DAVID RIVERS : For Irish Guard, Brush With Death Leaves Visible Mark

There is a 15-inch gash along David Rivers’ abdomen, hip to hip. On Notre Dame’s basketball court, teammates sometimes tell themselves that Rivers doesn’t seem to be his old self. In the showers after practice, when the scar is exposed in all its ugliness, they are reminded once again that he isn’t.

Rivers, Notre Dame’s best player and one of the nation’s best as well, was hurtled through the windshield of another man’s van in the wee hours of Aug. 24. He was thrown 90 feet from the vehicle and lost three pints of blood before an ambulance came. He was dangerously close to death.

Not only has Rivers recovered, he is also back playing basketball, far ahead of schedule, and might even start Tuesday night’s game against Indiana. He played 35 minutes in Notre Dame’s season opener, receiving thunderous applause the instant he began to remove his warmup clothes four minutes into the game.

“I’m very close to completely healthy,” Rivers says. “And I try not to dwell on what happens. But, you know, every time I look down at that scar, I guess I’m going to be reminded of what happened for the rest of my life.”

Twenty-one years was nearly all the life Rivers got. The cut he suffered was deep and gruesome, and, as Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps recalled, it was “only two inches from the heart.” The kid’s luck was bad that night, but not all bad.

Rivers remembers it vividly. He remembers leaving a pickup game at one of Notre Dame’s auxiliary gyms late on the evening of Aug. 23. He remembers riding in the van with Ken Barlow, his recently graduated Irish teammate, and heading down dark, two-lane blacktop toward Elkhart, Ind., where both of them had summer jobs working for a caterer.

It was around 1 a.m. when the car coming toward Barlow’s van would not get out of the way. Barlow gave the steering wheel a yank. The van left the road and careened more than 100 feet. Barlow then regained control for a moment and got the van back on the pavement, but it spun, veered across the center line of the road and rammed an embankment. Rivers went through the windshield, head first.

Barlow, bleeding from minor cuts but otherwise unhurt, jumped from the van and began looking for Rivers. He found him 90 feet away. Rivers’ shirt was a puddle of blood. The gash was so deep that internal organs were exposed. Barlow fought the nausea that gagged him, covered Rivers with a shirt, assured Rivers he was going to be all right, then ran to a nearby house to bang on the door.

Rivers was alert all the while. He was certain he was about to die, alone and bloody in a country field. His mind raced.

Death was no stranger to David Rivers, so he handled it as naturally as anyone could. He didn’t cry. He tried to convince himself that Barlow would return any minute with help. He thought of all the hardships his family had endured over the years, 23 of them in one ramshackle house, comforting one another in times of despair.

There were 16 brothers and sisters in that house. That did not include the older brother who crossed the busy highway next to the Jersey City, N.J., projects without looking and was killed by a speeding truck. It did include a brother who was stabbed, and a father who had to quit one of his three jobs because a high-pressure hose broke free and scalded his legs with first degree burns.

Rivers had played his way out of Jersey City. Only six feet tall, he did not have college basketball recruiters clamoring for him from the beginning. But every night at the White Eagle, the quaint Polish social club where Rivers’ parochial high school team played its games, he raced around the breadbox-sized gymnasium, and he played as hard as he could. And to make some pocket money, he waited for the church Bingo games to end, then folded and stored all of the chairs.

At home, windows were covered with Saran Wrap instead of glass, rusted-out cars sat dead near the curb, and exposed thatches of wallpaper were decorated with David’s various awards. Some day, with any luck, he would be the one to earn the kind of money that would rescue the Rivers family from this depression.

Suddenly, on a hot August night in a Midwest countryside, David Rivers found himself a blink or two from Heaven. Later, at the hospital, when Phelps arrived at 4 o’clock in the morning to offer solace, Rivers told his coach that he had been afraid to close his eyes at any time during the ordeal, for fear of never again being able to open them. He was thinking, he said, about all those brothers and sisters, and how he dreaded letting them down.

Phelps and several Notre Dame players were there to hold his hand. Doctors could not begin surgery until they got all the glass and grass off of Rivers’ chest. It occurred to David how often he had been told by his coach and teammates that they would be there whenever he needed them, and here they were, proving it.

“I don’t know if I could ever handle an experience like that as courageously as David did,” Phelps says.

Hundreds of stitches later, it was clear that Rivers would survive. He was young and strong, and that helped. Encouragement from friends also helped. Bob Knight, the Indiana coach, dropped by the hospital shortly after the accident, and Rivers chuckled remembering that visit.

“He was joking with me. Everybody else was so, you know, serious. Coach Knight said, ‘David, don’t worry about coming back too soon. You’ve already shown us you’re a good player.’ Stuff like that.”

At the time, and this was inherent in Knight’s playfulness, there seemed no way that Rivers would ever be well enough to take the court when Notre Dame had its early season date with Indiana. Some thought Rivers would be lucky to miss one entire season, at best. But the junior guard dressed for the season opener against Western Kentucky and played the final 35 minutes in a losing--but hardly vain--cause.

“I think I’m ready to start now, definitely,” he says. “I’m very close to being back at full strength. My major concern is being able to do all the things that I used to do, like running the team, running the full court, doing everything easily and naturally. I don’t think my skills are as sharp as they were. But I’ve worked hard to reach this point, and it’s time to give it a try, to get on with my life.”

Four weeks after the accident, against some of his doctors’ advice, David Rivers grew bored watching a pickup game on campus and picked up a basketball himself. He bounced it a few times, twirled it in his palm, got the feel of it again. Then he shot it at a basket once or twice.

He felt a twinge. But it made him feel good. It made him feel alive.