Taliaferro living normal life, 10 years after spinal-cord injury

As the final seconds of the United States' semifinal hockey victory against the heavily favored Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics ticked off, ABC announcer Al Michaels made one of the most famous calls in sports-broadcasting history.

"Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" Michaels shrieked, and a joyful nation agreed.

Maybe there are no such things as miracles, only improbabilities that every now and then become reality, like someone buying a winning lottery ticket at their local convenience store and becoming an instant millionaire. Then again, there are events so seemingly impossible to have actually happened, "miraculous" seems to be the only word that applies.

Like, for instance, Adam Taliaferro standing on his own two feet and leading a relatively normal existence after the then-18-year-old Penn State freshman suffered a severe spinal-cord injury in a Sept. 23, 2000, game at Ohio State. The initial prognosis was grim: Taliaferro, a 5-10, 183-pound cornerback from Voorhees, N.J., was facing the very real possibility of being a quadriplegic.

"People don't like to use the word 'miracle,' but to get to the point where Adam is now is just that," said Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli, Penn State's director of athletic medicine who rushed to the fallen Taliaferro on the Ohio Stadium field that day.

Sebastianelli is not alone in holding that opinion. Yes, advances in treatment of spinal-cord injuries had raised Adam's chances for some level of recovery in the 15 years since another college football player, The Citadel's Marc Buoniconti, was forever confined to a motorized wheelchair after an on-field tackle that went horribly wrong. But medical science sometimes needs a boost, a sprinkling of luck to go with a dollop of individual willpower.

"In a way, it surprised me," said Dr. Guy W. Fried, the chief medical officer at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, where Taliaferro's remarkable comeback from an expectation of paralysis began to take shape. "But we kind of came to expect miracles, if that's the word, out of Adam. Some people just have that magic, that fire in their belly. You can almost say Adam literally willed himself to a better recovery."

Adam never played football again, never got a chance to live his NFL dream, but he seldom regrets the might-have-beens in a game he loved so much, and still does. He knows just how fortunate he is, how his tale has become a source of inspiration for others facing months of grueling rehab with only the distant hope for something better to drive them on. He returned to Penn State to finish his degree in labor and industrial relations and then graduated from the Rutgers School of Law-Camden in 2008. He is an attorney now in the Cherry Hill office of Duane Morris, an international law firm that specializes in gaming matters as well as labor and employment. He also heads the Adam Taliaferro Foundation, which has raised more than $600,000 to benefit Magee and provide financial assistance to athletes around the country who have been seriously injured in sanctioned contests. The foundation will celebrate its 10th anniversary at an Oct. 16 gala at the Hyatt.

Oh, yes, and Taliaferro, 28, will take a bride, former Penn State swimmer Erin Mulshenock, next September, just in time for a new football season. Life is good.

"I appreciate what I have every day," he said.

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You have to be a pretty good athlete to be offered a scholarship at a big-time football school like Penn State, and Adam Taliaferro was, if a bit on the small side. In his two seasons of varsity football for the Eastern High Vikings, he averaged 9.4 yards per carry, scored 62 touchdowns and had seven interceptions.

Very little of which his mother, Addie, viewed from the stands. Football is a contact sport, and she never stopped worrying that her son would be injured.

"I started playing football at 7," Adam recalled. "At that age, there are weight limits; you're basically playing against kids your own size. My mom's fear increased when I got to high school and some of the players I'd be going against were a lot bigger. She was so concerned that these huge guys would be hitting me.

"In some games she'd just sit in the car because she couldn't bear the thought I was getting beat up. She was a nervous wreck. Then the ultimate injury happened. She was the first person I thought about when I went down."

Back home in Voorhees, Addie and her husband, Andre, were watching on television as Penn State was taking the worst licking of the Joe Paterno era, a game that Ohio State went on to win, 45-6. But their son, a true freshman, was on the field, appearing in his fifth game. There surely would be better days for him and for the Nittany Lions.

Then the unthinkable occurred: Adam's helmet struck the knee of 231-pound Buckeyes tailback Jerry Westbrooks. Both players fell to the grass. Westbrooks got up, Adam didn't.

"I remember making the tackle," Adam said. "I was dazed. The first thing I tried to do was roll over and get up. But it felt like nothing was there. I thought, 'Aw, man, I got a stinger.' I had heard so many times that when you get a stinger, different parts of your body go numb. I had no feeling and sensation, so that's what I thought I had.

"I really wasn't panicked when I was on the ground, but when they strapped me on the gurney and were taking me off, I tried to give a thumbs-up to let the crowd know I was OK. But I couldn't move anything. That's when I knew something was going on. Even then, though, the thought of being paralyzed never entered my mind."

Adam had suffered a burst fifth cervical vertebrae in his neck and a bruised spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed, with no movement from the neck down. He underwent surgery at the Ohio State Medical Center to fuse his C-5 vertebrae and was later airlifted to Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, after which he began his 8-month rehab at Magee, the last several months of which were as an outpatient.

Sebastianelli, who first attended to Adam along with members of the Ohio State medical staff, said those first few minutes, when the player was removed from the field and rushed to a nearby hospital, were of critical importance.

"It starts with the moment the injury occurs," he said of the effort to save Adam from a lifetime of paralysis. "Once it was evident he had a spinal injury, he was log-rolled into an appropriate position and placed on a backboard with a neck-immobilizing brace.

"I had called ahead to have a steroid injection prepared so we could give it to him immediately when we arrived at the hospital. Once we got there, the real challenge was to get his helmet and shoulder pads off without creating further damage. That's something that myself and our head trainer, George Salvaterra, took responsibility for since he was our kid. We took his face mask off before we transported him, in case there was a problem with his airway."

When Adam's father arrived in Columbus, he was given the grim news and an estimation by Sebastianelli that Adam had, at best, a 3 percent chance he would walk again.

"Based on what I saw, the bruising of the [spinal] cord, I knew there was a very, very low chance that he would walk again," Sebastianelli said. "But the fact that the cord wasn't transected, or cut in half, meant he at least had an outside chance to become somewhat functional.

"You never want to say zero percent of recovery because anything can happen, and you certainly don't want to estimate the potential for recovery, either. Was it actually 2 percent? Four percent? It was just an estimate. There was no way of making any sort of projection that was accurate."

But no doctor could have factored in something inside Taliaferro that went beyond the boundaries of medical science.

"The first thing I said to my dad when he arrived in Ohio was, 'I guess my football career is over,' " Adams recalled. "He said, 'We're not going to worry about football. We've got bigger things to overcome right now.' He didn't tell me how bleak my prognosis was. It wasn't until I got to Magee that I realized this was something that went beyond football. This was about regaining my life."

*******

The staff at Magee isn't apt to forget Adam any time soon. Not just because he still occasionally shows up, unannounced, to cheer up patients who need a pep talk and a reminder that hope dies only when hopelessness takes over.

"By no means do I consider myself a celebrity or anything like that," Adam said of his continuing status as one of Magee's biggest success stories. "I'm just a guy who got hurt and fought to get back, the same way other patients are fighting to get back."

It's an uphill fight, a daunting one, that not everyone is mentally equipped to take on.

"Adam was pretty much told that he'd probably never walk again," Fried said. "His injury was so bad that even that 3 percent figure was probably very optimistic.

"For most patients and their families, this would be devastating news and grounds for crawling into a cocoon and just giving up. For Adam and his family, they took it as just another obstacle to overcome. Their attitude was, 'Nothing's been easy. We've beaten long odds before, we'll beat this, too.' "

Adam's football background, along with his youth and superb physical condition, all contributed to the making of his own personal miracle.

"There is definitely a correlation between drills on a football field and drills in the Magee gym," Fried continued. "It's regimentation, it's discipline, it's commitment, it's repetition. Rehab by its nature is a team sport.

"Adam was working with physical therapists, occupational therapists, group therapists, psychologists and other patients. He saw them as his coaches and teammates, if you will."

Amy Bratta, a physical therapist who worked with Adam, says his determination to walk again went beyond the pale.

"Here was this young kid leading his college life and playing football and all of a sudden he needed someone to help him get out of bed, to take a shower, to take care of his personal hygiene," she said. "But he had such incredible mental toughness. He just stayed the course. We rarely saw him upset or not totally engaged in what we were asking him to do."

It also helped that Adam was selected to participate in a National Institute of Health locomotor training program for people with acute spinal-cord injuries.

"He literally was hung from an overhead harness with a treadmill underneath it, to facilitate a walking pattern," said Mary Schmidt, Magee's spinal-cord injury program director who is a member of the board of directors of the Adam Taliaferro Foundation. "What he had to do was to learn how to use his legs again."

On Jan. 5, 2001, less than 4 months after his catastrophic injury, Adam, with the use of forearm crutches, left Magee to enter a new phase of his rehab as an outpatient. On April 7, by then walking on his own, he threw out the first pitch of a Phillies-Cubs game at Veterans Stadium. And on Sept. 1, wearing his blue No. 43 jersey, he led the Penn State team onto the field at Beaver Stadium for the season opener against Miami.

"I was nervous because I'd only been walking a couple of months prior to that," Adam recalled. "I didn't really know what I'd be able to do. But when I got in the tunnel and I heard people chanting my name, such a feeling came over me. It was a sense of euphoria. Even today, I don't know if I can put it into words. It's a moment I'll cherish for the rest of my life."

Penn State didn't come out on top that day, but sometimes things have to be put in their proper perspective. There are matters of higher significance than who does or doesn't win a football game.

"I was forced to focus on things other than football," he said. "I've tried to make the most of what was available to me, and I'd like to think I have."

Adam's recovery, however, was not total. Although he no longer takes medication and experiences virtually no pain, he said his muscles do tighten sometimes in the morning.

"I stretch and work out 4 days a week," he said, adding that, on a 1-to-10 scale, he's probably reached a personal ceiling of 7.5, the same number he gave himself upon his graduation from law school 2 years ago.

"I think I've probably peaked," he said. "It's all about maintaining where I am now."

And does he ever have flashbacks to that collision with Westbrooks, the one that forever changed his world? As a motivational speaker who frequently has to tell his tale, making that particular trip into his past of necessity is a common occurrence.

"It happens more often during football season, when I see guys I played with and against in the NFL," Adam, who can't run and still walks with a slight limp, said of the tinges of sadness he feels at times. "You can't help but wonder about what might have been.

"But I also know things could have been much, much worse. I'm one of the lucky ones."