Ten-month-old Lennox Bernard looks like a linebacker in the making. His thick, 19-pound body comes with a natural scowl that turns into a smile, with some parental prodding, as he poses for a photo in Utah’s Eccles Football Center.
These hoped-for features seemed barely imaginable as of last October, when the child was born slightly bigger than a football — weighing 2 pounds, 2 ounces and needing a ventilator to breathe. And even that precarious status was viewed as a victory. His arrival came not quite four weeks after his mother collapsed in the Herriman High School parking lot at halftime of a football game, due to extremely high blood pressure caused by preeclampsia.