Football means everything to Tyrone Primous, and it’s easy to understand why.
It’s one area where the playing field truly seems level for Young’s standout junior linebacker.
It’s a place where all that matters is performance, where what counts is not the effectiveness of your ears but rather the size of your heart. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who plays with more of the latter than Primous does.
“Football is my life,” he said last week through American Sign Language interpreter Melva Rodriguez. “I can’t say anything else.”
Primous is totally deaf in one ear and has 30 percent hearing in the other, which about doubles when he uses a hearing aid. That qualifies him as hearing impaired, a term he disdains because he doesn’t consider himself impaired at all.
“Deaf people can do anything they want to,” he said.
He has been proving that most of his life. His father, Vada, suspects that Tyrone was born hard of hearing, although he wasn’t diagnosed as such until he was about 5.
Vada and his wife, Renea, encouraged their son to lead as normal a life as possible. That included participating in organized baseball as early as 3rd grade and in tackle football two years later.
“We try not to shelter him,” Vada Primous said. “I noticed a lot of people shelter their hard-of-hearing kids, but in order to learn you have to go out there and take the bad with the good.”
Primous is a B student at Young, mostly in classes for deaf or hard-of-hearing students, and has played baseball and football since he enrolled.
In some instances, normal hearing would help in sports, like when football teammates yell “reverse” on an end-around or “pass” after a quarterback has faked a handoff. Primous, however, compensates with above-average focus and awareness.
On-the-field communication, in fact, is barely an issue. Primous hears some sounds better than others but he can read lips. His teammates are careful to establish eye contact and speak slowly, and Rodriguez helps out when necessary at practice and on the sidelines at games.
During games, coaches signal the defensive calls to Primous, a team captain, who verbalizes them to his teammates. His diction isn’t as clear as yours or mine, but the others are used to it, and he worked with Rodriguez to improve his pronunciation of a few troublesome words.
Seeing Primous joke with his teammates or fire them up during warmups at Thursday’s game against Steinmetz, it’s easy to understand why his teammates insist the 5-foot-10-inch, 195-pounder is no different than any of them.
“He’s the heart of the team,” junior offensive and defensive back Rod Gray said. “When you see him perform, it’s like he’s not hard of hearing at all.
“Nobody treats him like he’s deaf. He’s a regular player to us.”
Not, however, to some behaviorally impaired opponents, who mock Primous’ speech during games.
“Sometimes they look at me like I’m that stupid deaf person playing football, but I don’t care,” he said. “All I can do is prove them wrong.”
His performance has won over almost all doubters. Primous was an All-Chicago Public League Big Shoulders selection last year at linebacker while helping his team win the conference title.
Young coach Tim Franken has had a hard-of-hearing player or two during almost all of the last decade. Most have succeeded because of their unusual desire.
“They are hard-working, tough, physical kids,” said Franken, whose team improved to 4-3 with a 36-0 victory over Steinmetz, during which Primous played sparingly because of a sprained ankle. “They make it a point to outwork and try to exceed what so-called normal kids do.
“They want to be accepted and be treated like a normal person.”
That is exactly what has happened to Primous. His football success has made him popular throughout Young, breaking down the isolation that some students in the school’s specialized services program face.
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“Everyone looks up to him,” Gray said.
Football also has made Primous mentally tougher and more confident as well as better able to deal with problems.
“I just like to separate myself from anything negative,” he said. “If I have a problem, I just go to football practice and it goes away.”
Primous has used his success to encourage hard-of-hearing friends to try football.
“If I can do it, they can,” he said.
This season, however, only sophomore defensive lineman Nick Gramarossa, has joined the football program. Asked why, Gramarossa, through Rodriguez, had a simple answer: “Tyrone.”
Primous has put no bounds on his football ambitions. He wants to play in the Big Ten and then in the NFL, following in the footsteps of his football idol, a certain Baltimore Ravens linebacker.
“Ray Lewis inspires me because of the way he hits, his athletic skills, his focus and how he hypes up his teammates,” Primous said.
Pro football may seem like a long shot, but Primous is confident he knows how to get there.
“You’ve got to have the heart of a champion,” he said. “Every single game.”
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