A Rude Awakening From His Dream

Travis Roy came into Metcalf Hall, on the second floor of George Sherman Union on Commonwealth Avenue, and sat beneath the huge flags of the schools of Boston University to exchange banter with his hockey teammates Saturday night.

It was a week short of six months since the Terriers had raised the 1995 NCAA championship banner at Walter Brown Arena.

The banner marks the spot of tragedy now.

It was a week short of six months since Roy, Dan Ronan, Michel Laroque and Scott King had walked out of their brownstone dormitory that overlooks Fenway Park and gone to the rink to play their first college hockey game.

Three walked back, empty after an 8-5 victory.

It was a week short of six months since Roy had accomplished the goal he stated to Lee and Brenda Roy when he was a tow-headed 14-year-old in Maine: to be a Division I hockey player.

His career lasted 11 seconds.

The rink is quiet now, and the eye is immediately drawn to the banner and the boards below, about 20 feet right of the goal mouth. A week short of six months ago, Boston University had taken a 1-0 lead over North Dakota 1 minute 45 seconds into the game, and Travis Roy skated out to take his first shift with the third line.

A faceoff, and the puck went into the offensive end, to the left of the Terrier bench. Adrenaline charged, he was going to establish himself quickly, to check somebody hard, and to the right of the goal mouth he went after a North Dakota body.

The angle was bad. He bounced off, hit the boards with his helmet and lay still on the ice.

The time was 1:56.

A whistle blew and play stopped.

For Travis Roy, it stopped forever.

Lee Roy, who had been an All-American at Vermont, came down to the ice. “Hey, boy, let’s get going,” he said. “There’s a hockey game to play.”

“Dad, I’m in deep . . .” his son said. “But Dad, I made it.”

“You’re right, son, you did,” Lee Roy said.

A week short of six months ago, Lee and Brenda Roy learned the diagnosis, that their Travis had blown out his fourth cervical vertebra and that his spinal cord was almost severed. There was no movement, no feeling, almost no life.

That was first: Save his life. Then came trying to give him a life as a quadriplegic. The doctors are still trying, but it’s up to Travis Roy now, and in Boston that’s what he was trying to do this weekend: to learn to live life on new terms.

“Every day, I think a little further into the future,” he says. “I have to make a decision whether to go back to school next fall. But there’s a two-year window where I might be able to get some mobility and sensitivity back, and I need to do more for that.”

For a week short of six months, he has gone through the emotional transformation from able-bodied to paralyzed.

“When he was at the BU hospital, I would go by and he would be there in the bed, not saying anything, and then he would just say ‘I’m tired’ and close his eyes,” says Ronan, a defenseman also skating his first college shift when Roy was injured.

“That meant, ‘Go, and leave me alone.’

“Then, the other day I called him in Atlanta and he was on the phone talking with somebody else and said kind of lightly, ‘Hey, let me call you back. No, wait, I don’t remember the number. I can’t write it down. You call me.’ ”

The mood swing is from a state of vegetation to one of resignation and then to hope, all endured during 3 1/2 months in Boston, then nine weeks at Atlanta’s Shepard Spinal Center, where sympathy is measured against challenge.

While Roy did his job, learning to live life under new terms, the hockey community galvanized because that education was going to be expensive. The NCAA’s catastrophic insurance policy took care of the hospital costs, but it was going to take much more money to deal with a future that he cannot walk toward.

About $200,000 a year more for each of the 10,000 people who are rendered quadriplegics each year in this country.

There is no more hockey-crazed city in this country than Boston, whose fans are like a large family.

A phone-a-thon quickly raised $500,000. A celebrity auction raised an additional $200,000, with a golf outing for four with Boston hockey icon Bobby Orr going for $20,000.

When the Roys tried to check out of their hotel after a week because it was expensive, the manager told them to stay. There would be no bill.

The word spread. Bob and Susan Taylor, hockey fans in Dallas, called to ask what they could do.

A van would help, said Ed Carpenter, the Boston University sports information director who was aiming high and willing to work his way down.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Taylor, and six weeks later drove a $37,000 van from Dallas to Boston to give to the Roys to be converted to accommodate a wheelchair.

More than $1 million has been raised, $24,000 on Wednesday night at a benefit hockey game at Tabor Academy in Massachusetts, where the guest of honor was an honored alumnus.

“I had heard about it while I was in Atlanta and I hoped to be there to surprise them,” Travis Roy says. He was there, but it was no surprise because his arrival in Boston was well-covered by local reporters who have all but adopted him, covering his accident and the aftermath and even acceding to his wishes that they not attend the banquet Saturday night so he could spend time with teammates as a teammate, and not a celebrity. He played that part earlier in the day when he joined in first pitch ceremonies at Fenway Park for a Red Sox game.

The Roys are back, guests again at the hotel in this sold-out city where rooms are $400 this weekend because of the 100th running of the Boston Marathon. Again, there will be no bill.

He has spent time with friends, telling them of Atlanta, of the lows, when he first went to a restaurant with Lee and realized the difficulty of eating in public when he can’t feed himself; of the highs, when he began to learn the things he can do.

“It’s like while I was in Atlanta, I learned there are a lot of open doors to paralyzed people,” Roy says.

Then he paused.

“The problem now,” he says, “is I can’t open a door.”

Others open them for him, and he uses a tube to guide his wheelchair, blowing hard to go forward, softer to steer the chair, sucking to back up, learning, in essence, to walk again.

He went for a tuxedo fitting. His sister, Todi, is a nurse in Boston and last summer she had postponed her wedding until April 27 to wait for the end of the Terriers’ season so her brother could take part.

Today, he returns to Yarmouth, Maine, to a transformed home, with a new apartment built in back.

And he plans for a future.

“Look,” he says, “nobody plays hockey forever, and someday I was going to have to hang it up. But I didn’t plan on doing it this early.”

There is no condemnation of a game he has played since he was a tot, getting his first skates with 3 1/2-inch blades at 20 months.

“No,” he says. “If someday I have a son, I hope he can play. I love hockey. I guess, in a way, it will be like being back in hockey, through him.”

The Boston University locker room is empty now, lockers cleaned out after a season in which the Terriers made it to the NCAA Final Four for the sixth time in seven seasons. There, in a row of cubicles along the back wall with name plaques above them, one of the lockers still has a few things on the top shelf: a mask, a mouthpiece, skates with “T. Roy” in blue ink on the plastic between the boot and the blade.

They are skates Travis Roy will never wear again, but skates he can pass along to another generation of New England hockey player.

A family heirloom in the making.