Joe Ingles helps give gift of sight to legally blind young Jazz fan

Thanks to the ownership and front office of the Utah Jazz, Joe Ingles will be staying put in Salt Lake City for the next four years. Thanks to Ingles, young Landon Carter will be able to watch him play — and see an awful lot of other things, too.

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A few months ago, Salt Lake City CBS affiliate KUTV shared the story of Landon, age 7, who was born with a condition called aniridia, a genetic disorder in which the iris is malformed. It’s a rare condition — somewhere between one in 50,000 and one in 100,000 children suffer from it — and while some aniridia patients can still have good vision, others can scarcely see at all. Landon falls in the latter camp.

“His whole world needs to be right in front of his face instead of really being able to live the whole world,” Landon’s father, Jeff Carter, told KUTV.

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Back in April, Landon got a chance to test out a product called eSight that purports to allow those who are legally blind to see with clear vision. It’s a visor with a special HD camera headset that fits over standard corrective glasses, records what’s in the wearer’s field of vision, processes the images and displays them on two small LED screens directly in front of the wearer’s eyes.

The Jazz were testing out the device as a means of helping visually impaired fans when they come to games at Vivint Smart Home Arena. Landon got a crack at wearing them as part of the test run, and got to watch a playoff game between the Jazz and Los Angeles Clippers. After the game, though, Landon had to go back to a life without seeing things in focus … until Ingles stepped in.

Ingles picked up the $10,000 tab for the eSight glasses, ensuring that Landon will be able to clearly see not only the Jazz, but everything around him — the trees in his neighborhood, the blackboard in school, the faces of his classmates — for the first time.

“It’s like turning on the light,” Landon said.

Landon still loves All-Star swingman Gordon Hayward, but now he’s got a pretty good reason to root just as loudly for someone else on the team.

“Joe Ingles is, like, my buddy now,” he said.

Hat-top to Patrick Basler of SB Nation.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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