Utah State football’s Brady Holt: A gentle giant fighting for his life

Christy Holt and her youngest daughter, Abbie Holt, were on the freeway in West Jordan on Saturday afternoon when she received a call from her son.

Brady Holt had left their house in Riverton to make the trip back up to school in Logan to move out of his apartment and into a new one for the summer. The drive from the Salt Lake Valley to Cache Valley was nothing new to Brady — he had made the trip several times since starting at Utah State in January. Each time he arrived at his Logan apartment he would call his parents to let them know he arrived safely.

But this time it wasn’t his voice on the end of the line.

It was an officer from the Utah Highway Patrol.

“He said, ‘Ma’am, I have your son’s phone; he’s been in a very terrible accident. He’s been seriously hurt and he’s being airlifted to Ogden Regional Hospital,’” Christy said.

She pulled the car over into a nearby parking lot and cried with her daughter, who had not heard the phone call but knew that it was serious and that someone in the family was hurt.

“I knew it was my brother calling because it was his picture that showed up on my mom’s phone,” said Abbie, who thought her brother was calling to say someone else in the family was hurt. “Then my mom pulled off to the side of the road and I didn’t know what was going on, so I started crying. Then she told me it was Brady and I broke down in tears.”

“I called my husband and I was bawling,” Christy said. “I told him ‘Brady’s been in an accident and they life-flighted him to Ogden Regional Hospital.’”

Christy and her husband, Tracy Holt, arrived at the hospital around 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon and were told that their son had a spinal cord injury, severe head trauma, and that he was bleeding and possibly had a lacerated liver.

Two hours later, the doctors said that Brady had an 85 percent chance of not surviving.

“We said we would go with those odds — 15 percent chance of making it,” Christy said.

The doctors then did an exploratory procedure and found that Brady’s liver was fine, but that he had a fractured neck and four injured vertebrae in his lower back. The main concern at that time was still his brain injury.

At that point, the neck fracture and spine injuries were mostly stabilized by the fact that he was lying flat on his back, but until the doctors knew there was brain activity there was no point in fixing his spine.

“The doctor told us at that time to prepare for the fact that our son may never come out of this,” Christy said. “That is the most heart-wrenching news that anybody could ever tell you, to know that your child — and to me he’s still my child, even though he’s so much bigger than me and he’s 21, he’s still my child — that he may never wake up. We got that news and we were devastated.”

Christy has spent the past three days in the hospital with her son. Friends and family have stopped by to visit and spend time with the family.

Brady played sports all growing up and decided as a junior at Riverton High School that he would play football for Utah State after serving an LDS mission. He returned in November of 2015 and walked onto the Aggie football team this past spring.

Holt Family

He has been visited by former teammates and coaches since the accident. Christy said she never knew some of the things that have been shared with her about her son, like how he pranked a former basketball teammate by filling his bed in the hotel room with ice while they were on a trip as a team.

In addition to the more humorous stories, almost everyone has shared heart-warming stories about Brady and how he was the first person to reach out to them when they joined his football team or came to his school.

“You hope as a parent that you’re instilling those traits in your kids and as parents you think your kids are pretty awesome,” said Christy, who remembered that even from a very young age Brady was kind to his sister closest to him in age, Mikayla Holt. “But to see the outpouring of love and people reaching out to tell us a story or something he’s done for them has been amazing.”

“He worried more about everybody else than himself — always,” said Tracy Holt, Brady Holt’s father. “He was always worried about how people were feeling and how they were being taken care of.”

Christy worried about telling her husband about the accident at first because she knew he would have a hard time taking the news. She didn’t know if he would even be okay to drive after he found out. She remembered how hard it was for him when their youngest daughter broke her elbow, so she worried that this news would be too much for him to take. According to Christy, Brady gets that same caring personality from his dad.

The three other children of the Holt family have been with their parents at the hospital since Saturday.

When Abbie first saw her older brother in the hospital bed she could not walk past the door before she was in tears.

“That’s not my brother,” she said.

The brother Abbie Holt knows is the 6’7” 260 lb. pep-talker who helped her earlier this year when she was struggling with her dance career. According to Abbie, Brady would text her every day for a few weeks and give her a loud pep talk each time he saw her at the house until she got out of her slump.

Holt Family

The pep talks from Brady were a common occurrence in the family, according to Christy Holt.

Two days after returning from serving an LDS mission in Utica, New York, Brady’s younger brother Justin Holt was playing in the little league football championship game. Toward the end of the game, Justin – who plays defensive end just like his brother – took a hard hit and was on the sideline crying, discouraged by his team’s scoreless game.

“Brady knelt down by Justin and looked him in the eye and said ‘Don’t let that kid hit you again,’” Christy said. “He told him, ‘You’ve got this. You’re a fighter, not a crier. You’ve got this, you’re a fighter.”

Brady called Justin a fighter, but since he was little, Justin nicknamed Brady “the giant.” According to his mother, Justin couldn’t pronounce Brady when he was a kid, so giant stuck with him, and pretty soon all the neighborhood and family caught on to the nickname.

“It became ‘the gentle giant’ because Brady is very loving,” Christy said. “From a very young age he has been.”

The family is waiting for now at Ogden Regional Hospital, after MRI’s and CT scans and little improvements, they are hoping the gentle giant will be a fighter, just as he told his little brother to be last November.

— paige.a.cavaness@aggiemail.usu.edu

Twitter: @ususportspaige