Chamberlain’s friend and assistant, Todd Negoshian, actually recorded the mishap while aiming his smartphone at Joba and Karter. Willing to share stills with a reporter, if not the world, Chamberlain in one frame was in bounding heaven with his helmeted son, stumbling with the lower right leg turned ominously in another and finally down, clutching the ankle.

A third photo, taken by a doctor at the hospital before surgery, showed the bloody ankle, skin clearly broken, but not quite in the stomach-churning way the world was led to believe.

“There wasn’t that much blood,” Chamberlain said. “If it didn’t gross out a little kid, how bad could it be?”

Yet in the moment Chamberlain collapsed, he sent Karter to be with Negoshian and had the presence of mind to not make it worse for his son by crying out. How could he do that and look his father in the eye? Born on the Winnebago American Indian Reservation, Harlan Chamberlain had an impoverished, transient childhood, worked 27 years in a prison without use of half his body, reared the adolescent Joba and his older sister Tasha in the absence of their troubled mother and never complained within earshot.

“I’ll never forget, the thing where it finally turned in my head about what sacrifice really was,” Chamberlain said. “I had surgery my sophomore year in college. Had a little procedure that pushed water through my leg to keep the swelling out. It’s five o’clock in the morning, I’m on the couch and here comes my dad walking out on his crutches with the ice bag in his teeth. I said, ‘What are you doing, we can wait a couple of hours.’ He said, ‘No, your ice has to be switched.’ His handicap didn’t matter. What had to be done was going to get done.”