The Miracle Within

 

When the dreams overtake him in the middle of the night, transporting him to a world that exists only in his sub-conscious mind, Kent Waldrep feels whole again. He dances with his wife. He plays catch with his two sons. He even runs with the football, runs hard, fast and without fear.

“I play a lot of golf in my dreams,” Waldrep says, the trace of a pained expression rising across his lips. “I can still feel my golf swing. I can still feel it!”

On a rainy spring morning in sprawling North Dallas, the 42-year-old businessman pauses to consider the irony of his words. While discussing his shadowy nocturnal visions, the man sits in a wheelchair parked behind his neatly ordered desk at the Kent Waldrep National Paralysis Foundation, located on the sixth floor of a modern high-rise office complex. Six feet tall and thin, with short brown hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and a slight pallor around his cheeks, he’s wearing a starched white shirt and a blue necktie pulled tight to the collar.

“But you know what’s the weirdest thing? Sometimes when I wake up, it takes a few seconds for it to dawn on me that, ’Oops. That’s right. I can’t get out of bed by myself.”

Unlike the carefree man in his dreams, Waldrep cannot walk, dress himself or comb his hair. All because of one play in a college football game more than two decades ago—one play that unwittingly launched him on two distinct and equally daunting crusades.

Yet for all the pain and heartache caused by that one horrifying moment, his life is not coursing with bile or self pity. It’s filled with perseverance, triumph, and most of all, hope.

As he jogged onto the turf at Birmingham’s Legion Field, Kent Waldrep’s eyes locked on Paul “Bear” Bryant. It was Oct. 26, 1974, and the Bear, wearing his trademark houndstooth hat and a knowing scowl, was leaning against the goalpost, surveying his team during pre-game warm-ups. For a moment, Waldrep stared at the famed coach, not realizing how his life would become intermeshed with the legend’s.

Like most boys in Texas, Waldrep gravitated to football, becoming a highly recruited tailback who matured into a starter for the Texas Christian Horned Frogs. His 4.5 speed and tenacity with the football made him one of the brightest stars on a mediocre team. Of course, when Waldrep and his TCU teammates stepped onto the turf at Legion Field, they never had a prayer against undefeated, defending national champion Alabama. The Crimson Tide, in the midst of one of the most successful decades in college history—and a run of five consecutive Southeastern Conference championships—was a 35-point favorite.

After sustaining a broken collarbone six weeks earlier and playing only one quarter the previous week against Texas A&M, Waldrep’s hold on the starting tailback position was uncertain when the team arrived in Birmingham. Just before kickoff, TCU head coach Jim Shofner gave him the nod.

“It’s yours,” he said. “Have a good ’un.”

Early in the second quarter, with ’Bama clinging to a 7-0 lead, Waldrep took a pitch from quarterback Lee Cook, darted right on a sweep and immediately encountered a mass of crimson jerseys. He sustained a hit, an ordinary tackle on an ordinary play, and the impact of the collision flipped him into the air.

An instant later, he landed on the turf with a thud. A thousand times before he had gone airborne and landed with just such a jolt. A thousand times before he had climbed off the turf. Not this time. This time, he never felt the impact.

For Waldrep, the whole world shifted into surreal slow-motion. “It was a feeling of such helplessness,” he recalls. “I wanted to move my legs but they wouldn’t budge.”

Thinking only that his bell had been rung, Waldrep struggled to get up, but he couldn’t feel his leg, his arms…

Within seconds, the TCU trainers were in his face, grabbing his fingers, asking him questions.

“Can you feel this?” trainer Elmer Brown shouted, moving from place to place on Kent’s body. “How about here?”

“Can you raise your right leg? How about your left? Move this foot! Cross your arms! Any feeling here? Don’t move your head!”

Struggling for air, with panic gripping him, Kent shouted, “I can’t breathe!”

Soon after he was transported to Birmingham’s University Hospital, TCU officials tracked down Waldrep’s parents in New York City, where the transplanted Texans operated a mortgage banking business. “Getting that call was like having all the wind knocked out of you,” says his mother, Denise Waldrep. “We packed a suitcase and caught the next plane to Birmingham. Then when we got there I discovered that there was nothing in the suitcase. I was so distraught I didn’t know what I was doing.”

The paralysis, which resulted from a twisting of the vertebra near the edge of the neck, left Kent completely numb below his head. “It was like being decapitated,” he says. “When the doctors and nurses were poking around at my body, it felt like I was looking at them doing that to somebody else.”

A month at University Hospital and another three months at a Houston rehabilitation center convinced the doctors that Waldrep would never walk again. In fact, walking was just the tip of the iceberg for the quadriplegic. They told him he would never be able to father children; drive a car; urinate without a cathater; write his name. Implicit in all the straight talk was the end of Waldrep’s life as a productive human being.

He wanted none of that. “Early on there was a certain immaturity to [my outlook],” Waldrep says. “It was never, ’Oh, no! I’ll never walk again!’ It was more like, ’OK. Whatever it takes, I’ll teach myself to walk again.”

But the most painful blow was delivered by his own school.

Eleven months after the accident, TCU washed its hands of Kent Waldrep. As the medical bills mounted—and the prospect of expensive life-long care loomed—the university and its lawyers made a strategic decision to renounce any further financial liability for his injury. The news was devastating to the middle-class family, who thought their son was covered by TCU’s insurance policies. It was an even greater jolt psychologically.

“TCU completely abandoned Kent, treated him as if he’d never existed, never risked his life for that school,” says his father, Al Waldrep. “How do you imagine that made him feel?”

At the same time, Alabamians smothered the Waldreps with affection and cash for his medical bills. “The people of Alabama really took us into their hearts,” Waldrep says. “I hate to say it, but I feel a lot closer to the University of Alabama than I do to TCU, because I stopped having an alma mater the day the people at TCU turned their backs on me.”

Out of the tragedy came a special relationship with Alabama’s legendary coach, who would arrange for a special tribute at halftime of the next season’s Alabama-TCU game. Bryant visited him repeatedly in the hospital, once even showed up with baseball owners Charley Finley and George Steinbrenner.

“I can remember so well waking up in intensive care…and seeing Coach Bryant’s face,” Waldrep says. “It was a real shock…and he kept saying, ’We wanta see you get outta here real soon now, son.’”

While waiting in the hallway, Waldrep’s mother saw the Bear fighting back tears.