Deep in the heart of enemy territory is the biggest little LSU fan

ODENVILLE, Ala. – On a dead-end rural road northwest of Birmingham in the heart of Roll Tide and War Eagle country lives the biggest little LSU fan in the state of Alabama.

Nine-year old Colton Moore represents the Purple and Gold with a fervor that’s hard to match.

It's obvious as soon as you walk in the Moore house, quiet at the moment, but usually filled with their five kids and the beautiful daily chaos Jennifer and Brandon Moore experience.

Dressed in a yellow shirt with a purple LSU logo and stylish yellow patterned shoes, Colton is sitting in his wheelchair. He is "Geaux Tigers" from head to toe, and he can’t wait to show his latest visitor his collection of LSU YouTube videos.

“Coach O!” he says happily as he presses the play button on LSU coach Ed Orgeron’s Vanderbilt game week Monday press conference.

Orgeron extended Colton and his family an invitation to be his guests for the Tigers’ Oct. 5 home game against Utah State.

“For a young man of that magnitude to follow me like that means the world to me,” Orgeron said.

The invite to a Tiger Stadium football Saturday stemmed from Colton’s mom Jennifer posting a Facebook picture of the four LSU bags and a Tigers’ backpack that accompany him daily to school along with a nurse.

The reason all those bags are required is what makes Colton’s story special.

Colton has spina bifada, a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord don't form properly. More specifically, he has myelomeningocele, the most severe type of spina bifida.

It’s known as open spina bifida because the spinal canal is open along several vertebrae in the lower or middle back. The membranes and spinal nerves push through this opening at birth, forming a sac on the baby's back. This condition typically exposes tissues and nerves, which makes the child prone to life-threatening infections.

Colton is paralyzed from the waist down and must use a wheelchair. He has a trach tube to aid his breathing and has a feeding tube so his blood sugar doesn’t dive to dangerous levels.

You could say he’s “confined to a wheelchair” but that’s not accurate. In his actions and attitude, Colton believes nothing holds him back.

The more you learn of his story and once you meet him, you also believe it.

God’s mysterious ways

How can a 9-year old who has had 38 surgeries – mostly brain and spinal procedures – with two more scheduled by the end of this year greet everyone with such infectious enthusiasm?

“Colton teaches me every day,” Jennifer said. “He goes through all this stuff and he’s still smiling.”

How can this pint-sized, 52-pound constant ray of sunshine exit every one of his extremely dangerous surgeries happy?

“Nine times out of 10 when he’s in recovery, he’ll tell the nurse to `Call my Mom’,” Jennifer said. “The nurse will say `We can’t call your Mom right now’ and he will not hush. His blood pressure goes up until he gets to call me.

“He always says `I’ll see you a minute.’ Once he talks to me, he’s fine.”

How can a child with this many physical struggles want to be in the middle of the action, such as leading the local high school football team in prayer at their home games?

“Colton wants everybody to gather hands and get close,” Jennifer said. “And if you have a hat on, he’s going to tell you to take it off. The coach is impressed with that.”

When Jennifer graduated from high school in 2003, her dream was to attend college to become a special needs teacher.

A year after high school, she met her future husband Brandon and a year later in 2005 they were married. As they began raising a family, Jennifer’s career dream faded.

Until divine intervention came along in a most unusual and life-challenging way. It happened when Jennifer, 20 weeks into her third pregnancy, went to Trinity (now Grandview) Hospital in Birmingham for a sonogram.

Since she had already given birth twice without complications, she knew the routine and assumed everything would be perfect.

“It was just your basic gender and anatomy scan,” she recalled. “As the nurse was scanning, she kept measuring his spine a lot. She kept counting back and forth.

“I asked, `Is everything good?’ She said, `His spine has me really worried. I want you to talk to Dr. Brock.’

Dr. James Brock, Jennifer’s obstetrician, didn’t mince words. He told her that her baby had a birth defect known as spina bifada.

“From that point on, I don’t think I heard anything else come out of his mouth until he said `Jennifer, can I pray with you before you leave?’,” she said. “I said, `Absolutely.’

“I did hear him say `Don’t go home and Google.’ I said, I’m not.’ Then, I did it the moment I got to the parking lot. I wanted to know exactly what was spina bifada.

She googled and googled and sat in stunned silence.

“It was shocking,” Jennifer said. “I had two healthy children at home, and it didn’t make sense to me.

“I thought it was crazy. We’re about to have a kid with some issues. How am I going to tell people something is wrong with my kid? When I did tell people, some of them asked me `What did you do wrong?’ Well, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

It was a preacher at Jennifer's church who gave her much-needed comforting perspective.

“He said `I strongly believe the Lord picks out special people to take care of special people and I think it should be an honor and not a burden’,” Jennifer said. “At the time, I thought `My gosh, why?’

“But now that Colton is nine, I see what the preacher was talking about because not just anybody can do the job I do every day. I don’t say it at all to be arrogant. But he requires so much and just anybody wouldn’t be able to handle his needs.

“I look back and know why it happened this way. The Lord was going to be blessing me with a special needs child who would need my attention 24/7.

“I don’t have a degree, but sometimes I feel like I should. At home, we laugh and say that `I’m a nurse, I’m a doctor, I’m a respiratory therapist, I’m a physical therapist, I’m an occupational therapist, I’m a urologist.’ I feel like I do all of it.”

There are times Jennifer definitely bends – “The Lord is definitely my strength, I’m sure He gets tired of hearing from me every day,” she said – but doesn’t break.

It’s because she remembers so many moments of truth in Colton’s tedious journey.

He was just two months old when he had a Chiari decompression surgery to release the pressure of his brain pushing against his skull.

“Doctors told us beforehand there was 98 percent chance he wouldn’t make it off the operating table because they’d never done that surgery on someone that young,” Jennifer said. “I said, `There’s two percent he will.’ We put all of our trust in God clinging to that two percent.”

Eleven days after the brain surgery, Colton got his trach after the Moores finally agreed with the doctor he needed one.

“When Colton came out of surgery, we walked to his bedside and he smiled at us so big,” Jennifer said. “That’s a smile me and Brandon will never forget. I looked at Brandon and said, `He’s ready to face the world.’

“You can’t get a better smile than that. A peace came over us that we had made the right decision. From that point on, he’s had this positive attitude about everything.”

Jennifer’s day with Colton often starts before sunrise at 6 a.m. and doesn’t end until about 10 p.m., barring any unforeseen emergencies.

It takes Jennifer one hour to 90 minutes daily to get her favorite chatterbox ready to vigorously attack the day.

“He requires four medications at a certain time every day,” she said. “He has his trach, his feeding tube and he sleeps on a ventilator because he has severe central sleep apnea. Without the ventilator, he would just quit breathing. He’s fine when he’s awake.

“So, when I wake him up in the morning, I give him his meds and unhook his ventilator. This whole time he’s busy talking 900 miles an hour about what we’re going to do today, who we’re going to see and where we’re going.

“I give him a bath, then he gets trach care and G-tube care because Colton is severe hypoglycemic (a condition caused by low blood sugar). His feeding tube helps maintain his blood sugar. If he goes too long without something, his blood sugar drops. Colton doesn’t give an indication when it drops, so we have to monitor it.”

Colton is a third-grader at Odenville Intermediate School where those four bags and a nurse accompany him.

“He requires an emergency-go bag, a suction bag, a food pump bag and a monthly medical supply bag,” Jennifer explained. “He also has his school backpack.”

It’s always easy to identify Colton's bags, all purple and gold with various LSU logos.

“Right before school started, a few of the bags weren’t LSU,” she said. “He didn’t want them because they didn’t have LSU on them.

“I said `Colton, you cannot have LSU everything.’ But of course, he has to have LSU everything. So, I Amazon Primed a couple of bags within two days.

“His closet is a sea of purple and gold. One day, I made him wear something that didn’t have LSU on it. When I dropped him off at school, he said `Mom, I am not happy with you.’ I said, `You have other stuff to wear.’

“But in his world, it should be purple and gold every single day.”

From an Auburn Tiger to an LSU Tiger

LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri understands the charge of a coach is more than just accumulating wins and championships.

It’s about teaching his players life lessons they carry forever. One of his foremost messages is about giving.

“I tell our players they have the amazing ability to impact other people’s lives in a very positive way with just a little extra effort,” Mainieri said. “When you give your time or your attention, you think you’re doing something to help somebody else, but the reality is it comes back to you 100 fold."

Just like the Tigers’ baseball team learned on May 28, 2017 when Colton flipped to purple and gold.

The Moores scored some tickets that Sunday afternoon to the SEC baseball tournament championship game at the Hoover Metropolitan Stadium.

It was a good day for the Tigers. Behind superb relief pitching from then-freshman Eric Walker, LSU beat Arkansas 4-2 to win its 12th league tournament title.

Afterwards, Colton planted himself by the Tigers’ team bus. He wasn’t shy about approaching the players.

“One player handed him a hacky sack and another player handed him a wristband,” Jennifer said. “The next player came up and said, `I don’t have anything.’ Colton told him, `You go back and get something.’ The player came back with a water bottle. Their generosity was incredible. LSU's fans told me those players are like that whether they win or whether they lose.”

By the time the Tigers loaded the bus and headed toward Baton Rouge, Colton had switched allegiances.

“He was an Auburn fan like me and my husband until he got to meet those players,” Jennifer said. “After that, it was over with.

“He also got to meet the Alabama baseball team, but they didn’t do it for him like LSU did. They were sweet and Colton had a great time, but it was something about LSU’s players that sucked Colton right on in.”

“He is in love with the whole LSU everything. He’s a mess.”

And he’s rubbing off on his parents, lifelong Auburn football fans as well as huge LSU baseball followers.

“After all this in the last few weeks when everybody from LSU reached out so quickly to us," Jennifer said, "my husband said one night while getting ready for bed, `You know, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but we might be LSU football fans, too.' I said, `When you have a kid who supports them like he does, I guess you can say we are because a lot of our money goes to buying LSU apparel'."

Colton’s conversion has made the annual LSU-Auburn football game week interesting in the Moore household. Last year, he reveled in LSU’s 22-21 victory provided by Cole Tracy’s 42-yard field goal as time expired.

“I have a picture of Colton after that game,” Jennifer said. “He went to bed very proud that night. My husband was `That’s all right, we’ll get you next year.’ Colton was like `No you won’t, no you won’t'."

Now, every football Saturday is a battle for the big screen TV.

“If Auburn is playing at the same time LSU is playing, Colton rolls in the living room to watch it on the big TV and my husband has to flip back and forth to make Colton happy to see what’s going on,” Jennifer said. "If Colton misses any of it, I guarantee he’ll replay it that night.

“Every time Coach O is on TV, he has to let everybody in the house know it.”

There are not too many people in Odenville, population about 3,800, who don’t know Colton and his love of LSU.

“More people know Colton than I realize,” Jennifer said. “If I need to take a quick trip to Wal-Mart, I don’t take Colton with me. Because if I do take him, I’m going to be gone a guaranteed two to four hours because everybody knows him.

“People come up to me all the time and ask me “How’s Colton doing?” I’m like `Who are you?' They say, `I’m so-and-so’s friend and their son is in Colton’s class at school.'

“The support system we have in this town, you would think it is as big as Texas. It’s amazing.”

Love from Louisiana

Never in her wildest imagination did Jennifer believe her support stretched beyond Odenville and the Children’s Hospital in Birmingham where Colton goes for procedures.

Her August 18 Facebook post of Colton’s collection of LSU bags the day before he started school quickly went viral.

Within five hours of her post, Derek Pomansky, special assistant to Orgeron, was flooded with Facebook and Twitter links to the post as well as e-mails, phone calls and texts requesting LSU invite Colton to a game.

“It was extraordinary,” Pomansky said. “I got probably 1,000 contacts from all those sources in the five hours it took for me to obtain Jennifer's phone number to call her. Even after we talked on the phone, I had 600 or 700 people contact me the next three days.”

Pomansky said Orgeron’s wife Kelly has taken particular interest in Colton’s visit. She has undergone numerous surgeries for scoliosis, including one in May 2017 when she nearly died after a surgeon nicked her colon.

“She really felt a connection to him (Colton) and she wanted to get involved,” Pomansky said.

Kristen Churchill Cauble, Jennifer’s best friend, set up a GoFundMe to defray the expense of the Moore family trip that will include Mom, Dad and kids Kasen (16 ), Carter (13), Clara (11), Colton and Cruze (2).

After Cauble and an LSU fan named Mickey Cheramie chatted, the original goal of $2,000 was raised to $15,000 to also help the Moores place a down payment on a handicap accessible van with a wheelchair lift. Jennifer has to lift Colton and his wheelchair into their current van several times a day.

So far, $9,040 from 127 donors has been raised.

A week from today, the Moores are headed to Baton Rouge. Jennifer has been crossing her fingers everything goes as planned.

“We learned we don’t give Colton dates because if gets sick, he gets totally disappointed,” Jennifer said. “We missed a couple of things in his life he looked forward to. He had emergency surgery one time.

“He’s so excited. He’s told people at the grocery store who don’t even know him. He’s like, `I’m getting to meet Coach O!’ They say, `Who’s Coach O?’ I say, `LSU’s football coach’ and then they get excited for him. Colton thinks everybody should know who Coach O is.”

Mainieri hopes to meet Colton on his visit.

“To see somebody with those challenges who has such a positive outlook it’s inspiring to me and it should be inspiring to our players,” Mainieri said. “How can you not be inspired from somebody like him?”

And Orgeron certainly knows who’s coming to see him.

“I can’t wait to meet Colton,” Orgeron said. “He’s going to motivate me.”

(Anyone wishing donate to Colton's GoFund Me can go to the listing "Colton’s meeting Coach O/ Handicap Van Downpayment.")