Umpire is in the wrong place at the wrong time

Ed Manning never saw it coming.

He was a 58-year-old umpire in the Arena Football League, working a game between the Iowa Barnstormers and Orlando Predators on May 1, 1999, when he was accidentally blindsided by an Iowa player. Two more players tripped over Manning as he lay unconscious.

“When he hit me from the side, it catapulted me backward,” Manning said. “I was actually out on my feet when he hit me, so I couldn’t reach back to break my fall. My head hit off the turf.”

Medical personnel strapped Manning to a backboard and wheeled him off the field. Perhaps by reflex, he gave the crowd a thumbs up, although he doesn’t remember doing so. He was taken to Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines, only two blocks away, and the initial diagnosis was promising.

“They really thought at the beginning I’d just gotten my bell rung and I’d wake up in the morning with a headache,” he said.

But a CT scan indicated that his brain was swelling and there was bleeding of the brain stem. He lapsed into a coma and doctors didn’t expect him to recover. His wife and children flew in from Elizabeth, Pa. Also standing vigil were then-AFL commissioner David Baker, supervisor of officials Carl Paganelli, and the other members of Manning’s crew. A priest delivered last rites.

Something Manning now calls miraculous happened on the fourth day of his coma: The swelling began to subside. He woke up five days later.

In all, he spent 18 days recovering in Iowa and nine more in Pittsburgh before returning home. He had double vision for 14 months after the collision but now shows no ill effects but for a slight numbness on his right side.

His career as a football and basketball official was over, though. He was injured in his 13th season in the AFL and had worked for nine years as a Big Ten Conference umpire.

The season after Manning was injured, the AFL instituted a rule prohibiting players from using umpires as picks to help offensive players shed defenders.

If it happens three times in a game, the offending player is automatically ejected -- even if he didn’t commit the first two offenses.

Although Manning never returned to the field, he continued working in arena football as a regional supervisor of officiating until retiring after last season.

He will still work for the AFL officiating department this season as an observer.

“This gets in your blood,” he said. “I think I’m a football guy till death.”

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sam.farmer@latimes.com