Chip Jacobs

Watch him roll victoriously onto the fileld with his teammates after surviving the nearly unsurvivable.

” … On October 16, 2010, I was a junior playing special teams for Rutgers during a midseason game against Army. We were playing at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., not far from our campus. With the game tied at 17 and about five minutes left in the fourth quarter, I ran downfield after a kickoff and collided with the returner, Malcolm Brown. I hit him pretty good — I learned later that he broke his collarbone on the play. But I tucked my head. If you have a strong stomach, you can watch it for yourself. (Personally, I do it all the time. It’s the last football play I ever made. I figure I might as well watch it.)

I remember feeling like I had a full-body “stinger” and that the wind was knocked out of me. But when I tried to move, I couldn’t. My mom was in the stands and right away she knew something was wrong when she saw me fall so stiffly. I was taken from the field on a stretcher, and when I tried to give a thumbs-up and let the crowd know I was OK, it felt like there was an unmovable weight on my hands. I had fractured my c-3 and c-4 vertebrae and was rushed into emergency surgery.

The doctors told my mom that I would never walk again, that I would never come off the ventilator — which I did five weeks later. My mom did not allow the doctors to talk to me because she didn’t want me to hear anything negative. She was the one who told me I had broken my neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. I had just turned 20 …

I’ve spent a lot of the last year in rehab trying to retrain my body to walk. It’s all about baby steps, so to speak, but I’m making progress. Right now I’m standing in a standing frame and I can last for up to 45 minutes. (The first time I did it as an inpatient, I lasted 30 seconds, so that’s progress!) After 17 minutes or so, though, I get dizzy and I need a shock. Because of my injury and the damage to my spinal cord, the blood flows to my legs but doesn’t know to circulate back to my brain. So the muscle needs to be stimulated, a signal needs to be sent to transfer the blood and oxygen back up. The next phase is to move onto locomotive training with a harness to hold me up.

By now I’ve become an expert on the human body, especially the autonomic nervous system. So much goes through the spine, it’s amazing. For instance, I don’t sweat. The body’s trigger to sweat — to cool itself — goes through the nervous system and that signal doesn’t work with me right now. So on top of everything else, I have to be careful not to overheat.

People have asked me about whether my injury makes me rethink football and how dangerous it is. My answer: not at all. No hard feelings, football. I don’t think kickoffs should be eliminated or changed either. Before this, I had never had a serious injury. Think of how many kickoffs there were in college football and how few get paralyzed. It was just a freak accident.

I’ve had low moments, but I can probably count them on one hand. My attitude is that I don’t have time to be bitter and do the why-me? thing. I have to get better, and getting down doesn’t help me do that. You can’t change the outcome so why bother? I think that God chose me to go through this for a reason: so other people going through adversity can look at me for inspiration. I’m also trying to bring attention to spinal cord injuries. They affect millions of Americans and there’s some real progress being made. But it takes funding. I encourage people to go to http://www.justadollarplease.org/, which supports the research of Dr. Wise Young, a neuroscience professor at Rutgers. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation at christopherreeve.org is another organization dedicated to finding a cure for spinal cord injuries.

To read his entire story in Sports Illustrated, click here. Eric and my quadriplegic uncle, Gordon Zahler, would’ve been kindred buddies. Gordon was a C-3/C-4 quadriplegic now striding fully in some fantastic place.