Collision Set Hixon On a New Course

Everett's Injury Pained Giants WR

He was always sensitive as a child, so it made sense to Marvin Hixon that the accident would come to torment his son, Domenik. How could it not?

It was his boy's first professional football game in September 2007, and Domenik, then a wide receiver and kick returner for the Denver Broncos, caught the kickoff and was running when suddenly a Buffalo Bills player named Kevin Everett knocked him to the ground. Domenik bounced up. Everett didn't move. An ambulance arrived. Hours passed and, as Domenik left the stadium in Buffalo that evening, he looked at Marvin with fear in his eyes and said, "Dad, they say he's paralyzed."

Something changed in Domenik Hixon that day. Gone was the fearless bravado that Marvin had come to expect from in his only child, going back to when they were living on the military base in Germany and Domenik dominated the other kids in every sport they played. It was gone in the instant Everett's spine broke between the third and fourth vertebrae, damaging his spinal cord. And even though Everett was walking again by the middle of that December, Domenik could not feel joy.

"I felt like I could have made him miss," he said. "I make people miss all the time."

And here is where his story could have ended: about a month later, when Mike Shanahan, then the Broncos' coach, released Hixon after the player began to shy away from contact in fear of hurting someone else. Hixon sat in his brand-new condominium in Denver, the tags still dangling from the furniture, and thought that maybe he didn't want to play football anymore.

Yet here is where it continued: a day later with a phone call from the New York Giants, then a Super Bowl and a confluence of circumstances -- the most significant of which involved a wide receiver named Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg -- that has left Hixon as a starting wide receiver for the NFC's top-seeded team in the playoffs this weekend.

None of which would have happened had he and Everett not collided on the 20-yard line of Buffalo's Ralph Wilson Stadium on Sept. 9, 2007.

"It's been a lot of ups and downs," Hixon said. "But it's also been a great experience."

Not that he could have realized this in the weeks after Everett's injury as the images of that afternoon kept replaying in his mind -- the limp body lying on the turf, the ambulance rolling slowly into the tunnel. "It tore me up mentally," Hixon said.

People told him it wasn't his fault, that such things happened in football and that he couldn't blame himself. But how could he not? "You play the game hard, but you don't hit anyone to get them injured," he said.

Even more than a year afterward, he sighed. "That's going to affect him for the rest of his life," Hixon said. "You can't say, 'You'll be good eventually.' "

And even though Marvin and his wife, Birgit, kept telling their son that this wasn't his fault, they knew their words were futile. A man was lying in a hospital desperately trying to coax his arms and legs into moving again. If there was anything they understood about their son, it was that he would not be able to forget this fact.