A Hit and Missed Paperwork Alter Player’s Life

ATHENS, Ga. -- Decory Bryant had been hurt on the football field before. He’d bruised muscles, dislocated fingers, broken a few bones. This was different.

The pain in his neck was dull, but it was spreading.

As he stumbled off the field after returning a kick, trainers guided him to the bench and ordered him to sit. They asked him to hold out his arms, then pressed down on them to check that they were stable and strong. They asked him to swivel his neck, swing his arms in circles, shrug his shoulders to see whether he had lost any freedom of motion.

The hit had been vicious -- so vicious that the National Athletic Trainers Assn. would eventually show it to high school and college players as an example of the dangers of headfirst tackling.

Still, the trainers decided moments later that Bryant was OK. The cornerback was the star of the defensive backfield for the University of Georgia Bulldogs; his coaches wanted him in the game.

But he didn’t budge.

Something wasn’t right.

Bryant knew his body well. For three grueling seasons, he had hurled it against some of the nation’s quickest wide receivers and offered it as a human bull’s-eye during kickoff returns.

He also knew that his body could crumble in the crucible of the football field. That very week, he had visited the office of Hoke Wilder, a hard-nosed assistant athletic director. Among his responsibilities: arranging insurance for players who wanted it.

Bryant told Wilder his family was ready to pay the $5,000 premium for coverage. The policy would pay $500,000 if an injury ended his career before he had an opportunity to sign a contract with the National Football League.

But it was already halfway into the season -- and just days before the team’s game with the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

“Is it too late to get any insurance for the year?” Decory recalls asking.

“I don’t think so,” Wilder answered.

Later that Tuesday, Bryant waited at his locker for Wilder to bring the insurance papers that needed his signature. Wilder never showed. Nor did he the next day.

On Thursday, the insurance company had given Wilder a notice that Bryant could be covered. But Bryant and Wilder didn’t meet then either.

All week, Bryant’s mother, Betty White, called anxiously to make sure the papers were in order. White and her son had talked about getting insurance since the summer. She’d always worried about his safety -- when he was younger, she made Bryant retreat from the gridiron to the baseball diamond -- but she was more nervous lately.

“You’d better take care of it before the game,” she told him Friday night.

But Wilder was nowhere to be found -- and Bryant had no time to look.

After the game, Wilder’s home phone rang. It was head coach Mark Richt, demanding to know whether Bryant’s insurance coverage was set.

“I would say it is probably less than a 50-50 chance,” Wilder answered, according to his deposition. “What is the problem?”

Decory’s injury, said the young coach, was much worse than we initially thought.

*

Each Saturday in the fall, thousands of football players such as Decory Bryant put their lives on the line as their colleges earn big payouts and grab priceless national prestige.

At Georgia, where home games attract pilgrims from across Bulldog Nation, Richt’s latest contract guarantees him $2 million a year; his top assistants make six-figure salaries. The team’s share for playing in one game alone, the 2006 Nokia Sugar Bowl, was $1.7 million.

In return, players get scholarships, housing and travel expenses -- and an opportunity to showcase their talent to pro scouts.

But since 1977, 252 football players have had devastating injuries to their cervical cords and not completely recovered -- 31 at the college level, according to a University of North Carolina study.

All NCAA players are automatically covered by catastrophic insurance that pays medical and other expenses, along with a disability benefit. But a few athletes with pro potential can buy policies to protect millions of dollars in expected income.

Bryant was a member of that elite. In Orlando, where he grew up, he knew he had a future in football from the moment he first took the field in eighth grade. Georgia coach Jim Donnan, impressed by that confidence, recruited him for the Bulldogs.

When Donnan was fired and Richt took over, Bryant became a fourth-stringer.

After watching a painful loss to a so-so South Carolina team from the sidelines, he brazenly approached cornerback coach Willie Martinez.

“I understand you’ve got to do what you got to do to keep your job. But if you don’t play me, you’re going to lose your job,” he said. “Let me know when you want to win.”

By his junior season, he was starting every game. By October of his senior year, Bryant’s NFL hopes were soaring. Coaches were telling him he had a realistic chance of being a first-round pick, which meant a shot at a starting job in the NFL and a salary of more than $1 million. He had started 25 games in a row and his team was homing in on another SEC East title.

For the most part, he was not called upon for special-teams duty deep into games. But that Saturday in October 2003, the Bulldogs were locked in a 10-10 tie with the lowly Blazers at halftime, so he was sent out to field the kickoff.

The pigskin spun toward the giant “A” branded in the end zone and dropped into Bryant’s hands. “Sic ‘em,” the fans screamed.

As Bryant bolted forward, Alabama-Birmingham players forced him to lurch toward the middle of the field, without a lot of protection.

Bryant glanced to his left in time to see a defender slam into a blocker only inches away. Bryant darted to his right to dodge another defender.

His vision obstructed by his helmet, he never saw another defender launch into him, crashing helmet-first near the right side of Bryant’s head. Then another defender careered into him, hurtling all three toward the turf.

Bryant clung to the football as he struggled to remain standing. A Georgia blocker watched helplessly as Bryant’s body was flung like a rag doll.

On his way down, all Bryant could think was: Where did he come from?

His friends in the crowd could hear the hit from the top of Sanford Stadium.

*

“If you move again,” a doctor barked, “you run the risk of paralyzing yourself.”

Bryant gulped and tried to stay calm. He had been taken to the hospital after the game (Georgia 16, Alabama-Birmingham 13) and was fidgeting on an exam-room table.

Then X-rays confirmed the doctor’s fears:

Your neck is broken, the physician said. Walking again may be a long shot. Playing again is out of the question.

“Is this really happening?” Bryant thought. “Will I wake up any moment?”

Then he realized he had never signed an insurance policy.

*

In the aftermath, Hoke Wilder remembers frantically calling Mike Price, the agent at ESIX Entertainment and Sports Insurance Experts, with whom he had discussed Bryant’s coverage earlier in the week.

Each year, Georgia’s football coaches sent Wilder a list of players who had the potential to play in the pros, and Wilder forwarded it to the insurance company to see whether any policy was available. Bryant’s untimely injury disrupted the system.

The day after the game, Wilder said, he sent Price a letter outlining the details of their earlier conversations about Bryant. He would recall following Price’s instructions and backdating the letter to Oct. 24 -- the day before the game. (Price did not return phone calls for comment.)

But in late November, as the Bulldogs prepared to face Georgia Tech, Richt pulled Bryant aside and leveled with him: The insurance company wasn’t going to cover him.

Bryant figured it was time to level with Richt too. “I’ve got several people looking into the situation,” he said. “They’re waiting to take over the case.”

Richt insisted that his injured player had other options, Bryant remembers. A trust fund, for example. Setting one up requires a careful treading of NCAA rules, but the school said in depositions that it had done so before, for David Jacobs, a star defensive tackle who’d had a stroke after a hard hit in practice.

Bryant took his coach’s measure. “I trust you,” he remembers saying, and they shook hands.

Weeks later, Damon Evans took over as head of the athletic department. One of the first things he did was fire Wilder and a few others in what was called a reorganization.

Evans, who declined several requests for an interview, also sat down with Bryant’s mother. The athletics association has paid Bryant’s medical bills, funded his rehab and offered to hire a lawyer if he wanted to sue the insurance company, he told her. But that was all. There would be no trust fund for Bryant, no other financial help.

*

Georgia coaches “pretend they have this special relationship with athletes,” says Bryant’s lawyer, Hue Henry. “They create an aura of trust. They use that ambience to their benefit.”

Henry sued the university on Bryant’s behalf in December 2004. But the school’s lawyers have successfully delayed the proceedings several times. Henry fears he won’t be able to depose Richt for months. The school’s lawyers would not comment; neither would Wilder or his lawyer. Tom Jackson, the school’s vice president of public affairs, would say only that “the university does expect to prevail on the facts.”

These days, Bryant works in Athens, Ga., as a housing consultant, tackling the details of home finance and learning the ins-and-outs of construction.

Although muscular, he is no longer in playing shape. He can still walk and sometimes run, but some days he winces with pain at the slightest movement in his neck. Then he dips into the Tylenol he keeps handy in case of sudden, intense headaches.

He says he’ll keep fighting the university, however long it takes.

“I’m not out to destroy anything,” he says. “I’m out to get what’s owed to me.”