NFL great helps ‘resurrect’ hearing in Phl

MANILA, Philippines - Larry Fitzgerald’s actions have always spoken loudly, particularly in the National Football League.

The 6’4” Arizona Cardinals wide receiver owns no less than five NFL records, including most touchdown receptions in the postseason. He also holds half a dozen franchise records and has been to the Pro Bowl six times. In 2011, his volume of work was rewarded with a resounding eight-year contract renewal worth $120 million, making him the fifth-highest paid player in the league. So he’s used to performing before tens of thousands of screaming, yelling, cheering fans.

This week, however, Fitzgerald spent a few days in near-total silence in the University of Santo Tomas seminary in Manila, helping those who would never have heard him or heard of him regain their hearing as part of the Starkey Hearing Foundation.

This world-famous athlete was literally standing behind our hard-of-hearing countrymen, softly slipping them personalized hearing aids, and clapping from one side of them to the other, testing if they would finally be gifted with hearing.

“It’s different from a lot of the charity work I’ve done, because you see people sitting here. They’re hard of hearing right now. But once you get them into a chair and fit them with a hearing aid, it’s like they were in the dark and you turn the light on,” the third overall pick on the 2004 NFL Draft explains. “Just instantly, they light up and they’re able to communicate with their families and their families get emotional. It’s really a touching experience for me to see that. And that’s why I continue to come back. It’s family now. You build those lifelong relationships, and they’re like-minded and like-hearted.”

His connection with Starkey began in his neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he happened to be neighbors with Starkey founders Bill and Tani Austin. On his way to and from workouts, he was constantly surprised to see big groups of people and happy crowds in the Austin home. His curiosity soon built up to the point that he couldn’t contain it anymore.

“After a few months, I managed the courage to kind of just go knock on their door,” Fitzgerald chuckles. “And they were so warm and friendly, and they told me about what they did, showed me pictures and took me on a tour of their facilities. I instantly fell in love with it.”

His first exposure was a ten-day trip to India, where the foundation begun by the Austins in the 1970’s fitted and distributed hundred of hearing aids to those who needed them. Since then, Larry has been part of many of those missions, and has even been requested by former US president and football fan Bill Clinton to accompany him on one. The Starkey Hearing Foundation has found support everywhere it has gone, and now gives out at least 250 hearing aids a day and more than 100,000 a year in their goal to fulfill their mission “So That the World May Hear”.

For Larry, though, the experience resonated strongly because it brings up memories of his late mother Carol, who died of a brain hemorrhage years ago. Carol concretely demonstrated her desire to give back and be generous with her time and her self. More than two decades ago, she started two foundations in Minneapolis which are still running today, including Circle of Love, a foundation for patients diagnosed with HIV.

“My mother, God bless her soul, was a woman who was very active in our community. So at a very young age my brother (Marcus) and I were always around her doing her community service work,” he recalls. “We hated going there. We’d much rather be at the gym playing basketball at that age. But as we got to know the kids, playing chess with them, shooting hoops with them, snowball fights, we just started building relationships. And it helped those children kind of have an outlet from what their reality was. So at a young age, we realized it was important to be able to give back.”

Fitzgerald is a giant in the mainstream of sports, among others from different fields who serve and give far removed from noisy fanfare and loud cheers of adoring crowds, in small, isolated, often desolate communities in far-flung places. Here and around the world as part of the Starkey Hearing Foundation, resurrects hearing, reconnecting families, and bringing hope in quiet, intimate moments that themselves shout of the joy of living more completely.