A Murfreesboro Man Got a Recycled Phone Number. Then Chris Johnson Announced He Had ALS, and It Started Ringing.
Phone numbers get recycled. Carriers reissue them constantly, and the person who ends up with a used one usually inherits nothing more interesting than a few years of robocalls and the occasional wrong-number text meant for someone named Dave.
William Ray of Murfreesboro inherited something else. The number he was issued had belonged to Chris Johnson — the running back who spent six seasons with the Tennessee Titans and, for one improbable year, was the most electrifying player in professional football.
For a long time, that meant almost nothing. Then Johnson disclosed that he has ALS, and Ray's pocket started buzzing and would not stop.
What he decided to do with it
He was at work when it began, the phone vibrating over and over against his leg. The messages were not for him. They were from friends, former teammates, coaches and fans — people reaching for a man they cared about, and reaching a stranger in Rutherford County instead.
The easy thing would have been to ignore them, or block the flood, or change the number. Ray did something harder. He posted about what was happening on Facebook, worked his way toward Johnson's family, and began passing the messages along — voicemails from old coaches, notes of support from people who had no idea their words had landed two counties away in someone else's phone.
He described the strangeness of it plainly: you spend years watching someone play like Superman, and then a diagnosis arrives that rewrites everything you thought you knew about them.
Who Chris Johnson was in this town
If you lived in Middle Tennessee in 2009, you did not need this explained. Johnson, a second-year back out of East Carolina, ran for 2,006 yards that season — a total only a tiny handful of players in the history of the NFL have ever reached. He was fast in a way that broke the geometry of a football field; the nickname CJ2K followed him for the rest of his career. He last played in the league in 2017.
He was diagnosed with ALS in 2025, at 39. The disease has moved quickly. He now uses his eyes to operate a speech-generating device, and has said publicly that he intends to keep fighting.
What ALS actually is
ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, still widely known as Lou Gehrig's disease — is a progressive neurological condition that attacks the nerve cells controlling voluntary muscle movement. As those motor neurons fail, muscles weaken and the ability to move, speak, swallow and eventually breathe erodes. The mind, in most cases, remains entirely intact. There is no cure.
The name most Americans know it by comes from the New York Yankees first baseman who retired in 1939 after the disease ended a streak of 2,130 consecutive games. Nearly ninety years later, the treatment picture has improved only incrementally — which is exactly why awareness campaigns keep mattering.
The point Ray keeps making
He is not raising money and he is not running a foundation. His argument is smaller and, in its way, more useful: if a viral moment — an ice bucket challenge, a strange story about a recycled phone number — sends one person to look up what ALS actually does, that is knowledge that did not exist before.
It is a modest theory of how public understanding gets built, and it happens to be correct. The original ice bucket challenge raised more than $100 million for ALS research in the summer of 2014, and a substantial share of what researchers learned in the years afterward traces back to it.
For now, a man in Murfreesboro keeps answering a phone that was never meant to ring for him, and keeps forwarding what he finds. It is a small kindness, performed repeatedly, for someone he has never met.
