Once Again It Takes a Tragedy to Teach Us the Lesson We Should Already Have Learned

Three people I know have been involved in auto accidents in the last few months, including me. No one was killed or seriously hurt. But one man’s wife has had back pains ever since and lugs a seat brace with her now, wherever she goes. Another friend got away from a wreck undamaged, which is more than can be said for his car.

I was picked up Sunday in Tucson, Ariz., by a woman I intended to interview. We drove about six blocks to a coffee shop. There, in the parking lot, she plowed her Oldsmobile into the side of a moving Cadillac. Our car lost.

Everyone stepped out and inspected the damage. Parts of the Olds were scattered across the lot. The front end had crumpled like a cardboard box. But the drivers and passengers were more startled than injured. No one was in pain and no one was to blame.

An hour later, I returned to my hotel room and turned on the television. At another end of the country, in New Jersey, 26-year-old hockey goalie Pelle Lindbergh of the Philadelphia Flyers had been taken to a hospital, having smashed his souped-up Porsche into the concrete steps of a school. The accident had killed him.

Doctors did not pronounce him dead, but his brain no longer functioned. Only a respirator kept the rest of him alive. There was no miracle left for Pelle Lindbergh; only technology. The accident had killed him.

“At first, my God, it doesn’t even faze you, it doesn’t even sink in when you hear something like that,” said Coach Pat Quinn of the L.A. Kings, who once coached young Lindbergh in Philadelphia. “Then slowly you realize that this is somebody you know, somebody you really know, and you just can’t imagine that he’s not here anymore.”

Throughout our lives we hear warnings, from loved ones, from public-service messages, from voices of experience, to be careful out there. To drive defensively. To not drink and drive. To buckle up. We nod our heads and say yeah, yeah, yeah, sure thing, and then we go right ahead and ignore them.

I rented a car last month in Chicago. The gatekeeper at the Hertz lot refused to let me out. “Put on your seat belt,” he said. “It’s a state law.”

“I’m just going to take it off half a block for now,” I said, acting all put out.

“What you do then is your business,” the guard said. “But you fasten your belt now or I don’t raise the gate.”

I slid into the shoulder harness. He opened the gate. I drove 20 feet, stopped, looked over my shoulder and made sure he saw me unfasten the belt. Then I drove away.

Boy, did I show him.

There is something curious, maybe even metabolic, about our need to defy good advice. Friends in saloons tell us to give them the car keys, to let them drive, but we never do, and the only way we ever will is if our friend is Clint Eastwood and he knocks us cold with one punch so he can take the wheel.

Pelle Lindbergh was never regarded as a big drinker, but he was regarded as a fast driver, so any mix of the two was an invitation to the grave. “Pelle loves speed,” Quinn said, speaking of him alternately in past and present tense. “As long as I’ve known him, he’s always had a Porsche or some fast car.”

He was a just a boy who liked to have fun. “He had an impish way about him. He was a fun-loving little fella,” Quinn said. “Many of the Swedes we met were very morose or quiet types. They were soloists who liked to be off by themselves. But not Pelle. He was a little practical joker who loved to be around people. Everyone liked Pelle.”

They liked him even better when he blossomed into one of the best goaltenders in the National Hockey League. Lindbergh was superb last season as the Flyers made it all the way to the Stanley Cup finals against Edmonton. And this season, the Flyers won 12 of their first 14 games, with Lindbergh playing wonderfully.

But when he and two companions squeezed into the turbo-powered Porsche, he was skating on thin ice. He was drunk, legally drunk, his blood containing more than twice the amount of alcohol that New Jersey’s law enforcement allows. And when he rammed the school steps, Lindbergh evidently was doing at least 80 m.p.h.

Quinn knew not only Lindbergh, but one of the passengers, 28-year-old Ed Parvin. Parvin’s father handled real estate in the Cherry Hill, N.J., area, where many of the Flyers lived, and he and his son knew a lot of the players. “I think young Ed was still in school and working as a bartender part time,” Quinn said.

When he phoned Tuesday morning, Quinn found out that Parvin was still in a coma. The New Jersey hospital is still listing him in stable condition, and Quinn is praying for him.

“You know, as a coach, you don’t get to socialize a great deal with the players,” Quinn said. “You try to stay away from dictating what they should do on their own time. Instead you try to be a good model for them. But I’m the same as most guys. I take a drink once in a while. I try to be careful about it, but I drink.

“I don’t know. Perhaps we can use this kind of tragedy as some sort of lesson. Maybe to make it even more clear to the people around you what can happen to them. Certainly it’s not unusual for the players to have a beer or two after a game. Some guys just don’t know when to shut it down.

“Maybe I should be even more concerned than most coaches. Here in the West, where so many of us live so far from our work, we’re in our cars a lot. Maybe something like losing a great kid like Pelle Lindbergh will be a strong lesson for us. Maybe it will convince more of us that this is a problem we had better start taking seriously, before it’s too late.”

To friends and strangers alike, then: I will if you will.