Bengals DE looks for a new start

A sociology major and academic honor roll student at Arkansas, Anderson is fluent in sign language and always eager to help the deaf community. He showed that in April when he was in town for Bengals minicamp. While staying at the Westin Hotel, his wife noticed there was a large contingent of deaf people across the street at Fountain Square and pointed it out to Jamaal, who went down and started mingling with the American Sign Language group that was staging an event known as a Silent Take Over.

“I just went around and tried to interact with as many people as I could,” said Anderson, whose father, Glenn, was rendered deaf in the 1950s when he was struck with a case of pneumonia at the age of 9.

“I was born into it, just from small stuff and being around the deaf community at college,” Anderson said. “Whatever I didn’t know, he would just show me.”

Glenn Anderson is a professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and a former board of trustees president at Gallaudet University, a federally chartered institution for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing located in Washington D.C.

Jamaal worked with the Indiana School for the Deaf during his one season with the Colts, and he has reached out to do the same at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf in Cincinnati.

But for now, the most important sign for him to convey is the one that says he is returning to Atlanta a better player than when he left.

“I’ve definitely become more studious,” he said. “That was one of the things I probably learned between my second and fourth year in Atlanta, was definitely getting in, watching a lot of video, understanding not only my position in the scheme but overall what the concept was and why I was doing that for a particular reason.

“It feels good to go back and play where you started, but I’m not going to get over-hyped about this game,” he continued. “Unfortunately it didn’t work out for me there. I can’t look at the past. All I can do is continue to look forward.”