November 22, 2007
Helping Fight a Battle for a Friend Who Can’tBy KAREN CROUSE
NEW YORK TIMES
IRVING, Tex., Nov. 21 — Every time Everson Walls sees his former Dallas Cowboys teammate Ron Springs, he flicks him on the forehead, slaps his cheeks, jabs at his jaw; anything to get a reaction.
The contact is purposeful, not playful. It is Walls’s attempt to reach a close friend who may be beyond modern medicine’s reach. When Springs, who has been in a coma in a Dallas hospital for more than a month, squirms in response or opens his eyes, Walls says a silent prayer of thanks. “To me, that’s signs of improvement,” he said.
This was supposed to be a bountiful Thanksgiving for Walls and Springs, friends since they met playing for the Cowboys during the 1981 season. In February, Walls, 47, donated a kidney to Springs, who had lost his right foot and two of his left toes during a more than decade-long battle against diabetes.
Springs, 50, came through the surgery fine, only to lose consciousness during a minor operation in October. The medical prognosis is dire. For the extended Cowboys family, Thursday’s blessings will come with some sorrow.
When Walls gave Springs one of his kidneys, he never expected to receive, in return, Springs’s gift for conversation. The introverted Walls, who enjoyed taking shelter in Springs’s conviviality, has shed his reluctance to publicize their story and become a persuasive spokesman for living organ donations. In September, he appeared before a congressional subcommittee in support of a bill that would create a National Organ and Tissue Donor Registry.
The legislation that lured Walls to Washington was the Everson Walls and Ron Springs Gift of Life Act of 2007, named for the charitable foundation they started this year to raise awareness, especially among African-Americans, about diabetes and organ donation. In 2006, the last year for which statistics were available, 24 percent of kidney recipients in the United States were African-American. Since Springs lapsed into the coma, Walls has spread himself thin covering his and Springs’s appointment books. Wherever he goes on behalf of the foundation, he bumps into people who believe, as he once mistakenly did, that only blood relatives or the deceased can be donors. In fact, in 2005, more than 33 percent of living donors of all organ transplants were non-relatives.
Before last year, Walls said he thought becoming a donor amounted to agreeing to carry a driver’s license that indicated one’s organs were to be recycled in the event of a fatal accident. Then he found out that Springs, who had befriended him when he came to the Cowboys as an undrafted free agent in the early 1980s, needed a kidney transplant.
No one in Springs’s family was a donor match. But Walls and Springs were as close as brothers and were godfathers for each other’s children. So Walls read everything he could about becoming a donor. “Once I did my research, I realized how safe it was,” he said.
He offered to be tested and did not think twice when it turned out he was a match. The transplant — the first between two professional athletes — took place Feb. 28. Springs’s body accepted Walls’s kidney without protest, and six months later, Springs was telling people he felt better than he had in years.
On Sept. 9, Springs and Walls returned to Texas Stadium to serve as honorary captains for the Cowboys’ regular-season opener against the Giants. In an interview with The Dallas Morning News the week of the game, Springs said Cowboys fans “don’t have to worry about Ron Springs giving up.”
The last time Walls and Springs spoke was shortly before Springs entered Medical City Dallas Hospital on Oct. 12 to have a cyst on his arm removed. Springs considered it such a routine procedure, he did not mention it when he and his wife stopped by Walls’s house two nights before.
Springs was in great spirits that night, Walls recalled. Parking his wheelchair at the door, he walked into the house, plopped himself down on the couch and was his old wisecracking self. When Walls thinks back to that night, “I get frustrated,” he said, “because I realize how close he was to turning the corner.”
During the surgery, Springs went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing for at least three minutes, according to Walls. He has not regained consciousness. Springs’s vital signs are stable, but the neurologist treating him has told the family that the prognosis is poor. Springs’s son, Shawn, a cornerback with the Washington Redskins, described his father as “pretty much a vegetable at this point” while speaking to reporters from Dallas last week. The Redskins have allowed Shawn to miss work every Monday and Tuesday to be with his father in Dallas, but in an interview this week, he said he did not expect his father to come out of the coma.
“For me, it’s just the way I look at things in life,” said Springs, who was reared by his paternal grandparents. “Whatever God’s will is, let it be done. I think sometimes we confuse God’s will with what we want.”
Shawn added that it was up to his stepmother, Adriane Springs, to decide whether to remove his father from life support. She declined an interview request.
Walls, who is in daily contact with her, said that she remained hopeful her husband would recover.
“Shawn is a little bit more pessimistic than everyone else is,” Walls said. “In interviews, he’s so down and dismal and that’s not where we’re at right now. That’s what we don’t want.”
Walls spent part of last week in Columbus, Ohio, standing in for Springs, a former Ohio State player who was scheduled to be honored at a dinner leading up the Ohio State-Michigan game. Walls had intended to accompany him on the trip. Although he attended Grambling, Walls felt a kinship with the former Ohio State players he met. He talked with Jack Tatum, a defensive back whose lower left leg was amputated because of complications caused by diabetes. He compared notes with Diane Brockington, who donated a kidney to running back John Brockington, whom she later married.
People entertained Walls with stories about Springs. Photographs were passed around showing Springs as a collegian, his hair styled in a resplendent Afro. By the end of the evening, Tatum declared Walls an honorary Ohio Stater because Buckeyes blood now runs through his donated kidney. Walls looked forward to telling Springs the Ohio stories during his next hospital visit. “The fact that they made me an honorary Buckeye will stir him,” Walls said. He laughed. “That will get him going.”
For however long it takes, Walls said he would keep flicking Springs’s forehead and wiping his mouth and watching his chest rise and fall and telling him, “I know you’re in there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/sports/football/22walls.html?em&ex=1195880400&en=c41446f5b44ed69b&ei=5087%0A
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