Cowboy And The Cross (eBook)

SUBTLE AS A TRAIN WRECK To make a long story short, we ran into a speeding train. It was 1960, and I was playing football at the University of Oklahoma in my sophomore year. With the size today of college players, especially linemen, can you believe that at 229 pounds I was the heaviest guy on the team? Normally, I weighed about 245 to 250 pounds, and at that weight I was still lean, well-proportioned and growing. OU coaches believed the players should be small, which to them correlated to being quicker, so they kept trying to pull us down in weight and never encouraged us to lift weights. Lifting weights is almost mandatory today because with that comes more size or mass. They didn't understand then the benefits of weight training and were too closed-minded to investigate. Their approach was horrible for a guy who was maturing, growing into his strength as an adult. In my case, it meant I was continually on a diet, or on their 'fat man's team' for extra running, which also became, to me, one of their labels that created low self-esteem and insecurity. I was with my first wife, Pat, but our marriage wasn't working out, and I was leaving her. My mother had come to Norman because I didn't own a car. Our only car had been Pat's father's, so my mother picked me up at OU in her 1954 Buick Century. She was upset about the entire situation. We were back in Oklahoma City, on Meridian, heading north between Reno and 10th. As I recall, the railroad signal lights weren't working. We were told later that there had been seven previous deaths at that crossing from train wrecks. We hit the westbound train's second engine, which, we learned later, was traveling over the speed limit. Hitting one of the engines along the big 'drive arm' of the train's wheels, our point of impact was, I now believe, providential. If we had hit the train's body, we probably would have gone underneath it and been crushed to death, because it took the train seven-tenths of a mile to stop. The impact swung the driver's side away from the train and my side into it. The car was crushed, and I was thrown out of it. I landed about twenty yards away. I've often said, 'I wish I had a videotape of that. It's probably the best bump I ever took.' (Lenny Montana, a very funny wrestler who later played one of the mobsters in The Godfather, told me my beals were 'not even as high as rice grows,' so I was never noted for spectacular bumps taken, more for bumps given.) I believe that everything is providential and that the days of our lives are in the hands of God. This accident happened in the middle of football season, so I was in good physical shape. My mother hit the steering wheel and was bruised some but wasn't badly hurt. By the time she got to me, I was instinctively trying to get up, although I couldn't. My pelvis was sprung, and I had crushed ribs, a concussion and a bunch of things internally they didn't even know about at the time. I'd be in and out of consciousness for the next few weeks. My mother had major problems with depression. I believe now that she was manic-depressive or 'bipolar.' She also had terrible headaches and had prescriptions for them. She had some tranquilizers and painkillers and bravely crawled back into her car to get her purse, because she thought it would help to get a painkiller into me. Initially, they left me in my clothes, possibly because they didn't think I was going to live and because they didn't know the extent of my injuries, so they didn't want to cut me out of my clothes until they could examine me.