Football Hero of the Best Sort : Walk-On Receiver for Wisconsin Probably Saved a Life in Tragedy

They talked for 15 minutes Monday, the 19-year old Wisconsin student from Antigo, Wis., and the sophomore Badger walk-on wide receiver who had probably saved her life 48 hours earlier.

“My name is Michael Brin,” he said when he called her. “From Saturday.”

Brin didn’t have to say anything else. He couldn’t. As soon as Aimee Jansen heard his name, she knew exactly who it was.

“Oh, my God,” Jansen blurted out. “Thank you, very much.”

She thanked him eight, maybe nine more times. And when it was over, Brin promised to call her again that evening, to see how she was doing.

“It was nice to hear her laughing mood, instead of the crying and panic,” Brin said later.

Saturday, minutes after Wisconsin’s victory against Michigan at Camp Randall Stadium, Brin and Jansen found themselves in the middle of a postgame celebration gone terribly wrong. School security officials later estimated that as many as 12,000 students surged toward the end zone at game’s end, presumably to tear down a goal post in the northeast corner of the 76-year-old Madison landmark.

Instead, the force of the crowd pinned some students atop, under and against a retaining fence that later gave way. As the students fell forward, they began to stack up like flapjacks. Another metal railing, this one at least three inches thick and anchored in the concrete by six-inch bolts, was bent back by the crowd.

In all, an estimated 69 students were injured. Thirteen were hospitalized that day, seven of them originally listed in critical condition. As of Monday, though, only eight of those patients remained in area hospitals. Five students had been upgraded to good condition, three to fair.

Meanwhile, university officials continued their investigation of the incident. Meetings were held, suggestions entertained. After all, only four days remain before the 15th-ranked Badgers face No. 3 Ohio State at Camp Randall.

By then, Wisconsin Athletic Director Pat Richter said, the railing will have been replaced. “Safety codes,” he said.

But for now, a Wisconsin security guard keeps watch over the twisted debris that still litters the site. Guards have been assigned to monitor the area since Saturday, when investigators strung long yellow strips of police-line tape around the damage.

It is an eerie, almost surreal sight. Red and white pompons still litter the ground, as do crushed red drinking cups, makeshift posters, and flattened popcorn boxes. Long pieces of red railing lay diagonally across the seats in the student section, where sit the “Bleacher Creatures.” Nearby, only a few yards away from the tunnel used by Wisconsin players last Saturday, is the fence that Jansen was pinned against.

Jansen and several friends made the mistake of venturing too close to the tunnel. They were pushed forward, closer and closer to the fence.

“People started panicking, people were screaming,” she said. “I got separated from my friends. I got whipped against the fence, I remember. It just got to the point where all of a sudden it was hard to breathe. I couldn’t breathe anymore. I was just saying, ‘Help me! Help me! Help me!’

“And then there was a football player. All I remember is I saw (No.) 3. I said, ‘Please help me!’ ”

It was Brin, the scout team wide receiver from Highland Park, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. Still wearing his helmet, Brin grabbed Jansen by the pants and helped her over the fence.

“You’re free,” he told her.

Jansen is fine now. Her arm is bruised, her body sore. But for those few terrifying minutes, she was at the mercy of the crowd.

“I had to concentrate (to breathe), it was getting that bad,” she said. “You could hear men and women crying and screaming, ‘I can’t breathe!’ Probably another two minutes and I would have passed out for sure.”

Jansen wasn’t the only student Brin helped. Wading into the crowd with teammates Joe Panos, Tyler Adam, John Hall and Brent Moss, Brin later revived an unconscious student, who by then was blue in the face and whose eyes had swelled, with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He also helped stabilize another student who had been nearly crushed in the incident.

Now he is being hailed as a hero. Without him, Jansen said, she would be dead today.

“He saved my life,” she said.

It was blind luck. Normally Brin would have been one of the first players to reach the locker room. But this time, as he searched for friends in the bleachers, he lingered on the field. That’s when he saw the crowd surge forward and saw Jansen gasping for air and pleading for help.

“I don’t see myself as a hero,” said Brin, who is so low on the Badger depth chart that school publicity officials still list him as a quarterback--his position in high school. “I’m just an everyday kid. I’m not a hero. I’m just Mike Brin.”

Not to Jansen, he isn’t. Jansen spent two days trying to track down Brin to say thanks. With only a jersey number to go by, Jansen soon discovered that Brin, who has appeared in only one play this season, shares No. 3 with starting cornerback Kenny Gales.

But they finally found each other. They tried to keep the conversation light, but it was difficult. The scenes were hard to forget: students bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious students, the shrill sound of ambulance sirens, the screams, the seemingly lifeless bodies of the seriously injured.

“It all seemed like a flash right then,” Brin said. “But thinking about it, it seems like a lifetime now.”

Or as Panos recalled, “They were limp, dead weight. I thought they were (dead).”

The near tragedy has forced Wisconsin officials to rethink assorted game-day policies. A formal announcement is expected within days, but Richter said the short-term changes could include the elimination of several bleacher rows near the railing, monitoring the number of students in those sections, and moving the Wisconsin marching band onto the field at game’s end, the better to provide an additional buffer zone.

A more vigilant examination of containers for alcohol would not be implemented, he said.

However, Richter did reveal the possibility of placing bumper stickers on the bleachers. They would read: “Please Don’t Push. Remember Oct. 30, 1993.”

How could anyone forget?