Collision Set Hixon On a New Course
Everett's Injury Pained Giants WR

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2009

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.

"He's really a compassionate person, he really felt so bad," Marvin Hixon said by phone from central Ohio, where he is now a police officer. "You could tell it just weighed on him."

It reminded him of the time in Germany when Domenik was about 9 years old and had won three trophies in Cub Scout competitions at the Kaiserslautern military community where the Army had stationed Marvin as a transportation director. And as the trophies were being handed out, another boy began to weep, begging for a trophy, too. Domenik reached down, picked up one of his own trophies and handed it to the crying child.

So as Hixon sat in his condo near the Broncos' training complex wondering what was going to happen to his football life, Marvin and Birgit tried to inspire their son. A religious family, they told him it was all part of a larger plan and that everything had happened for a reason. Someday soon, that reason would be revealed.

"I kept telling him, 'God has a plan for you; you're special,' " Marvin said.

The Giants made him their kickoff returner for the rest of 2007, also using him as a backup wide receiver and asking him to help block on punt returns. And as fate would have it, that season's schedule called for the Giants to play Dec. 23 in Buffalo, coincidentally the very day Everett was planning to return to the stadium where he had been hurt and to walk across the field and wave to the crowd. Hixon was asked if he wished to meet Everett. He did. Arrangements were made and after the game he was taken to a room where he finally shook hands with the man whose accident had haunted him for weeks.

"There were a lot of questions I had," Hixon recalled. "What does he think of me? What are his feelings toward me?"

Hixon had teammates who had played with Everett at the University of Miami and they told him Everett was a wonderful person, easy to talk to. But still, Hixon was nervous, unsure how to approach the meeting, wanting to say something, to apologize. He had no idea how he would go about it.

"I didn't know how I was going to respond to him or what we would say to each other," he said.

Instead, as they stared at each other, Hixon told him what the previous months had been like, how anguished he had been. Everett smiled. He said not to worry. He didn't blame him for anything.

Suddenly Hixon felt better. Months of guilt dropped from his shoulders. He was not afraid of football anymore. And from that point on, everything changed.

The weeks after that were a blur. The Giants kept winning. In the NFC championship game, he plunged on top of a fumble in Green Bay, probably keeping the Packers from winning the game. Then he returned kicks in the Super Bowl, where his everlasting memory is that of fellow wide receiver David Tyree shouting to his teammates just before the game: "Make today your best game. Make today count." And then watching with awe as Tyree made what might be the greatest catch in Super Bowl history.

"It's definitely been a blessing," he said.

Now, with Burress out for the remainder of the season, the opportunity is there for Hixon to be anything he wants. This season, he had 43 catches for 596 yards, most of them coming in the season's final five weeks after Burress was suspended.

In Ohio, a father rejoiced. Marvin Hixon has always believed his son was destined to be different than the other children. He knew this the moment Domenik started roaring through the soccer games and basketball games in Germany, the way as a pitcher he fired fastballs past the other kids on the American military bases. When Domenik reached junior high school, Marvin realized his child could not be kept in Germany, that he needed to be challenged. He asked the Army for a transfer back to the United States so his son could try to get a scholarship.

Someday, Marvin told people, his boy would be a professional athlete. Someday, they would know his name.

Finally, released from the burden of one of the worst moments imaginable, it seems they will.