MIAMI — I am watching a man paralyzed from the neck down lift an artificial arm by merely thinking about do so. I am watching another quadriplegic play drums thanks to similar microchip in his brain.
I am listening to doctors talk of hypothermia protocol, brain-computer interface and how artificial intelligence will help change the wheelchair world.
“What do you think?” a scientist asks.
“This is the greatest sports story of my lifetime,” I say.
Dalton Dietrich looks around as people in wheelchairs talk with doctors and doesn’t see sports. But the scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis understands.
“Look at all the good since that awful day 40 years ago,” he says.
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Forty years ago Sunday, Marc Buoniconti made a tackle as a Citadel linebacker took the final step of his life on the 42-yard line of the East Tennessee State football field.
He has said, many times through the years, how he saw his arm flop beside him on the field and couldn’t feel it. He has said, many times, how he immediately knew he was paralyzed.
He has said, as he did to me at the 10th and 15th and 25th and 35th anniversary of his tackle, how he’d purposely stay busy on this day so he wouldn’t think too hard about it. He would, however, reserve a moment to recognize it.
“I call it a celebration,” he said before the 15th anniversary. “I celebrate I’m alive. I celebrate the culmination of what we’ve been able to accomplish and celebrate what we’ll accomplish in the next year. I’m not bitter about what happened. I’m enthusiastic and optimistic for the future.”
He paused, then said, “I think that’s how I stay sane.”
Buoniconti didn’t say anything for this story. He couldn’t. He is too ill, and he’s been ill for a while. He didn’t make the Miami Project’s annual dinner in New York in September. That tells how serious it is, because the dinner is their big fundraiser, the one he and his late father, the great Miami Dolphins linebacker Nick Buoniconti, used as the centerpiece toward their raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Miami Project into a top research center for spinal-cord injuries.
“I won’t walk again, but I’ll help others walk,” Marc said before the 25th anniversary.
Listen, you can back up your idea of the greatest sports story with numbers and statistics and maybe you’re right or maybe the guy showing the analytics of another story is right.
But listen to this: Barth Green, the Miami neurosurgeon whose medical vision combined with the Buoniconti’s fund-raising ability to build The Miami Project, is asked how many people walked out of wheelchairs or saw their lives improve dramatically from the day of that tackle 40 years ago.
“Thousands upon thousands,” he said.
Now that’s a sports stat to remember.
“We really launched with Marc,” Green said of The Miami Project. “From the start, he never gave up his leadership position as an international spokesman.”
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For this 40th anniversary, Scott Roy, The Miami Project’s director of communications, asked the 175 scientists, researches, clinicians and support staff for the project’s top 10 medical and social breakthroughs. His first list had 60 such achievements.
Some are easy to understand like helping paralyzed men to father children for the first time or alleviating the chronic pain that comes with most spinal-cord injuries. Others are like trying to explain color to a blind person. Regeneration of the nervous system. FDA approval of Schwann cell transplantation in clinical trials.
Their idea of hypothermic treatment just needs the video of Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett laying on the ground after a hit in 2007. Within minutes, an intravenous, ice-cold saline solution was administered by doctors — an “ice-pack for his spinal cord,” as Green called it.
That was a Miami Project creation and part of NFL protocol by then. Maybe it helped Everett walk again. No one can really say. All everyone knew is Everett quickly was flown to The Miami Project for treatment where he met another man with a similar dislocation of the third and fourth vertebrae of the spinal cord.
Marc was 42 by then. He accompanied Everett from his wheelchair as Everett walked out of the hospital weeks later. Everett became the face of thousands of spinal-cord victims The Miami Project helped.
“If we’d had that treatment back when I was hurt, maybe I’d be out of this chair,” he once said. “That’s why we’re doing this. I love to see people get out of this chair.”
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Buoniconti’s work hasn’t just helped heal the injured. There’s also the story of the East Tennessee running back, Herman Jacobs, who he tackled 40 years ago on that third-and-1 play.
“For years, I carried such guilt about it,” Jacobs said. “I punished myself, like I was to blame. I played in a semi-pro league after college, but had to quit. It affected my life.
Twenty-two years after the hit, Buoniconti’s former Citadel teammate, Joel Thompson, talked with Jacobs. Thompson put the two in touch.
“I was scared to death to call him,” Jacobs said. “I wasn’t sure how the conversation would go. But he said he didn’t blame me for what happened. He assured me it wasn’t my fault. I started feeling better at that moment, like this heavy weight lifted off my shoulders.”
Buoniconti did something more, too, because he knew Jacobs was struggling in life.
“What is your dream, if you could do anything?” he asked.
“I want to be a chef,” Jacobs said.
Buoniconti invited him to Miami. He took Jacobs on a tour of Johnson & Wales culinary school. He helped Jacobs enroll in the school and had Jacobs live with him for six months. He got Jacobs an interview with a top chef, Norman Van Aiken, who hired him at the chef’s Coral Gables restaurant.
“Marc’s my brother and he’s inspirational to me,” said Jacobs, who now works in a Tampa restaurant. “He always has time for people, to help them in any way he can. What he did for me, hopefully, one day, I can do for others.”
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Forty years ago, I was in the newsroom when news of Marc’s injury came and was assigned to write a story. That began a career-long relationship with his story. I went to Charleston, S.C., in 1988 to cover the trial of his failed lawsuit accusing the Citadel team doctors of causing his injury by tying his facemask to his shoulder pads seemingly to help a sore neck.
I stood in the crowd in 2000 as Green and the Buounicontis broke ground for The Miami Project.
“That’s where it happened,” Nick said that day, pointing a mile away at the Orange Bowl. “It was one thought no team could when them all. It was once considered an impossible dream. Like our ’72 Dolphins had (Larry) Csonka and (Jim) Kiick and (Dick) Anderson and (Jake) Scott, the Miami Project has Green and Marc and a team of scientists to do the impossible.”
I watched Marc deliver the introduction at his father’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in 2001, listened to him talk through tears at his father’s memorial in 2019 and saw him go from a scared teenager of 19 to a grown man of 59 with a wife, Cynthia, and several private businesses.
Now I sit in a classroom on the seventh floor of the Miami Project as a neurosurgery resident, Seth Tigchelaar, talked to a small audience of students and donors of the next step being taken. “Neuralink: Restoring autonomy with brain interfaces,” his talk was titled.
Diagrams and photos show a Neuralink chip being implanted in the part of the brain that involved arm movement. A video shows a quadriplegic thinking about moving his arm and a mechanical arm bringing him a cup of water to drink. Another video shows a father who is quadriplegic playing tic-tac-toe with his daughter. Another, the first woman to receive this chip, shows her artwork.
“There are three patients in Miami that we have worked with,” Tigchelaar said.
There are only 11 such patients worldwide. Tigchelaar talks of the ability in years to come to do thousands of such surgeries a year. The problem is a common one: Money.
“You know how on a great team everyone knows their role?” Marc once said. “Raising money is my job.”
The greatest sports story of them all?
Maybe because it’s not about sports.
