ONE GIANT LEAP : Dan Pinto’s Recovery From Near-Fatal Accident Culminates in One of Top JC Vault Marks in State

October, 1987. Dan Pinto drifts in and out of consciousness in the emergency room at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, his head and back aflame with pain. In a moment of clarity, he can make out the sorrowful faces peering down at him. Sisters and brothers he hasn’t seen for a while. Other members of his Granada Hills family. And the face of a stranger, a priest, giving him last rites.

March, 1989. Pinto stares down the runway during warm-ups for a track meet at Santa Monica City College. He rolls the shaft of a fiberglass pole in his hands, then he barrels toward the pit, plants the pole and clears 14 feet. The vault itself isn’t remarkable--or even better than his high school best--but to Pinto and those who know him, it confirms a remarkable fact: 18 months after a devastating accident, Pinto is alive and well and, incredibly, vaulting again.

“It’s pretty amazing he can even walk, let alone pole vault,” says Fred De La Vega, Pinto’s track coach at College of the Canyons.

After a drunken driver plowed into Pinto’s motorcycle and dragged him 165 feet, there was doubt whether he would even live. The back of his head was crushed, his brain was hemorrhaging, his back was broken and his left knee “was destroyed,” Pinto says. During rehabilitation, he says, “Two of my eight doctors said I wouldn’t be able to play any sport again. And they still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

But Pinto, the youngest of six children, had two things going for him at the time of the accident: He was young (19 then) and he was in excellent shape because of a six-hour-a-day training regimen. Like most head-trauma patients, however, his comeback would be frustrating, painful and measured in agonizing fractions.

Pinto was driving south on Sepulveda Boulevard returning from the ’87 homecoming football game at Alemany High, his alma mater. He was on a new Ninja 1000. “It was so beautiful, and I was so cool, not wearing my helmet,” he says with sarcasm. He pulled into the left-turn lane and stopped to let oncoming traffic go by so he could turn on Mayall Street. But the driver of the Ford Bronco behind him kept going and “went right over me,” Pinto says. The driver--convicted twice previously of drunken driving--had a blood-alcohol level that was twice the legal limit, Pinto says.

Pinto spent more than a month in the hospital. His weight dropped from 160 pounds to 125. He had searing headaches and petit mal seizures. He couldn’t sleep. His speech, memory and learning ability were impaired. He was trussed up in braces “from head to toe” and couldn’t walk if he wanted to. His hand-eye coordination was severely reduced.

“In therapy they had me make these little models that a kid should have been able to do,” Pinto says. “I hated it. It was so frustrating. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even remember a single-sentence direction.”

Six months after the accident, Pinto was discharged from physical therapy and was able to get around without braces. “They were restrictive, uncomfortable and embarrassing when people backed up behind you on the stairs,” he says. Nearly a year after the priest performed the last rites, Pinto signed up for classes at COC despite lingering physical and mental problems. His equilibrium was affected if he stood up quickly and his memory was still faulty.

“In class, it was hard to get the information from the board to my notebook,” he says, “but all my professors were very understanding.”

Even today--although he has a 3.2 grade-point average--thoughts don’t flow spontaneously and he often has to search for the right word in conversations.

“I usually have to think ahead on what to say,” he says. “And it takes more time and patience to study.”

During the early days of his recovery, Pinto would often have vivid, surreal dreams about pole vaulting. It had been his event ever since his freshman year at Alemany.

“My coaches reeled me in and said ‘You’re just going to pole vault,’ ” Pinto says, referring to Alemany track coaches Randy Smith and Dave Carlson (who helped coach him at COC this year). In Pinto’s junior year, he won the Southern Section 2-A Division championship with a vault of 14-6.

Despite discouragement from his doctors, Pinto walked into De La Vega’s office last spring and signed up for the track team.

“I knew what he did in high school and I knew about the accident, but I didn’t know the details,” De La Vega says. Pinto was purposely evasive about the severity of his injuries. “I didn’t want Fred to mother me,” he says.

But once De La Vega found out, “I was really careful with him,” he says. Which upset Pinto. “Fred is an L. A. County fireman and he knows all about the kind of injuries I had,” Pinto says, “so he started mothering me, cutting back on practice, things like that. We had a conflict but it blew over fast. Fred just had to let me be me.”

Once Pinto began working out at the track, he was surprised at how quickly everything came back. “It was like riding a bike,” he says. But he didn’t try his first vault until the meet in Santa Monica. “I felt good,” he says, his soft voice filled with enthusiasm. “Nothing hurt. I put it up and went over. It’s just in my blood.”

How far has he come back? A few weeks ago, he vaulted 15 feet, which was the fourth best junior college vault in the state this year. Although he didn’t qualify for the state JC championships (“Pole vaulting is a head-trip sport,” he says, “and I put too much pressure on myself.”), he feels he can clear 16 feet by the end of the summer.

De La Vega concurs. “I think he really can,” the coach said, “but he’s got to work on two or three mechanical things.”

Pinto says that his accident has given him a deeper appreciation and understanding of life. “Even as bad as I was, I was the most fortunate person in my head-trauma class,” Pinto says. To give something back, he is considering changing his major from economics to special education.

Pinto, who has been invited to vault for a U. S. team at a meet in Tahiti this summer, plans to attend a four-year college--possibly USC or Cal State Northridge--and “become an NCAA champion.”

Then there’s the 1992 Olympics.

“I’ll be in my athletic prime then,” he says, adding, “I set extremely high goals for myself.”

Anybody else with such large dreams would be considered a cockeyed optimist but, as Pinto showed in the emergency room, he can’t be counted out.