Blessing in disguise: career-ending injury didn't stop BYU athlete

SOUTH JORAN —The first thing you notice about Danny Frazier is that he fills a room. He is 6-foot-6, 260 pounds, with wide shoulders and a flat stomach. At 52, he looks like he could still line up for BYU's defense, if not the Pittsburgh Steelers. Then there is his booming laugh, which punctuates every other sentence and is so loud that it used to scare his grandchildren until they realized he is a warm, engaging man who tends to draw people in.

"It's hard to miss him because he's so tall and so loud," says his son Jameson. "You can hear him across the room. He's always been loud, warm and loving."

Frazier is an attorney with his own private practice — Frazier Law Firm — specializing in criminal defense. But when he is shopping or out in public, here come the questions that come naturally when you are big and black.

"Where did you play football/basketball?"

"I never get mistaken for a lawyer," he says, laughing again."

He played football and basketball at BYU, and the story ends there, although if circumstances had been different, he might have gone much further.

He seemed destined for gridiron greatness when he took the field at starting outside linebacker for BYU as a sophomore, going up against national powerhouse Texas A&M. A lanky and ripped 6-foot-5, 220 pounds, he was a rare combination of speed, athleticism and size. With his instinct for the ball, could the NFL be far behind? He was such an all-around athlete that he played basketball for BYU in 1977, earning mop-up duty at power forward as a freshman (he and Keith Rice were the first blacks to play basketball for the Cougars).

"Athletically, he had it all," says former BYU head coach LaVell Edwards. "He looked like he had tremendous potential as a football player."

And then it was finished.

He broke his neck against A&M and that was that. He will tell you today that it was a blessing in disguise. The injury launched the rest of his life. He became one of the early black missionaries of the LDS Church after the ban against blacks holding the priesthood was lifted in 1978; he went to law school; he married; he started a law firm; he raised a family.