Kennedy Feels More Pain Than an 18-Point Loss : Running Back Jones and Quarterback Newman Go Down and Out Against Banning

The night ended suddenly for Kennedy High’s Edwin Jones. It ended with a jolting collision with a Banning football player and a burning pain that began in his neck and raced down his back.

Jones suffered the neck injury in the third quarter of the Kennedy-Banning game. He is Kennedy’s starting tailback and had gained 35 of his team’s 58 yards in the first half. But he was playing defensive back when the collision occurred, a collision that left him lying still on the field as doctors and team officials raced to his side.

The initial diagnosis was a compressed third or fourth vertebra. Jones had movement in his arms and legs, but the pain would not subside, scorching his neck and back.

His helmet was taped snugly to a wooden stretcher to prevent any further damage, and he was carried carefully to the sidelines. Twenty minutes passed before an ambulance arrived and took him to Kaiser Hospital in Gardena.

They were probably the longest 20 minutes of Edwin Jones’ life. A brother and a sister and his mother hovered over him, touching his hands and whispering to him.

And the only movement now in Jones was from his eyes. They darted about, searching the faces that showed through his face mask. Often he winced as the fire raced up and down his back. A few times a tear filled an eye and then slowly rolled out, disappearing into the void between his gold helmet and his shoulder pads.

“He’s really in a lot of pain, but mostly I think he’s scared,” said attending medic Louis Anderson. “We don’t think it’s too serious, but we’ll take every precaution. All he knows is the pain won’t stop and he’s pretty scared, I think.”

With his mother clutching his hand in the ambulance, Jones was eventually taken away. A night of high expectations and dreams of glory on the football field would drag on into the morning with X-rays and an extensive examination in the sterile confines of a hospital.

And at the moment that his ambulance was leaving the stadium at Gardena High, Kennedy starting quarterback Jeff Newman was overrun by a ferocious Banning defense and whipped to the ground by the face mask. He, too, lay still on the field. The same officials who had just sent his teammate to the hospital began another long sprint toward the fallen player.

This neck injury was diagnosed as just a severe muscle sprain. The game ended moments later. Kennedy lost, 18-0, but to two young men and their families, the game didn’t matter much anymore.