Reggie Brown has had to relearn about life without football.
Spectators stood throughout the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit, wiping their tear-soaked cheeks and rising in swells of emotion as a miracle walked across the 50-yard line. Flanked by three of his former Detroit Lions teammates at the Oct. 25 game against the Minnesota Vikings, retired linebacker Reggie Brown returned to the field where he had lain 11 months earlier, unable to move or breathe. He had bruised his spine while making a tackle, his neck twisting beneath the weight of a falling New York Jets offensive lineman.
That day in December 1997, the sellout crowd of 77,000 and the players on two teams stirred through an anxious five minutes, praying, holding hands, and thinking that players always get up and hobble off. But No. 59 did not.
Brown remembers the 15 seconds after the collision. He was fighting but unable to say he could not breathe. Then he felt his eyelids grow heavy, like lead curtains. He knew something terrible had just happened. “Am I dying?” he thought and drifted from consciousness.
Doctors and trainers pumped Brown’s chest and blew air and life into his lungs. Players raced to bring in a stretcher and call for an ambulance. That was Reggie Brown’s last day as a pro football player.
Almost a year later, Brown, 24, looks and sounds like a lucky man, one who made a recovery only 2 percent of spinal cord patients ever make. He believes that his healing was nothing short of miraculous. He can walk, jog, tumble and rise. He can breathe, he can smile, he can talk, he can laugh. He can feel the sunshine and raindrops, a breeze on his shoulders and a kiss from his girlfriend.
Brown cannot play pro football because his coordination is not what it used to be and there is numbness in his hands and feet, a stiffness in his neck, and lapses in his memory. He was forced to retire and has had to move on from the sport he had played forever.
He is discovering, though, that there is plenty of life outside of work and many, many simple pleasures he once overlooked.
“I’ve tried to not take anything at all for granted, starting with being able to wake up in the morning, walking around and seeing people,” Brown said from his home in College Station, Texas. “I’m appreciating everything, going day by day, and seeing that I have a lot of life to live.”
Brown returned to Texas A&M in College Station to resume his education. A senior, he is finishing his economics degree, studying supply-and-demand curves instead of blitzes, visiting classrooms instead of locker rooms.
College students sometimes come up to him and congratulate him on his recovery, which began when he awakened 30 minutes after passing out on the field. He was inside an MRI tunnel with his pads still on when he awoke, remembering that he was to pick up his girlfriend, Texas A&M basketball player Kerrie Patterson, at the Detroit airport.
He needed surgery to fuse his first and second vertebrae together with two long metal screws and had to wear a halo cast for three months. He needed an experimental drug, a steroid called methylprednisolone, which his neurosurgeon, Dr. Russ Nockels of Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, had helped develop. And he needed time.
Remarkably, he was walking two days after the surgery and was sitting up in bed, surfing channels to find a sportscast. “I heard my name, saw clips of my career and the injury,” he said. “The first thing they said was that Reggie Brown suffered a career-ending injury. How did they know that? I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what to think.”
Brown had always known that getting hurt was part of playing football. A sprained knee, a broken ankle, a pulled hamstring, he thought. Never this. Right after the injury, the doctors weren’t even sure he would walk.
“His recovery has been the best that we could have possibly expected,” said Nockels.
Visited by his teammates, showered by well-wishers, and strengthened by the company of his family, Brown healed. Through physical therapy, he retrained his body to move swiftly, and his walk turned to a jog and then a run. His memory improved.
“When I first started going through it, I wanted to see how far my body could get back to normal,” he said. “I came a long way, and I have a long way to go. As far as being 100 percent or anything, I’m nowhere near that.”
He began to enjoy football more as a spectator, watching all the television games and following the players he met in the two years he played in the National Football League.
“I guess part of my identity was taken away from me without football,” said Brown, whose contract provided a $200,000 salary from Lions this season. “But I’m 24, and there’s a lot of life in me.”
