on their sleeves more than some.

The anniversary of his death is still mourned by Husker fans 23 years later and Brook Berringer may be the only back-up quarterback in all of college or pro football to have a statue outside the stadium.


While part of his popularity is certainly due to his work while Tommie Frazier battled blood clots, much of his legacy is due to what he gave back. And it's for that reason that out of the tens of thousands of Huskers who have played here over 129 years of football, only he has a statue outside Memorial Stadium.

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