20 years later: The crash that shattered dreams and left IndyCar's Sam Schmidt a quadriplegic

He kept telling the doctors that he was moving. Move your right thumb, they would say. Sam Schmidt would move his right thumb. Wiggle your toes. Schmidt would wiggle.

The doctors would look at him dejectedly, shake their heads, stare down at the floor. "Sam, you didn't move anything."

But he had. He was sure of it. And from the moment he stepped into his race car on Jan. 6, 2000, to that moment — 12 days later in a hospital -- nothing had changed in his head.

Schmidt was telling anyone who would listen he would be in Indianapolis in May, ready to race the 500. He was telling them that his body was moving.

On a hospital television, a story flashed across SportsCenter. "It's a lot worse than we first thought," a spokesperson for Schmidt's Treadway Racing team told ESPN. "He has the same injury as Christopher Reeve."

Broken vertebrae, a pinched spinal cord. One tiny tweak of a cord, one millimeter a different way and the doctors might have looked happier.

Instead, they told his wife, Sheila, to start looking at nursing homes, that her 35-year-old husband might not live to 40, that he would remain on the ventilator. If Superman couldn't get out of this, Schmidt most certainly couldn't.

But their words didn't matter, not to Schmidt. When it came to matters of paralysis, the doctors were 0-1 in his world.

Race car drivers crash. They are paralyzed. Doctors tell them they will never walk or talk again. And then they do.

Schmidt knew that. He had watched it all unfold as an 11-year-old boy, when his dad was racing and there was that terrible crash.

Baja, Mexico 1974

The 1970s were a magical time for the Schmidt family. The weekdays were spent working hard, just to get to the weekends, to the race track.

Marvin Schmidt was a fabricator and a racer. He plopped his son Sam on a motorcycle when he was five, and for the little boy on the track, there was nothing else that could ever compare.

Growing up in California, Schmidt's hero was Rick Mears, who won four Indianapolis 500 races, was from Bakersfield, Calif., and got his start off-road, just like him.

"That's really all I can remember thinking about most of my life," said Schmidt, 55 now and owner of motorsports team Arrow McLaren SP, "was racing."

But then came the day in Baja, Mexico, in 1974. During a race, Marvin Schmidt collided with a chase vehicle. The impact caused neurological damage much like the injuries found in people who have strokes.

At 11, Schmidt heard the unimaginable words echoing in his head: "Having the doctor tell your dad, 'Hey man, you're never going to walk or talk again," Schmidt said. "'This is going to be your life.'"

Schmidt watched his dad tuck those words away and go a different direction. He watched him struggle through outpatient therapy every day for two years. He watched his dad, always a tough, quiet Nebraska farm boy, with tears running down his face. The therapy was so intense, it almost broke him.

But it didn't. Marvin Schmidt started walking. Years later, he spoke. In the end, what was left from his accident was partial paralysis in his right arm.

Marvin Schmidt did what the doctors said he couldn't.

"My parents had no idea at that time," Schmidt said, "how much of an inspiration he would be for me all those years later."

1999: One last great race

Schmidt had these long sideburns and they called him Elvis. He had just moved to Las Vegas and other drivers started teasing him with that nickname.

As the 1999 racing season grew longer, so did the hair on the sides of his jaws.

"They got longer and longer and longer to where I showed up at the race in September in Vegas with, literally, Elvis mutton chops," he said.

Schmidt had colored his hair black with permanent dye and even went to a sponsor appearance in a rented Elvis outfit. He was loving life. And then life got better.

On Sept. 26, 1999, Schmidt won the Vegas.com 500, his first win in 26 career Indy Racing League starts. With two laps to go, Schmidt passed Kenny Brack and held on for the victory at his hometown Las Vegas Motor Speedway track.

"Ahhhhh ... this is great ... awesome, awesome," Schmidt screamed over his radio as he took the checkered flag.

The moment was surreal for a kid who had grown up racing, a kid who had to put that dream on hold after his dad's accident. Marvin Schmidt had given up driving. "He just didn't have the desire" anymore, his son said.

But here Schmidt was back at it, an IRL race champ. His dad's accident hadn't deterred him from the track. People always asked him how he could race after what happened to his dad.

"The general population doesn't understand it and I don't know if we do either. It's just the way we're built," he said. "It's all you kind of live, eat and breathe for your entire life and once you get an opportunity to do it, you won't stop doing it no matter what the risks are."

The win in Vegas, the feeling of hoisting that trophy over his head, it certainly seemed worth any risk. "This is just huge," Schmidt said after the victory. "Next to what it must feel like to win the Indy 500, this is the next best thing."

Looking back, the time he would spend savoring the win in front of fans, it was as if he knew it would be his last. "Schmidt spent an inordinate amount of time in victory circle," the Las Vegas Sun reported the next day.

The words Schmidt would say after the race, it was as if he were foreshadowing his own fate.

"I didn't care how long it was taking (in victory circle)," he told reporters after the race. "I was going to get some memories here."

"You never know," he said that day in 1999, "when you'll get another one."

Shattered dreams

The phone rang in the Schmidts' Vegas home. Sheila, who had stayed home with 2-year-old Savannah and 6-month-old Spencer, heard her mother-in-law's voice on the other end.

Standing in the kitchen, Sheila grasped for the countertop to hold herself up.

"You know it was... it kind of took my breath away," she said. "I remember just thinking, not believing what was being said to me."

Schmidt was testing in Florida, preparing for the IRL season opener Indy 200 later that month. He was in his Treadway Racing G Force-Aurora at Walt Disney World Speedway when he spun and hit the retaining wall.

He doesn't remember it happening. His dad was there with him.

Schmidt blew apart his C3 and C4 vertebrae and wasn't breathing for almost four minutes. Because it was an IndyCar test, the safety crew was there, which to this day Schmidt contends saved his life. They pulled him out, resuscitated Schmidt and put him in a helicopter to Orlando.

Sheila hung up the phone and looked at her two children and prayed. Please let Sam walk again, let him be there for the kids growing up, let him be able to play with them. She booked a red-eye flight to Orlando and arrived at the hospital the next morning.

"And all the doctor could say to her was, 'Well, you know we're lucky he survived the night and if he survives the week, just find him a nursing home,'" Schmidt said. "'He'll be on a ventilator the rest of his life.'"

Schmidt woke up in the hospital days after the accident. People were telling him he was paralyzed. They were telling him he couldn't move. At first, he was sure he could.

Then reality set in.

Schmidt was so weak he couldn't hold his head up; he lost 40 pounds in the hospital. And the ventilator, he said, was a nightmare.

"I got to say on the ventilator, life was pretty grim," Schmidt said. "As a race car driver everybody has to plan for the worst and hope for the best so you had medical directives...put away hoping you never need it."

His were clear. If there was severe brain damage, "go on with life. Don't worry about me. Pull the plug," Schmidt said.

Instead, his brain was fine but he could move nothing on his body. And the ventilator, he didn't know if he could live with it.

"I think it's pretty easy to say if I was still on the ventilator I don't know if I would still be here just because it was like a living hell," he said. "Between respiratory issues and hot and cold, it was just very, very 24-7 uncomfortable."

Schmidt knew if he was going to be around for his kids growing up, he had to find a way to get off of it.

A glimmer of hope

Most of the medical professionals weren't giving the Schmidts much hope for that.

"Fortunately, having my father having gone through what he did 20 years ago, we knew sort of not to take the first judgment as the final sentence," Schmidt said.

The family started calling neuroscience rehab centers, doctors around the country and found an aggressive physical therapy doctor in St. Louis named John McDonald.

"He was about the only one after hearing the details of my accident that said, 'You know, if you can get him here, we'll work his tail off and try to get him off the ventilator and do intensive amounts of rehabilitation,'" Schmidt said. "'And then whatever you're left with, we'll teach him to live with it."

It turned out, Schmidt didn't have the exact same injury as Reeve. Schmidt's broken vertebrae were lower. Reeve broke his neck at the base of his skull, which required a pad to hold his head up and a ventilator.

The family moved to St. Louis about a month after the accident. Sheila and the kids and Schmidt's parents, Marvin and Judy, got a 3-bedroom apartment. They were there every morning for breakfast with him and there every evening for dinner.

Within two weeks, Schmidt was off the ventilator. He had done what most of the doctors said he wouldn't.

"It was like just a relief," he said. "Being able to eat and breathe and feel somewhat normal from that perspective."

Next was nearly six months of intense therapy, in which Schmidt gained weight and a lot of strength, but never any movement. What he wanted most was use of his arms, he said, and to not have that happen was frustrating and depressing.

Sheila remembers some of the toughest times were when the kids were little. Savannah is now 22 and Spencer is 20.

"It would just break my heart. They're kids. They want to play. They want to wrestle and he would just have to sit there and watch," she said. "Those were the hardest times for him."

Still, he forged on, doing thousands hours of therapy once back in Las Vegas. Never giving up.

An unconditional love story

Sam and Sheila had been married seven years when the accident happened. They were living the life of their dreams, Sam climbing the ladders of racing, Sheila traveling with him, two tiny children in tow.

Sometimes people don't ask her. Sometimes they do. Almost all of them wonder. How has she gotten through it and did she ever for a moment think about leaving it all behind?

"I didn't marry Sam because he could walk," she said. "I married him for the man that he is and he is no different."

Sometimes, she looks at him in his chair and forgets that he can't stand up and walk to answer the phone or get the door or do a chore. She'll actually scold him. And then...

"We laugh about it, but that's all you can do," she said. "You either laugh or you cry, and we choose to laugh."

Having family support has helped Sheila through the tough times. Having Judy there, a woman who first watched her husband and then her son go through life-changing racing accidents, has been incredible.

"His mom is the strongest person I know. She stood by Marv through everything when he got hurt," Sheila said. "To have to go through it a second time, my heart breaks for that."

Schmidt said that without Sheila's love, he wouldn't be where he is today.

"You know when you get engaged and get married you say 'For better or worse,' right?" he said. "But you never really know what that could mean and if the shoe were on the other foot I'm not 100 percent sure I could do what she's done. I am not kidding when I say I would not be here today without her by my side."

Sheila said there hasn't always been laughter. There have been sad times, dark times.

"There were days when he felt like, 'What am i doing here?' I remember him saying, 'Why me? Why couldn't it have been somebody else?'" she said.

She always answers him the same way: "Because they wouldn't have made the impact you've made."

'I was doing something I loved'

Twenty years since he was at the top of his racing career. Two decades since he has walked, since he has scratched his nose, since he has lifted a fork to his mouth.

"Sometimes, it seems like it's been a really long time but other times I can't believe it's been 20 years," Schmidt said. "I'd be lying if I said it was all rosy and perfect, every day is like a rainbow because it's not. It's a lot of hard work."

In 20 years, Schmidt has done more than many people do in a lifetime. He's spent thousands of hours in hospitals, giving hope to people whose lives have been changed by spinal cord injuries.

He is a strategic investor and board member of BraunAbility, a manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vans and wheelchair lifts in Winamac, Indiana. He travels 140 days a year as owner of his racing team and started a foundation 19 years ago to support people who are paralyzed. He has a Nevada driver's license and helped create a Corvette that he drives with the use of sensors.

He loves being in the middle of the racing world, even if he can't drive.

"A lot of people say, 'How can you be involved in racing after it put you in a wheelchair?'" he said. "And I don't look at it like that at all. It was my lifelong dream to get to where I was. This happened while I was doing something I loved."

From early on, Schmidt said he has tried to focus on all the good things he has in life, though there are times he thinks about the one thing he misses most.

"Just being able to hug my family, the simple things in life," he said. "They still hug me and I can still feel it, just sometimes you just want to squeeze the tar out of somebody and you can't do it."

And for that reason, he wouldn't wish what happened to him on anyone else.

"I certainly wouldn't want it if I had the option, but I can easily count back the last 20 years and think about a lot of things that have come down the pipeline that never would have happened," he said. "I feel like we've been able to help thousands more people in this situation than I ever would have been able to as an IndyCar driver, so that's the silver lining."

Making a difference

For nearly 20 years, Sam Schmidt has been helping through his foundation, Conquer Paralysis Now, which he started a year after his accident.

At first, the group focused mostly on rehabilitation and research but then started seeing the insurance gap and lack of support for patients and family after an injury. Rehab time covered by insurance was mere weeks, Schmidt said.

A year ago, the foundation started a rehabilitation center in Las Vegas called Driven NeuroRecovery Center, which features an open gym, intensive rehab equipment, the latest technology from around the world. It also has a psychiatrist, wheelchair yoga, job placement assistance and peer group sessions.

"The insurance runs out, you don't have any money, we didn't want to turn anybody away," said Schmidt, who plans to expand the concept throughout the United States. "There's got to be some level of hope and some level of direction and inspiration."

Find out how to help at Schmidt's foundation Conquer Paralysis Now.

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via e-mail: dbenbow@indystar.com.