King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Fatalism and denial: Carrying on after a sports catastrophe. Plus: The idiotic Patriots "spying" scandal.
Editor's note: Late Tuesday, Kevin Everett's doctors expressed more optimism about his prognosis.
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Sept. 12, 2007 | The news about Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett looks awfully dire. Doctors have called the cervical spine injury he suffered making a tackle in Sunday's loss to the Denver Broncos "potentially catastrophic" and life-threatening.
Orthopedic surgeon Andrew Cappuccino, who operated on Everett Monday, said, "A best-case scenario is full recovery, but not likely," and that there's a good chance Everett will be at least partially paralyzed. Everett remains under sedation as doctors wait for the swelling to go down so they can better analyze his injuries, news reports say. Infection and blood clots are serious dangers.
Not much to say other than how awful it is, how everyone hopes Everett proves the doctors wrong.
It's hard to watch and hard to think about. Hard to stay in my chair as I type this. Being paralyzed is one of my greatest fears. Isn't it yours? The tackle on which Everett was injured looked like a thousand other tackles made every weekend by hundreds of players.
How can any of us watch all those tackles next week and all the weeks to come without cringing in fear of the same thing happening? How can the players themselves race downfield toward collisions even more severe than the one that changed Everett's life?
Somehow, we will, they will. It's a life skill we all develop, or maybe it's an instinct, I don't know. But it's not coldheartedness. We all do it every day.
One of the first things I ever wrote about professionally was death in a boxing ring. A local up-and-coming lightweight in San Jose, Calif., named David Gonzalez had knocked out a journeyman named Rico Velazquez -- who had no business being in the ring that night, but that's another story -- and Velazquez had died from his injuries.
I interviewed Gonzalez as his next fight approached. He told me he felt bad about Velazquez's death, but not guilty. Serious injury and death were hazards of the trade, he shrugged.
I asked him how he dealt with that. Having seen firsthand the toll his sport could take, how could he climb back through the ropes? He turned the question around on me. "You could get killed every time you get into your car," he said. "You just don't think about it."
I became fascinated with the question and asked it to pretty much every boxer I met over the next few months, which was a lot of them since I was writing about boxing. Almost all of them gave me a variation on Gonzalez's answer, a mix of fatalism and denial that I found familiar even as I found it strange.