A tackle 10 years ago left him partly paralyzed, but now his life is an inspiration to others. That’s really the . . . : Hart of the Matter : Former Athlete Defies the Odds and Retakes Control of His Life

Todd Hart remembers the moment vividly.

He was dashing across Pasadena’s Rose Bowl field to tackle a UCLA receiver reaching for a long pass. Hart’s Cal State Long Beach teammate was racing for the same guy. All three players collided in air, tumbling down in a heap. The next thing the 19-year-old Hart knew, he was at the bottom of the pile, flat on his stomach.

“At first I thought I had the wind knocked out of me,” Hart recalls. “I thought: ‘I just need to wait here for a second.’ I was having tremendous problems breathing and I couldn’t move. . . . It didn’t occur to me that I had a broken neck. It wasn’t sinking in.”

Todd Hart fractured two vertebrae near the base of his head in the freak accident that day, Sept. 11, 1982. Doctors told his family he wouldn’t survive, but if he did, he’d never be able to breathe on his own. Certainly, he’d never recover any movement.

It has taken nearly a decade, but Hart, now 28, proved them all wrong. With limited use of his arms and legs, he scoots around in a wheelchair and a specially equipped van. He’s married, he and his wife, Polita, have two children and he has just graduated from UCLA Law School. Now, when he’s not playing catch with 5-year-old Steven or cuddling 7-month-old Christina, he spends his days--and nights--cramming for next month’s California State Bar exam.

He has triumphed in every other step of his recovery, so friends and family have no doubt that he’ll pass this grueling test with flying colors too.

“According to the books, he’s still a quadriplegic, but in his own mind, he’s not handicapped,” says longtime family friend Sgt. Don Blankenship, president of the Santa Ana Police Officers’ Assn. “You don’t tell that kind of guy you’ll never walk again.”

Todd Hart was one of the county’s most promising student-athletes. A standout Little Leaguer, the freckled, sandy-haired youth became a star safety at Servite High School in Anaheim, then at Cal State Long Beach.

His father, Wyatt Hart, was then press spokesman for Sheriff Brad Gates and well known by most reporters, but the younger Hart was the toast of sportswriters.

Friends remember him as a rambunctious young man, a daredevil who did back flips into the pool from the roof of his family’s San Juan Capistrano home. He admits to “totaling a few cars” in his youth, walking away with hardly a scratch.

“It’s a strange thing, you know, I was a very reckless individual. . . . I lived from one hour to the next,” Hart says. “But I had played football for 11 years and never hurt myself. Nobody knew about broken necks. It was a freak thing. It just doesn’t happen.”

Yet there he was, lying on the field after his second play in the UCLA-Cal State Long Beach season opener.

“The trainers ran onto the field, and I whispered, ‘Please roll me over.’ I couldn’t breathe,” he recalls.

Even when he was being carried off the field on a flat board, his head taped in place, Hart still thought he had injured a nerve.

It wasn’t until five days later, while watching TV in the intensive care ward of Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital, that he heard his doctor’s prognosis.

“The doctors were having a press conference at the hospital, and they explained my injury. . . . One of the reporters asked whether I would be able to walk again. The doctor gave me an 8% chance of regaining it. It was the first time I had heard that,” says Hart, who was in considerable pain and could only barely move his neck.

Suddenly, he was acutely aware that everything had changed. “Before I was injured,” he says, “I was living life at the top of the world. . . . After the accident, 95% of my life was over as I knew it.”

Lying in bed, vital air and food piped into his body to keep him alive, Hart wondered what was in store for him. “You realize you’re going to live,” he says, “but you think, ‘My life will never be as good as it was.’ ”

When nurses tried to wean him from the tracheal tube connecting him to a respirator, he fought them. He could no longer control the muscles in his diaphragm used in breathing, and he hadn’t mastered using his neck muscles for the same effect. And although he couldn’t speak, he managed to mouth angry words and obscenities that sent nurses from his hospital room in tears.

“My dad would say, ‘How can he make you cry, he can’t even talk! Just don’t look at his mouth,’ ” Hart recalls with a mischievous grin.

The day finally came, though, when he decided to take himself off the respirator. “I decided, OK, I’m going to do this. . . . I felt like finally, I was in control,” he says.

It was the first of what would be many small victories for the young man who had gone from a vigorous 170 pounds to just over 100 pounds in a matter of weeks.

Hart gives most of the credit for his comeback to his parents, Wyatt and Sue Hart, who rushed to his side on the field and stayed with him at the hospital, as well as a legion of family friends.

Municipal Judge Frederick Horn, another longtime pal of Wyatt Hart’s, disagrees.

“No matter what anyone else tells you, he’s the one who did it all. He’s the one who had to fight the battle and do all the struggling,” says Horn, who was then a top homicide prosecutor for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and would come after work most days to talk and help with things such as shaving the teen-ager.

“He was an angry young man, but once he got over the initial shock about the injury, it was just him there. And he realized what he had to do,” says Horn, who still remembers the day he visited Hart in the rehabilitation wing of a Northridge hospital and saw him move a finger more than three months after the accident.

“It was the index finger on his right hand. . . . I’m sure tears came to my eyes,” Horn says. “I was just beside myself with joy, thinking, ‘This kid is going to be OK.’ ”

Todd Hart had come a long way when he arrived home in March, 1983, 6 1/2 months after the collision. He could get around with an electric wheelchair, and there were signs of slight mobility in his legs. He still couldn’t feed himself, but he could reach a hand to his nose to scratch when it itched. And he had resolved to return to college.

The man who most made that possible was Greg Kading, who lived with the Harts from the age of 12 pretty much as a foster brother to Todd and his younger brother, Ryan Hart.

Kading slept in the specially equipped quarters the Harts had added onto their ranch home. He would wake every hour or two and turn Hart over to keep him from developing bedsores on the rail-thin frame that had shrunken to barely 100 pounds, recalls Kading, now a 29-year-old Los Angeles police officer.

Kading also drove Hart three days a week to an outpatient rehabilitation center in Pomona, and two days a week to Cal State Long Beach, pushing him in his new manual wheelchair to classes they both attended.

“He knew I needed the assistance, but he never gave me too much,” Hart says. “I was just barely getting the use of my arms back. He would let me push the wheelchair, even though it meant he’d have to walk in circles behind me, because I couldn’t go very fast.”

One very public victory came on Feb. 23, 1987, at a charity golf tournament sponsored by a foundation that family friends had started in Hart’s name to assist injured athletes.

In attendance was Jeff Severson, a former defensive back with the Washington Redskins and the Rams who had also played for the Cal State Long Beach 49ers. After the accident, Severson gave Hart his 1970 Pasadena Rose Bowl championship ring. It wasn’t for keeps though, he explained to Hart’s father: “Look, the day will come when he will walk, and he will hand this ring to me.”

At the tournament, Hart called out to Severson. Then, with metal crutches clasping his arms, he walked slowly forward and handed him the ring.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” Blankenship says.

By then, Hart and his girlfriend, Polita, were already the proud parents of a 7-month-old son, Steven, a towheaded, blue-eyed boy. Even the story of their meeting has an improbable ring.

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1983. The 17-year-old Garden Grove High School cheerleader had just read a story about Hart, his pluck and his effort to regain some mobility. She wanted to congratulate him and offer her support.

The native of Ecuador allows that she also thought he was “cute.”

She tracked down the Hart family telephone number the same day. Listening to her on a speaker phone, friends and family within earshot, Hart took her number. It was the beginning of a love affair that friends say continues to this day.

“Polita has a heart of gold,” says San Diego business owner Kurt Sardella, a high school friend who remains part of Hart’s inner circle. “She’s the finest woman I’ve ever met. She really loves him for who he is.”

Polita Hart, 26, just laughs. “He’s my husband, so I can’t be too nice,” she grins. “But I do admire Todd. He’s an incredible person. . . . Todd and I have grown up together.”

Hart finished Cal State Long Beach in December, 1988, with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. A law degree was next on Hart’s agenda, but first he embarked on a six-month campaign to “get myself physically ready for law school.”

Five days a week, eight hours a day, he trained with a therapist. A high-water mark in his progress was the day he walked the mile length of Temescal Canyon in Pacific Palisades. “It took me 2 hours and 38 minutes,” he remembers with pride.

He hasn’t worked out so much since the start of law school in fall, 1989. Today, he mostly relies on his wheelchair to get around the spacious 3,800-square-foot home he and his wife just bought in the exclusive South County gated community of Coto de Caza--courtesy, in part, of a $3.93-million settlement of a lawsuit over his accident.

In the airy living room, Hart is clearly uncomfortable discussing himself. “You need to come back when we don’t talk about me,” he tells a visitor. Yet he knows he’s a symbol of hope for others with spinal injuries.

“My dad keeps telling me, ‘Your story, whether you like it or not, gives other people inspiration,’ ” he says.

Hart already has a job with the prestigious law firm Buchalter, Nemer, Fields & Younger in Newport Beach, where he was an intern last summer. Assuming that he passes the bar exam in July, he plans to begin making his mark in litigation and legal transactions this fall.

And there’s something else on his calendar. Hart has decided to throw a “Break Your Neck” party Sept. 11.

“Only Todd would do that,” laughs Blankenship, who says Sue Hart finds the whole idea “kind of ghoulish.”

Not so, says her son. It’s really a party for 100 or so relatives, friends and parents of friends whose time and energy put him on the road to recovery.

“I love to get together with my friends and we have a landmark to celebrate,” says Hart, who views the last decade as the first 10 years of his new life. “This is a way of showing my thanks. I want everyone to know I appreciate how much they have helped me.”