Honoring Gehrig's Heroic Legacy

Seventy years ago, baseball legend Lou Gehrig announced his retirement from the game he loved due to a diagnosis with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

This past weekend, Major League Baseball players across the country remembered Gehrig's speech, in which he said that despite his illness, he was "the luckiest man on the face of the earth" who had enjoyed many blessings.

The inspiration for raising money on the anniversary of Gehrig's speech came from Michael Goldsmith, a law professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who also suffers from ALS.

Last year, Goldsmith wrote a guest essay that was published in Newsweek which called for the MLB to spearhead a fund-raising initiative for the debilitating disease in Gehrig's honor.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig responded favorably to the idea, and the result was Saturday's tribute, as well as a new program called MLB 4ALS, which is devoted to raising money and awareness for the disease.

Goldsmith told NBC News that after his diagnosis in 2006, he initially fell into a depression but then realized that he could use his situation to make a difference.

"I wanted to show my kids and my students that you press ahead and try to make something positive out of a desperately horrible situation," he said.