DESTREHAN, La. – Devon Walker doesn't remember the pain. He remembers the hit, the numbness and the strange feeling that his arms and legs were floating high in the air.

Then he remembers trying desperately to breathe, and the feeling he was drowning, and the realization that he was about to die.

On Sept. 8, the Tulane safety sped to make a tackle in the final seconds before halftime of his team's game at Tulsa. He launched himself at an onrushing receiver, his long hair flying behind him, and he hit both his intended target and a teammate coming hard from the opposite direction. He fell and went still.

"You're waiting for the hand to move, the foot to move," says Brenda Dickson, wife of Tulane athletic director Rick Dickson, who was there that day. "Come on, let me see something. Come on, move. He didn't move. That was just crushing. I think it destroyed that veil that everything's gonna be OK."

Everything wasn't OK. A doctor who tended to Walker would compare the collision to a car wreck, or when a diver hits an unseen rock underneath shallow water. Walker's vertebrae squeezed against his spinal cord so forcefully that it cut off his breathing mechanism and nearly severed the cord altogether. If it weren't for the quick response of both Tulsa and Tulane medical staff tending to him as his blood pressure fell, Walker would have died on the field.

Eight months later, everything still isn't OK. Three hours of surgery fused the bones in Devon's neck and took the pressure off his spinal cord, but severe damage was done. Breathing and speaking returned slowly, but he still struggles with both.

It's a tragic story where Devon Walker is now, yet he somehow exudes a calm with the challenge in front of him. That's how he's always been.









On a chilly day in this New Orleans suburb, a nurse leans over a wheelchair in the living room of a one-story house. She smiles as she picks up a piece of sushi from a tinfoil tray. Devon Walker opens his mouth and starts to chew slowly. He swallows carefully and turns his head to greet a reporter at the door. "Nice to meet you," he says in a scratchy voice.

Walker uses a Sip-N-Puff, a device that allows him to direct his chair by inhaling and exhaling. That's all he can do for now, though he has frequent pain from his nerves starting to fire. He says he can just start to wiggle his toes – a terrific sign. He can move his shoulders – also ahead of schedule. Yet something as simple as scratching an itch can still be maddening. He takes 20 pills per day, and each one is difficult to swallow.

"It's a good thing I have pain," he says. "But it's bad."

You'd think the first emotion to hit a college football player upon waking up in the hospital after being paralyzed from the neck down would be overwhelming sadness. You'd also think the most painful part of losing the use of most of your body would be missing the ability to run and play. In the case of Devon Walker, you'd be wrong on both counts.

Walker blacked out on the field at Tulsa, woke up in an ambulance, and then blacked out again. His mother, Inez, was here in Destrehan, at the Walker home, when the injury happened. She rushed to the TV to see her son's legs sticking out from a mass of paramedics. "Oh Lord," she said, "don't let it be Devon."

Then the TV showed her son's face on the screen. "I just lost it," she says.

Rick Dickson rushed downstairs from the press box and onto the field. The athletic director quickly made arrangements for Devon's entire family to fly to Tulsa. He called Inez from the hospital as soon as he could to tell her Devon was out of immediate danger. That was the lowest point for her – learning her son came close to dying. She was so, so far away.

That's why, when Devon came out of three hours of surgery, the first emotion was happiness: the whole family was there at his bedside. "Devon," his mom told him, "it'll be OK. Mom's here. Everyone's here."

View photos

Story continues