By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — This was supposed to be a column about the changing of the seasons, not from fall to winter, although that change certainly has come on hard this week, but from football to basketball.
It was supposed to make the point that with Bob Huggins in town, the change is not quite so shocking as it used to be, for his warriors play as hard-nosed in underwear as any football team in the nation does in pads.
But as we were beginning to write the first sentence of that column we were distracted. The television across the room was tuned into the Pittsburgh Steelers game with the Miami Dolphins and we heard the play-by-play broadcaster say that Patrick White had taken off around end with the football.
This thought began creeping into the mind.
“How many times have I seen White …”
That’s when the hit came, a hit with more violence, more fury, more force and power than any blow Bob Huggins or Bill Stewart’s players ever could deliver. White had been tripped along the sideline and was going down as Steelers’ safety Ike Taylor, racing in at full speed, delivered a helmet-to-helmet shot that violently snapped White’s head to the side.
He was out cold before he hit the ground at the feet of Mike Tomlin, the Steelers’ coach.
The football trickled out of his now flaccid arms, rolling harmlessly away and he lay there, motionless.
Tomlin immediately signaled for medical help. Dolphin players, teammates of White who undoubtedly have taken to him just as did the entire state of West Virginia when he quarterbacked here for four years like no one before him ever had, gathered around.
The Steelers knelt in circle, praying on the field.
Too often they had seen such sights, a player laying unconscious from a blow to the head. At best he had suffered a concussion, although considering that he has a history of the same at West Virginia, that is not a minor problem.
At worst … well, the possibilities are frightening.
The backboard stretcher they brought out is a precaution they take, so it is not a cause for panic. The fact that White tried to roll over onto his side at one point showed he had regained consciousness and had some mobility. That they cancelled a call for a helicopter to transport him to the hospital also was a good sign, although ambulance rides are best taken in the driver’s seat, not in the emergency area.
The shivers I was experiencing by then were not from the cold, cold day, but from long ago and far away, from a moment that remains seared in the mind of what was then a teenaged kid, part football player, budding journalist.
Somewhere, I knew, I had the graying remnants of a column that a high school sports editor had written. It was important to him and he had saved it. It was there, in the back pages of the scrapbook his parents had kept for him.
There had been a football scrimmage in the fall of 1958, a Lyndhurst High School senior, just 17, named Ronnie Canella had come up to tackle Ray Chrzanowski of Englewood, who had just broken through the line. Canella had made a solid, clean hit, but when the players got up from the pile, Canella lay motionless.
“Then,” this high school journalist wrote, “Ed Zach, Ronnie’s coach, came over to the injured player, who said, ‘Don’t touch me; I’m paralyzed.’”
The journalist had just gotten out of the pile himself and heard those horrible words.
Canella laid on the field for a half an hour, according to the article, and would learn later at the hospital that he had suffered breaks of his fifth and sixth vertebrae.
He was paralyzed from the chest down.
Just like that, in an instant, his life had changed. Instead of hoping to beat his rival, East Rutherford in the Thanksgiving Day game that year, Canella hoped that somehow they would take him out of the hospital to view the game.
That moment, that article, as primitive as it now reads, has never left the budding journalist’s mind, just as he still faintly can hear the injured teenager instruct his coach “Don’t touch me; I’m paralyzed.”
And that is what I think of when injuries like the one Patrick White suffered, why I feel so for White, and why I hope I do not have to write another article like that ever again.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
