Gaining Ground : Walks Once Meant Failure for Redfern, Now They Mark an Amazing Comeback

Among the many videotapes stacked next to Pete Redfern’s TV are two of which he is particularly fond. One shows him pitching the Minnesota Twins to a 3-2 victory over the Angels in Anaheim Stadium on Easter Sunday in 1982. The other shows him learning to walk.

The unusual thing about the second tape is that it wasn’t taken back in the late 1950s when Redfern took his first steps. It was taken in May of this year, on Friday the 13th to be exact. Redfern knows that learning to walk the first time is nothing compared to learning to walk the second time.

Redfern’s first life was one of long summers and baseball. He was the City Player of the Year in 1973, his senior season at Sylmar High, and then became an All-American at USC. But the best was yet to come. For seven years he pitched for the Twins, taking home major league money for playing the same game he played as a 6-year-old. Life was like a dream for Redfern.

And then, on Oct. 29, 1983, the dream came to a sudden, shattering end. Redfern dove into the Pacific Ocean off Newport Beach. Into 2 feet of water. His skull slammed into a rock and his spinal cord was nearly severed. The fourth and fifth vertebrae had collapsed, pinching the spinal cord so severely that Redfern was paralyzed from the neck down.

The immediate problem was that the instant the paralysis set in, Redfern was lying on his face in a couple of feet of water. He was awake and aware of what was happening.

He was drowning.

Finally, with the air in Redfern’s lungs nearly absorbed, a friend who had been standing nearby and figured wacky Pete was pulling another weird practical joke realized that this was not funny and dove in and saved Redfern’s life.

“If my friend wasn’t there to pull me out, I would have died right there in the water,” Redfern said.

And so he reasons that everything that has happened since that instant his head struck the bottom of the ocean is gravy, something to be thankful for. And it has been that approach that has led Redfern back.

When he was in the hospital in the days immediately after the accident, his doctor told Redfern’s wife, Tina, that what you see is what you’ll get, that Redfern would never recover, that he would never walk or move his hands or even get out of bed. Ever. If he worked really hard, Tina was told, someday many years from then Redfern might be able to sit up in his wheelchair without being strapped in.

“I still owe that doctor money,” Redfern said. “I’ve paid him the minimum for five years. I got the bill down to $30 a few months ago and now I send him $3 every month. Let’s say I don’t think much of him.”

The doctor would certainly feel a bit foolish these days if he could see Redfern. Perhaps Redfern might send the pessimist-ologist a copy of the tape from Friday the 13th, the tape that shows Redfern leaning on an aluminum walker and pacing purposefully alongside the outside wall of his Sylmar home, unassisted by any hands other than his own. It’s not Bob Beamon in Mexico City, but in Redfern’s mind and the minds of the many friends and physical therapists and nurses who have watched the former professional athlete rise from the ashes, it is astonishing.

“He’s already beaten all the odds,” said Art DeCecco, the physical therapist for the past 2 1/2 years who works with Redfern three days a week. “He was told he’d never walk, never sit up, never hold out his hand. Pete is a remarkable man.”

Redfern, however, doesn’t see his progress from a flat-on-his-back invalid to a man struggling not to walk, but to walk better, as anything remarkable. Just a fine example of how a bit of hard work can pay off.

“From the very beginning, from the day I realized I was in the hospital and what had happened to me, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to spend my life looking up at the ceilings. I was going to bring this thing as far back as possible.”

The trail has been a painfully slow one to travel. Huge improvements were measured in inches traveled or ounces lifted. When he began trying to strengthen his arms and chest a few years ago, his first exercise was the bench press. The “barbell” was a broom handle. Not a broom. Just the sawed-off handle.

“At first I could bench press that thing twice. That was it,” he recalled. “But pretty soon I could do two sets of 10 each with it. Then I got a real barbell. No weights, just the bar. It weighed 15 pounds. And I did one of those and collapsed. And then I could do two sets of 10 with that. Now I have a barbell with 31 pounds on it. And I do two sets of 10 with that.

“There’s quite a difference between a broom handle and 31 pounds of lead weights.”

There have been other milestones in Redfern’s rehabilitation. There were the first steps while being supported by two strong men and a set of parallel bars. There were the first steps with only the parallel bars for support. There were the first steps in the walker and the ability to stand alone, without help.

But none of the major accomplishments touched Redfern as did the one of March 18, 1984. That was the day he brought his right arm up off his leg and, in a pain-wracked, slow-motion move, draped it around the neck of his son, Chad, and hugged him tightly.

“It was the first time since the accident that I had been able to hug my kid,” Redfern said. “I remember crying for a long time that day.”

There have been other days of tears. Sometimes from the pain. Sometimes from the exhaustion. Sometimes from the frustration. But the sad days have slowly given way to brighter ones for Redfern. He keeps remembering being sloshed around in the salty sea, unable to move and wondering what dying was going to feel like.

“I could spend a week telling you about the bad things,” Redfern said. “But to tell you the truth, I’m enjoying my life. If it’s possible to have fun like this, then I’m having it. My life is a blast. There’s so much to be thankful for.”