Stories

The Times-Picayune
November 17, 2002

Keith O'Brien
Staff Writer

METAIRIE, La. -- The car pushed south in the night down the deserted Mississippi highway, over the rolling hills of Hattiesburg, through ridges of longleaf pines and into the flatlands down below.

It was chilly. It was April. It was Jack Hatty at the wheel and it was just as he had expected. He knew he, his mother and grandmother wouldn't just drive to Hattiesburg from their modest home in Metairie on that Thursday night for the final concert of his sister Lauren's freshman year of college.

They would sit near the back of the auditorium and listen for the sweet sounds of her clarinet. Then they would hug her, drive to a nearby pancake house, pile into a booth, and eat like a family until it was late and Lauren begged them to stay.

Lauren missed her younger brother, a 5-foot-7, 150-pound defensive back for Archbishop Rummel High School. He was changing so fast these days, she thought, and he was proud of those changes. Always strong for being so small, Hatty was bulging now. His legs were thick, his biceps ripped, and he liked to think that maybe this fall, the fall of his senior year, he would star in Raider red beneath the white lights of the football field he had come to love.

In the lights, even when he didn't play, Hatty felt as if the world was spinning around him, spinning just for him and his teammates as they scampered between the sidelines, making tackles and catches before thousands of people who sat in the bleachers just to be near them. In these moments, he stripped away his problems -- the math tests and pop quizzes, the childish soap operas and high school dramas, the father he had watched waste away in a wheelchair in their living room -- until it was just him and a team and a purpose: win.

So he ate to get stronger. Two eggs, two strips of bacon, two sausage links, and two buttermilk pancakes -- "It's two delicious!" the menu said -- that night in the pancake house in Hattiesburg. He washed it all down with two glasses of milk, said goodbye to his sister, and left his mother and grandmother behind.

They can't remember now why they took two cars in the first place. His mother tells him it was just in case her car broke down. The boy, sitting in a wheelchair in their home just like his father once did, admits he just wanted to be alone on the road. And so he motored down Interstate 59, an hour and a half to home, between the shadows of the hills.

It was about 10:30 p.m. It was the end of a long day. It was Jack Hatty at the wheel of his Mitsubishi Montero Sport and it wasn't long before he could feel it creeping up on him. Sleep. He wanted to sleep.

Hatty rolled down the windows, then rolled them up. He turned up the stereo, then turned it up louder. He focused on the music, on the road, on the headlights stabbing into the night until, just outside of Picayune about 50 miles from home, the heaviness overcame him and the lines of the interstate began to blur.

His head nodded. His eyes fluttered and closed.

The boy drifted off into darkness.

. . . . . . .

When he was 2 years old, Jack Hatty disappeared. He was playing in his back yard. His mother was watching him, moving in and out of their ranch-style home as he clambered about the patio. And then he was gone.

Susan Hatty, a young mother of two, tried not to panic when she couldn't find her son. But she couldn't figure out where he might have run off to in such a short amount of time. She spun around, called his name and heard the boy's answer from above her head.

To this day, the family can't explain how Jack, a mere toddler, found the strength in his arms to shimmy up a patio support to the aluminum rooftop suspended above the ground and his mother's head. It doesn't matter anymore, really. It has become family lore now, one of those stories told, retold and polished into prophecy as if it says something about the future of the boy named after his father.

Jack Hatty Sr. used to embarrass the kids when they went out to eat at restaurants. It kills Lauren to think about that now. But at the end, when multiple sclerosis left him unable to eat his own food without coughing it up at the table, she worried what others were thinking about them. By then, their father had lost everything to the progressive disease that picked apart his central nervous system. He couldn't stand, couldn't walk and couldn't hold a job anymore.

His son, 9 at the time, remembers coming home from school those last years of his father's life and finding him sitting in a wheelchair in the living room just as he had left him that morning, watching television or listening to music. It was all the father could do before he died in 1995 at age 40. He certainly couldn't throw a football with his son, who appeared in the newspaper just two weeks after his father's obituary, standing in a picture with his football team on Mike Miley playground in Metairie, a champion.

He was smaller than most kids, it was true. But Jack Hatty loved the game, the adrenaline, the smell of grass stains on cotton, and he had something to prove to everyone who thought he was too small to play.

Years later, Rummel head football coach Jay Roth noticed the same intensity in the player who came out for the Raiders. He wasn't a varsity starter -- Roth had too many good defensive backs on his roster -- but Hatty played hard when he got his chances and could lift as much as some of the linemen, guys who outweighed him by 70 pounds.

During one weight-room session at Rummel last spring, coaches watched him bench-press 260 pounds, at least 100 pounds more than his body weight. It was the most Hatty had ever lifted for them and it confirmed what Roth had already suspected about the boy who wore No. 19: Pound for pound, he was the strongest Raider on the field.

. . . . . . .

Out of the darkness came the sound of skittering car wheels. Hatty awoke to it in a panic. He didn't know where he was or how he got there. He braked and turned the wheel. He tried to get control. But the car was already gone now, careening off the road, over an embankment before an overpass and down into a grove of pine trees.

The car hit one tree, maybe more, in mid-air before rolling over on its end and slamming into the earth upside down, maybe 30 feet below the road, in a screaming moment of spinning tires and snapping tree limbs and shattering glass. The impact flattened the roof of the car like pizza dough. The rear axle and hatchback cracked and broke away.

Later, the towing service would need two trips to gather what was left of Hatty's car near the overpass just south of Picayune. For the moment, however, the engine was still running, the music still playing. Hatty passed out.

When he awoke, hazy, disoriented and pinned upside down in his seat, he somehow found a way to unbuckle his seat belt and crawl through the glass and crumpled metal to the grass on the side of the car. There he passed out again. He doesn't know how long it was exactly before he saw a man, another motorist whom Picayune Police never identified, and heard him say these words: "Son, are you all right?"

Hatty wasn't sure. He was breathing. He was thinking. He could see and hear the man who lifted him up and pulled him away from the wreckage for fear that leaking gasoline might ignite and explode. Hatty remembers moaning in pain. He was hurt, but he didn't know where. He was numb, but he didn't know why. He couldn't feel his legs, and for the longest time he refused to look down at them. He was worried what he might see. He was afraid they were gone.

. . . . . . .

On the ninth floor of the hospital, where the spinal cord injury patients come for rehabilitation, it's the doctor's job to tell them the difference between truth and miracles.

The truth, according to Dr. Gary Glynn, is this: If a patient who has suffered a spinal cord injury has no sensation or motor functions within 24 hours of the injury, the chance of getting something back is almost zero. The miracle, he tells his patients, would be movement -- any movement whatsoever.

"My saying that doesn't change the reality," he likes to add after breaking this news to the patients. "You're either going to get better or you're not. But from my perspective, at least for what we're doing here, we have to assume you're not going to get better."

Then, sometimes, the patients scream at Glynn, the medical director of the Touro rehabilitation center. They are angry at him, at the world, at the car accident or gunshot or fluke tragedy that left them here on the ninth floor surrounded by 26 other patients, most of them recovering from strokes or similar accidents. Other times, the patients glare at Glynn in silence, their eyes seemingly asking him: "Who are you, man? How do you know?"

Glynn, 54, remembers Hatty's silent stare.

The boy, then a 17-year-old junior at Rummel, came to Touro six days after he flipped his car into a grove of trees on April 18. He had fractured his third thoracic vertebrae near his shoulder blades and managed to knock the vertebrae above it out of alignment. Doctors in Hattiesburg, where Hatty was flown after the crash, had performed surgery to bring the vertebrae back together: like two fists one on top of the other. But the impact of Hatty's car slamming into the ground had already damaged his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the chest down, able to move his arms and hands, but not his legs.

At Rummel on the morning of the accident, rumors about Hatty spread from homeroom to homeroom. Some students, his closest friends, wanted to drive to see him. Senior guidance counselor Bob Whitman urged them to stay. They didn't know where they were going, he told them, and they didn't even know for sure what had happened. They decided to wait for more news. But Jay Roth, a 1981 Rummel graduate, knew there was something wrong. Hatty had missed "roll."

"Roll" is a football term that Roth borrowed from a coach while he was playing ball at Nicholls State University. If you messed up, if you broke team or school rules, you rolled. From one end of the field to the other. End over end. A hundred yards of rolling on your side. At 6:30 a.m. When the grass is still thick with dew. To Roth, who sees football as a metaphor for life, "roll" proves a point: You can't be successful, either on or off the field, without discipline.

Hatty had violated that corollary -- he had been late one day -- and that Friday morning he was scheduled to roll for the coach before school. When he didn't show, and Roth began hearing that Hatty may have been paralyzed in a crash, the coach cringed.

More than a decade earlier, then coaching at Archbishop Shaw High School, Roth was standing on the sideline when Nat Adams, a promising freshman running back and defensive back, snapped his neck making a tackle and wound up paralyzed. Roth remembered the look in the boy's eyes on the field that day. "I think he knew and I knew what had happened," Roth said. Frightened at the thought of it, he considered giving up coaching.

But in the weeks and months that followed, Roth said he learned what the team meant to Adams, what the game meant to him, and when he heard about Hatty's crash on that Friday years later he made a promise to himself and to the boy that the team would be there for Hatty, whatever he needed.

Roth brought him a Rummel helmet signed by all the players. He made sure his name appeared in the program this fall -- 19 ... Hatty, Jack ... SR ... CB ... 5'7" ... 150 -- even as the boy lost 20 pounds over the summer. Meanwhile, his friends visited him on the ninth floor.

"Hey, babe," the cards said.

"How ya doin'?"

"Jack, we are all thinking about you."

Glynn had seen it before, of course. After treating hundreds of spinal cord injury patients at Touro over the last 20 years, he has had his share of paralyzed high school kids. For a while, Glynn explained, they'll get visitors.

"It's a bad injury and that's your own vulnerability," he said. "At 17, 18, you're bulletproof, invincible, and you start off visiting that guy in there as if he has pneumonia. 'Get well soon, Jack.' But when the reality sinks in that their friend is paralyzed, they tend to fade away."

That didn't happen with Hatty, though. Roth and his teammates wouldn't let it happen. The Raiders had a season to play this fall. Hatty was on the roster and he had missed "roll."

"Remember," Roth began telling him, "you owe me."

. . . . . . .

The cars began to fill the high school parking lot. Beige minivans, driven by mothers, packed with girls. Beat-up two-doors, driven by boys, throbbing with hip-hop. One by one, they pulled up, stepped out into the cold November night and then disappeared into the gymnasium where the cheerleaders would soon be singing:

Rummel fans let's hear you shout!

Come on Raiders and spell it out!

It was homecoming. The next night, beneath the lights of Joe Yenni Stadium, Rummel would play Holy Cross, undefeated at the time, in a game that would help determine the district championship. Roth wanted everyone there for the Friday night pep rally, including, if he could make it, Hatty.

"There he is," said Brad Allen, a senior on the team, as Hatty pulled up in his mother's hatchback wagon, a "Raider Pride" license plate on the front bumper.

Hatty smiled at his teammates as he climbed from the passenger seat of the car into his wheelchair using the same arms that had once helped propel his 2-year-old body up the family's back patio. They waited for him, rubbed his head and walked with him as he rolled away from his mother, another teenage boy in a football jersey.

"Somebody want to escort me up there?" Hatty asked a minute later, nodding toward the steps that lead up to Rummel's second-floor gymnasium where the pep rally was about to start.

"I got you," said Nick Galliano, another senior.

In the dreams he has had since last April, it doesn't happen this way. He doesn't need help getting up stairs. He is always walking or running. Even the dreams that begin with him paralyzed and in a wheelchair end with him standing up and telling those around him: "Look what I can do."

This is the miracle and sometimes he clings to it. He tells himself that it's all a test, this accident, and he can pass the test if he's the best person he can be. He tells himself that he could turn out like Christopher Reeve, the quadriplegic actor who has recently gained some movement in his hands and feet. He tells his mother about the phantom feelings he gets from time to time in his legs, an itch maybe, or a twinge of pain.

"What does that mean?" he asked her one night recently, sitting in his wheelchair in their living room. Susan Hatty, who was miles behind her son that night in April and never saw that he had crashed, shook her head.

"Hope?" she wondered.

The truth is, sometimes he doesn't tell anyone anything and he sits in the bathtub for hours, staring at the wall, dwelling on the why, thinking too much. In the seven weeks he spent on the ninth floor at Touro, learning how to live life in a wheelchair from a flurry of therapists and doctors and nurses, Hatty thought a lot about his father. He worried that maybe he would end up like him: a man wasting away in a living room in front of the television unable to escape his own body.

"Don't my legs look like Dad's?" he asked his sister one day in the hospital, staring down at the pale, hairy flesh of the legs that once squatted 325 pounds of iron in the Rummel weight room. It haunted him, this thought, and his mother did what she could to persuade him that his father was only going to get worse, while he can only get better. Her explanation helped him make sense of his new reality. Football helped him more. On game day there's never time to think.

He has to put on his jersey and go to the team Mass. He has to follow the buses in his mother's hatchback and roll himself across yards of mud and grass to be next to the coaches on the sideline who are shouting at the players to beat Jesuit or Shaw or Holy Cross. And he has to shout, too, because these are his friends and this is his team, co-district champions at 9-1, playing beneath the lights in front of thousands.

"Where's Jack? Where's Jack?" asked Donald Williams, a senior wide receiver, in the gymnasium the night of the pep rally just before Hatty rolled off the lift to the second floor with Galliano behind him.

The boys rubbed his head. Roth gave a speech. The cheerleaders cheered -- "Yell R-A-I-D-E-R-S!" -- and then led the team outside to light a fire in the parking lot in anticipation of victory. The crowd didn't linger long around it.

It was cold. It was growing late. It was Jack Hatty rolling down the sidewalk with his mother in a wind that reeked of gasoline and it was the coach who stopped him to say it was all right if he couldn't make it to the game the next night.

Hatty eyed the man. The mother eyed her son. In the parking lot, boys and girls were leaving together, driving off into the night in cars that thumped and bumped across the road toward destinations unknown. The boy shook his head, looked up at his coach and smiled.

"I wouldn't miss the game," he said.