[82lsju]

tragic story from the Stanford Magazine

Lowell Wilson hadn’t made varsity yet—in the 1960s, freshmen still played on their own team—but the lineman was a likely star in the making. In the 1962 “Little Big Game,” he’d recorded the most tackles in Stanford’s 3–0 win over Cal’s frosh, and expectations were high. But in five years of high school and college football, Wilson had never done a drill like the one he lined up for at that Friday spring practice in May 1963—and he was, according to later correspondence, apprehensive to take his turn.

Each of the linemen was to tackle a sand-filled dummy hanging from a metal chain. It weighed, according to one teammate, hundreds of pounds, and after one player drove into it, the bag would swing back toward the next. “My turn came and I went straight for the dummy and it went straight for me,” Wilson said in a later letter. The players were supposed to hit the bag with their shoulder. Wilson hit it with the crown of his helmet and collapsed. When he regained consciousness, he was on a hospital table, surrounded by surgeons who had just performed a tracheotomy to put him on a respirator. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-los...BmNVBphlBA

[82lsju]

tragic story from the Stanford Magazine

Lowell Wilson hadn’t made varsity yet—in the 1960s, freshmen still played on their own team—but the lineman was a likely star in the making. In the 1962 “Little Big Game,” he’d recorded the most tackles in Stanford’s 3–0 win over Cal’s frosh, and expectations were high. But in five years of high school and college football, Wilson had never done a drill like the one he lined up for at that Friday spring practice in May 1963—and he was, according to later correspondence, apprehensive to take his turn.

Each of the linemen was to tackle a sand-filled dummy hanging from a metal chain. It weighed, according to one teammate, hundreds of pounds, and after one player drove into it, the bag would swing back toward the next. “My turn came and I went straight for the dummy and it went straight for me,” Wilson said in a later letter. The players were supposed to hit the bag with their shoulder. Wilson hit it with the crown of his helmet and collapsed. When he regained consciousness, he was on a hospital table, surrounded by surgeons who had just performed a tracheotomy to put him on a respirator. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-los...BmNVBphlBA