A Hit That Changes Your Life

The trouble is, there’s no warning. It’s not fair. It’s not even human. It’s nature at its most diabolical.

One minute, you’re a vibrant, healthy, happy, eager young athlete. You’re chasing a football over a grassy field on a glorious afternoon.

The next moment, you’re unable to move. One minute, you can run the 40 in 4.4. Your future is all roses--or, at least, Rose Bowls. One minute you’re following in your father’s footsteps. You’re going to leave your own footsteps in the sands of football glory. The next minute, you’re a crumpled heap. You’ll never leave a footprint anywhere, any time.

You’re Mike Utley of the Detroit Lions. Or, you’re Marc Buoniconti of The Citadel.

You usually get some warning when catastrophe surfaces. You’re driving too fast, you’re drinking too much. You’re daring fate and you know it. Or you notice this lump under your arm. Your pulse is erratic or your breathing is labored. You’re running a fever.

But, when you’re a linebacker, and son of a linebacker who became one of the legends of the game, life is just a romp. Your blood pressure and temperature are perfect, you can see 20/20, hear perfectly, run fast, hit hard. Life is third and short yardage.

It was just a nothing game. East Tennessee State vs. The Citadel at that hub of college football, Johnson City, Tenn. ABC wasn’t there, just a few under-excited reporters, a fair crowd, cheerleaders and the school band at halftime.

It was a game that will outlive many others in the region’s history. For Marc Buoniconti it was more than a game, it was a life. One minute, he was sliding toward a sure tackle. The next minute, he was as inert as a fallen log, unable to right himself, hardly able to breathe.

Marc Buoniconti was doing what sons have been doing since time immemorial--trying to emulate his father. Father Nick had been a mainstay of the great Miami Dolphins teams of the 70s, including the only pro team in history to go 17-0 and win a Super Bowl. Nick was probably the last of the 218-pound linebackers but he was a sure, deadly tackler, a play-stopper, a pass rusher with an uncanny instinct for the football. He had played for 16 years without getting a bad nosebleed.

There was some controversy as to whether his young son should have been playing that afternoon in Johnson City. “He had on a contraption that fastened from his face mask to his shoulder pads,” his father was to recall grimly. “He had been injured two weeks before. He hadn’t practiced because of it, but played in spite of it.”

The media likes to describe a hit as a “bonecrushing tackle.” This was exactly what young Marc Buoniconti put on the ballcarrier. Except the bone was his. “His neck was turned to one side and dislocated. He had crushed his spinal cord at the C-3 level,” explains his father. Prognosis: lifetime inside a body that was a prison, not a servant. Messages from the brain could no longer be carried out. They were short-circuited at the neck.

For Nick Buoniconti, the accident was devastating. “You get no warning, no way to prepare yourself for this.”

The father remembers mostly the desperation of that first night, the most terrible of his life. The doctors at the facility at Johnson City were candid. “His lungs began to fill up with fluid. His condition worsened. They told me ‘He’ll die if you leave him here.’ ”

Nick Buoniconti recalls spiriting his dying boy out of the trauma center to air-vac him to Miami. “It was 3 o’clock in the morning. It was cold--30 degrees--and damp. A 15-mile ride to the airport took two hours. He was just clinging to life. I remember thinking ‘If he makes it through this night, we’ll have him.’ ”

That was 1985. Marc Buoniconti was 19 years old. No time is a good time to become a quadriplegic but 19 is obscene. He not only couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe.

There are two things you can do when life deals you a hand like that: you can rail against the fates, scream “Why me?” sulk and hide. Or, you can say “I’ll play these.”

The father and son diagnosed the play. They were bucking a stacked deck. “I was shocked to discover there was almost no research into spinal cord injuries out there,” said Nick. “There are over 600,000 people in wheelchairs or suffering from those injuries. There are 14,000 added every year. Average age: 19. Over 80% of them are male. Apart from the automobile, most of them are sports-related injuries. These people are the risk-takers, whether it was diving into a wave or diving into a line.”

The cheering stops and faces are averted when the game is over and the victim can’t run the 40 in 4.4 any more. The Buonicontis sued the college for medical negligence but they mostly turned their attention to determining what was to be done now that the goal posts have been torn down and the school fight song is over and “playing hurt” becomes not a heroic but a mockery.

For a 218-pound linebacker who thought nothing of hurling himself at 300-pound pulling guards, not even paralysis was too big a foe to be met head-on.

Nick and some new teammates formed a project which, because of its proximity to and association with the University of Miami, came to be known as The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. “From almost no research labs and a skeletal crew working on spinal cord injuries, we’ve grown to 25 labs and over 70 researchers all over the world.” he boasts proudly.

They’ve already begun to probe enemy weaknesses in this real life Super Bowl. “They said there was no way human nerve tissue could regenerate. They’re finding out it can. In five years, we may be able to have a breakthrough and be able to restore some function to a paralyzed person.”

The gains, warn the Miami Project scientists, is “in inches.” To Nick, that’s preferable to the ailment’s former position--a regular 100-yard loss. “We’re very optimistic,” insists Nick. You don’t always win every game to win a championship.

The program can be kept alive only by massive doses of money and frequent fund-raisers. One such will be held on February 11 at the Beverly Hilton here where The Paralysis Project, the West Coast affiliate of the Miami Project, will hold a Great Sports Legends West Dinner, an annual event supported and attended by the likes of the great Joe DiMaggio, the great John Unitas, the great Stan Musial and the great O.J. Simpson.

From his wheelchair, Marc Buoniconti speaks for a half-million of his fellow patients who have been immobilized by the tragedy of spinal cord damage. “I still look down and see my body motionless, feelingless. But I have to put all that behind me.”

The success of the project is not for him. It’s for that 19-year-old coming along who will be strapping on his helmet, putting on the pads and neck brace and going smiling out to that line of scrimmage from which he will never emerge erect. It comes without warning but it should not go without challenge.