State, The (Columbia, SC)
October 23, 2005
Section: SPORTS

20 years after he was paralyzed on the football field, Marc Buoniconti refuses to let the wheels of progress stop turning

Marc Buoniconti walks these days: three times a week, a mile each time. It's not the sort of walking he might have imagined himself doing when he played college football at The Citadel. Then again, over the past two decades, walking at all often seemed for Buoniconti the stuff of miracles.

The mechanical device that lets the 39-year-old quadriplegic go for a stroll is called a LOKOMAT. "I get strapped into a harness, like a parachute," Buoniconti explains by phone from his Miami home. "Then I get wheeled over to a treadmill, and it lifts me up like a crane." Other devices are attached to Buoniconti's legs, chest and torso.

"And then I walk on the treadmill," he says, and laughs.

The device exercises Buoniconti's body, keeping him healthy and in shape for, he and his doctors hope, the day researchers at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis are able to restore his ability to walk on his own.

But there's another benefit.

"So simple, yet so amazing.

It has been 20 years since Marc Buoniconti last walked unaided. Twenty years since he suffered a horrific spinal cord injury during an Oct. 26, 1985 game at East Tennessee State, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, confined to a wheelchair, unable to do the simplest things without help.

Those 20 years could have seemed, for most, like a cruel prison sentence. But for Buoniconti, that time has become the most rewarding period of his life. His days are filled with travel and speeches, appearances and fund-raisers. A month ago, he and his father opened the American Stock Exchange in New York City and later chatted with Tom Brokaw on NBC's "Today" show.

That evening, father and son hosted the Great Sports Legends dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, an annual event that this year will generate $4 million for the Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis, The Miami Project's primary fund-raising arm.

"My life is dedicated to the Project," Marc says. "We've got a great building, 120,000 square feet, 200-plus scientists, an $18 million budget. It's extremely exciting."

In the past 20 years, the Buoniconti family has helped raise nearly $200 million for research. Dr. Barth Green, head of The Miami Project and the doctor who saved Marc's life - and gave him hope - in 1985, says there likely would be no Miami Project without Marc Buoniconti.

"He was the catalyst," Green says. "He was the first national figure to come out of the closet - even before Superman (the late actor Christopher Reeve). Before that, a lot of celebrities were paralyzed - Gov. (George) Wallace (of Alabama), (musicians) Curtis Mayfield (and) Teddy Pendergrass - but no one stood up.

"Marc did. He was saying, 'I just want to get better, have kids, have a beer, be with friends. I'd like to get up and run again.' By his coming out, not as something to pity but to respect, it changed things."

Now, Green says, Miami Project scientists working on cell regeneration believe they are close to being able to "rewire" spinal cords in victims. Experiments with lab rats have a success rate of up to 80 percent. FDA approval is on the horizon, he says.

Still, 20 years is a long time - half a lifetime for Marc Buoniconti. He is eager, even impatient, for the next stage of his life to begin. He wants to be made whole again.

For that to happen, though, he needs to heal another "injury": the hole in his heart where The Citadel used to be.

'FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE'

Nick Buoniconti's memory of the day his son's life changed forever begins in New Jersey, where he was visiting a friend. The "two Italian kids from the neighborhood who had done really well" were toasting each other with glasses of champagne over a late- afternoon lunch.

Then the phone rang, and Buoniconti heard these words from a neurosurgeon in Tennessee: "Your son has dislocated his neck. He'll be a quadriplegic the rest of his life."

"No niceties," Buoniconti, now 64, says. "He told us to get there as quick as we could, that Marc was fighting for his life."

That Saturday had begun like any other. Nick's older son, Nick Jr., was playing for Duke at Maryland; Marc and The Citadel team were at ETSU. Both sons were linebackers, just as their father had been at Notre Dame and throughout a storied career with the Miami Dolphins.

In Johnson City, Marc, a 185-pound sophomore, started at middle linebacker in place of teammate Richard Brock for the 2-4-1 Bulldogs. In the first quarter, ETSU tailback Herman Jacobs took a pitch from quarterback Keith Harris and turned up the field.

Outside linebacker Joel Thompson dove at Jacobs' legs, flipping him. Buoniconti dove toward Jacobs; his head hit the tumbling back - and his neck snapped.

"I knew immediately I was paralyzed," Buoniconti said later. He had suffered "a complete bilateral facet dislocation," the third vertebra disconnecting from the one beneath it and crushing the spinal cord.

Tom Moore, The Citadel's third-year head coach, recalls the play as "nothing dramatic."

You see that every day," he said, "from Little League to the NFL."

Even when Moore realized Buoniconti was injured, he said, "you keep thinking, 'He's gonna be OK, he'll get up.' "

But when he realized the seriousness of the injury -"he wasn't breathing, turning as blue as our jerseys" - Moore walked off the field. And threw up.

"It changed the way I looked at football, defined my career," Moore says. "Before, it was more important than (family) birthdays. In the blink of an eye, that changed."

That's when Nick leaned over, kissed Marc, and made him a promise. "I'm going to do everything in my power to get you better again," he said, "to see you walk again."

The first step was getting Marc to Miami, where Jackson Memorial Hospital was known as the nation's best facility for spinal cord injuries. Barth Green remembers being told only that "a football player, the son of a former Miami Dolphin" was being flown in from Tennessee.

"We needed to surgically stabilize Marc," Green says. "Then I told the family what they'd already heard: that the future was probably in a wheelchair."

Green had been a pioneer in spinal cord research - albeit one frustrated by a lack of funding and interest. "I was about to say, after 20 years of research, I'll just be a doctor," he says. "Then the (Buoniconti) family said to me they didn't accept the prognosis."

Green, in turn, told Nick Buoniconti he was tired of offering no hope to families of victims. Two months earlier, a prominent Florida businessman had suffered a spinal cord injury; he, as had Buoniconti, told Green he would help provide money to support research.

"All these people joined with Nick, who is very charismatic," Green said. "The Buonicontis were totally committed."

Thus was born The Miami Project, based at the University of Miami School of Medicine. One of its first board members was future Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

One of its first beneficiaries was Marc Buoniconti.

"He was a kid, and I was the enemy, trying to make him work harder to get off the machine," Green says. "I was like a coach, (saying) 'Take a few more laps.' "

"He eventually realized what we were doing and became committed to his recovery. And the more we talked, the more I realized Marc was an extraordinary young man. He not only was going to be the object of a lot of attention and care, but also a source of strength."

In time, Marc supplanted his father as The Miami Project's most eloquent and effective speaker and fund-raiser. "He realized the fastest way out of that chair was if he took control of his own destiny," Green says.

"I've said from the beginning, soon as Marc got off the ventilator and got his degree, he was a changed person," Nick Buoniconti says. "The wheelchair company told me he was the only person to wear out the ball bearings in his chair. He goes and goes."

Short-term goals, from getting off the respirator to going out for drinks with his pals, once kept Marc Buoniconti going. Now, he says, his goals are more for the long haul.

"Every day I wake up, I have to do what I can to continue the research, the awareness," he says. "Being part of the project allows me to take advantage of research. I'm the fortunate one; a lot (of victims) aren't in that situation. Here, I have the ability to change the world."

Before that, though, he would learn about something more intractable, something he could not change.

'THEY ABANDONED HIM, AND THAT SHOCKED ME'

If Marc Buoniconti's story had gone directly from his arrival at Barth Green's hospital to his present situation, a fitting description might be, "From tragedy to triumph."

Unfortunately, the story detoured three years after the injury into what the family and friends still view as a travesty.

Not long after the injury, Nick Buoniconti says, he approached The Citadel about obtaining its catastrophic insurance coverage for his son. The school, according to then-athletics director Walt Nadzak, had obtained a $1 million catastrophic coverage policy in the summer of 1985. Buoniconti - who already had coverage that helped pay for Marc's care - says the school turned him down. He says, then and now, that money wasn't the real issue, though.

"They abandoned him, and that shocked me," he says. "This was the Corps, and I didn't think they'd turn their back on one of their own. They should've come to his support. That's no different than someone wounded in Iraq."

Green, who later testified on the family's behalf in its lawsuit against The Citadel, says that when Nick Buoniconti asked the school to turn over its coverage, "they basically told Marc to go to hell. He went from the good guy to the bad guy."

Marc Buoniconti, while not as vehement as his father or Green, holds the same view. "What the school did to me when I was hurt was embarrassing," he says. "They blamed me for my injury."

Nadzak, now 70 and retired since 2000, takes an approach that seemed to typify The Citadel's response. "I'm not at liberty to say," he says when asked questions about the case. Other school officials could not be located or refused to comment publicly.

In 1988, the Buonicontis filed a $22.8 million suit against The Citadel, its coaches, team doctor E.K. Wallace Jr. and trainer Andy Clawson. In the suit, the family contended Marc should not have been in the ETSU game because of a previous neck injury. The suit also contended he had a pre-existing condition in his spine that he was never warned about by team officials.

Perhaps the most serious charge was that Buoniconti had been fitted by Clawson and Wallace with equipment - a rubber neck collar and a strap from his facemask to his shoulder pads that prevented his neck from snapping back - that contributed to his injury by forcing his head forward at impact.

Clawson, now in his 33rd year at The Citadel, will not talk about the case. "It was a very unfortunate situation, and I only wish Marc and the Buoniconti family the very best," he said through a school spokesman.

Scott Thompson, a defensive tackle on the 1985 team and brother of defensive end Lance Thompson (neither is related to teammate Joel Thompson), was one of several players who testified for the Buonicontis. He recalled seeing Marc's special helmet strap and telling his teammate, "You can't play like that. You'll break your neck."

Lawyers for The Citadel, though, argued that Buoniconti caused his own injury by tackling head-first, or "spearing." The school's defense team said Marc had been warned that such tactics were dangerous, but he and Nick both ignored the warning. Nick said he was never given such a warning.

Both sides paraded expert witnesses before the jury of 12 Charleston residents, the evidence introduced by one side often contradicting that presented by the other. At the end of the five-week trial, which was covered by Sports Illustrated in a story entitled "Was Justice Paralyzed?," the jury found for The Citadel.

"After meeting for just three hours, including a half-hour stretch at the start of their deliberations in which they were heard screaming at one another behind closed doors, the jurors found that Wallace was not liable at all and awarded Buoniconti nothing," SI writer William Nack wrote.

Nack referred to The Citadel as "a revered institution in a state where football is widely viewed as a hard-nosed endeavor in which a boy takes his chances giving and taking his licks." The insinuation was clear: The homefolks protected their school.

"It divided the team, the school," says Jim Gabrish, a former offensive tackle. "(The Citadel) had paid (expert) witnesses. No one paid (players) to testify for Marc."

Tom Moore blames the suit's nasty edge on "a litigious society" and the lawyers on both sides. He says he finds it "ludicrous" that anyone would blame Buoniconti for the injury.

But when attorneys are involved, they can turn conversations any way they want," Moore says. "I'm a loyal Citadel alumnus, I know what the school stands for. (But) if you go to court, you go to defend yourself."

"We didn't take Marc to court; he took The Citadel to court. I can't fault them for defending themselves."

 In actuality, the school was not defending itself. Two weeks into the trial, the Amerisure Co., which insured The Citadel and Clawson, ordered attorneys to offer Buoniconti an $800,000 out-of-court settlement, which was accepted. But because of a court- imposed gag order, the jury did not know Wallace, the team doctor, was the only defendant.

The result seemed to please no one, and it caused a rift between the school's supporters and several of Buoniconti's teammates that some say still exists.

Scott Thompson, who was an NCAA Division I-AA All-American and later played in the NFL, says he is not in The Citadel's hall of fame "because I testified against the school." "It was a lose-lose situation," says Lance Thompson. "The school was protecting itself, and the family was trying to get help."

What still raises Nick Buoniconti's hackles was the suggestion by some Citadel supporters that the lawsuit stemmed from Nick's need to absolve himself of blame for Marc's injury; that having taught his sons to play and tackle aggressively, he needed to prove the injury was someone else's fault.

"Do you have sons?" Nick Buoniconti says heatedly. "If your son hurt his neck and someone came and said, 'He can play, but we're going to strap his mask so he can't move his head,' would you let him play? There's your answer.

"This was total negligence, reckless endangerment by the doctor. (Marc) had inflammation of the (neck) ligaments, couldn't support his head, and they put that 'Hannibal Lecter' mask on him. You tell me who's looking for someone to blame."

Marc, like his father, doesn't deny his lingering bitterness over the trial. "To go out of the way to smear my name, talking about how I was trying to hurt people (by spearing) in practices - it just drives me more, my distaste for the way it was handled."

And yet, for all that happened, Marc Buoniconti remains curiously ambivalent toward his former school. For those who know The Citadel, that's not so surprising.

CAN THE WOUNDS BE HEALED?

Nearly 20 years before Marc Buoniconti arrived on The Citadel's Charleston campus, another young athlete fought a battle with the school and its system of tradition, honor and loyalty. Author and former Citadel basketball player Pat Conroy wrote about his alma mater in "The Lords of Discipline," which acknowledges The Citadel's virtues while hammering at its flaws.

Marc Buoniconti owns a copy of the book, which Conroy sent to him, figuring he'd understand it.

He does.

"We share a lot of the same disappointments," Buoniconti says. "This is supposed to be an institution of loyalty, yet (in his case) they act the opposite. It's an irony, but also very disappointing."

But Buoniconti, like Conroy, remains in his heart a Citadel man - even though, unlike Conroy, he never wore a graduate's ring. The Citadel's tradition of tearing down boys to build men is what lured him in the first place.

"In high school, I felt I needed the discipline, as well as guidance," Buoniconti says. "It was the perfect setting for me."

Even the school's notorious "Fourth Class" system, in which freshmen are routinely harassed by upperclassmen, didn't deter Buoniconti.

"Getting through the first year, I felt I could accomplish anything," he says.

Which helps explain why, in 1998, he went back to Charleston for the 10th reunion of what would have been his senior class.

"It was surreal," Buoniconti says. "I had moved on, but I didn't forget what I went through. Being with my classmates again, putting things behind me, that was really good for me emotionally.

"I still would have loved to go back to The Citadel to graduate. When you're part of that system and make it through the hardest part, it's like blood, sweat and tears. You're a part of it."

He sighs. "I wish things were different between me and the school," he says.

It might have happened in 1996. Before The Citadel played its season opener at Miami, Buoniconti says he received a call from a representative of The Citadel (he doesn't recall a name) telling him the school "wanted to honor me at halftime."

 "I (said), 'You must be new at The Citadel, because we don't see eye-to-eye.' "

Buoniconti did not attend the game. "I just thought at the time, out of the blue, I wasn't comfortable with it."

But times, and people, change. Few administrators from 1988 remain at The Citadel. And Les Robinson, the school's athletics director, has a unique perspective on the subject of Marc Buoniconti.

In October 1985, Robinson - who coached The Citadel basketball team from 1979-85 - was East Tennessee State's new coach and athletics director. He was at the game when Buoniconti was injured and remembers "a sick feeling," one that returns any time he witnesses a similar hard hit on the field.

 "I went to the hospital that night, saw his father and Marc," Robinson says, "just to offer my help."

Twenty years later, he might offer it again. Asked if the Buoniconti-Citadel wound can be healed, Robinson says, "Absolutely. It will be healed."

A spokesperson for The Citadel's interim president, Gen. Roger C. Poole, says nothing is planned at present regarding Buoniconti. "But we have received calls from alumni, saying we should do something to honor him," she says.

Joel Thompson is among Marc's former teammates who have remained close to the Buonicontis. He attended the Great Sports Legend dinner in September and chairs the Buoniconti Fund's Atlanta chapter. Recently he began a fund-raising Web site called www.10-26-85.com - the address references the date of Marc's injury - and displays The Citadel logo on the site.

"I wear the (Citadel) ring, and wore it to the dinner," Thompson says. "Maybe the bridge can be rebuilt, at least emotionally. (Buoniconti) shared experiences with Citadel guys, and I think he likes that."

After 20 years, perhaps the time is now.

"There's always time to forgive," Buoniconti says. "Is the door closed? No, I'm not that way. I don't live in the past. I'd like to make amends, but it's not for me to reach out."

Thompson politely disagrees. It's time for both sides to reach out, he says.

 "It's like The Miami Project; we've got to bridge the gap, mobilize to find a cure," Thompson says. "Things that have been held for 20 years, it's time to flush those."

Marc Buoniconti hopes to finish the job he began two decades ago in that hospital room. "With or without (The Citadel), we're doing incredible things," he says. "But it would be great to have their support."

Buoniconti wants to be made whole again. How much better it would be if the healing included the hole in his heart.