Derick Hall's 'miracle' is far from a finished story

The Seahawks selected Hall in the 2nd round, but his story starts well before the 2023 NFL Draft: Seaside Joe 1552

Derick Hall’s unlikely survival at birth story has been well-covered at this point, including a popular NFL Network segment that has been viewed by countless Seahawks fans already, so I’m going to mainly cover his upbringing after he was “out of the woods” and his football career prior to the draft in today’s post. But for a quick reminder on why he is a “miracle”, here’s a snippet from an AL.com article:

Bobbie Brown didn’t want to leave her grandson’s side at Gulfport (Mississippi) Memorial Hospital, so she volunteered for the night shift to keep him company.

Derick Hall was born four months premature, in March 2001, weighing just 2 pounds and 9 ounces at birth and small enough for his mother, Stacy Gooden-Crandle, to hold him in the palm of her hand. Hall spent the first five months of his life in the hospital, hooked up to a feeding tube and ventilator in an incubator, facing an uncertain future. A normal life was difficult to picture.

Every night between March and August, Brown sat beside Hall’s incubator, watching over her grandson and praying for the best. As tiny as Hall was, Brown found comfort in his seemingly large hands. They gave her assurance that, as bleak as the circumstances seemed, Hall was bound for something bigger.

In fact, if you want to spend a full hour watching a documentary on Hall’s story from birth to the draft, AL.com made a four-part series that you can start right here:

It’s hard for me to do better in today’s post than a documentary on Hall, interviewing the player, his coaches, and others who know him, but I’ll do my best to break it down in written form because you voted for this Origin Story to happen last week. On Wednesday, I wrote a bonus Regular Joes post on Zach Charbonnet’s life prior to becoming a star at UCLA, which you can read if you join the premium section.