NY Giants' Mathias Kiwanuka's family, stunned by motorcycle accident, now gets ...

18.05.12

INDIANAPOLIS — Inside the darkened garage of Deodata Kiwanuka’s two-story brick home, a midnight-black Honda CBR 1000 motorcycle leans behind a row of storage boxes, propped up by a kickstand and covered by a jacket lined with protective padding. Both the bike and gear belong to her son, Mathias, the Giants’ linebacker. His elder brother, Ben, glimpses at the bike. He takes a drag from his Marlboro cigarette. “It’s a confusing amount of emotions,” says Ben, 34. “I miss riding. I still hear the engine in my sleep. I can almost not relive the crash memory when I look at it.” Ben’s bike — the same model, but silver — exploded into fiery pieces on May 28, 2010. Mathias, in town for a surprise visit with his girlfriend, Tessa, to attend the Indianapolis 500, sped alongside Ben through their hometown streets for several hours that day. At 2 p.m., they stopped at a gas station near home, and removed their helmets. They continued on Lafayette Road — Ben in the lead — as they approached a slight bend. Suddenly, Sheila Petrie, 43, pulled out of an apartment complex on Hunnewell Drive in a gold Kia Rio. Ben braked, then crashed into the car. He was thrown 100 feet in the air. “I just wanted to reach out and save him,” Mathias says. “I couldn’t do anything.” Police labeled Ben as “possible fatal.” He broke his fall with both wrists, which were shattered on impact, along with his thumbs; his right arm was lacerated just above the elbow. Mathias — who pulled up in time and went unscathed — ripped off his black T-shirt and tied it around his brother’s arm as a makeshift tourniquet to staunch blood loss. “Don’t move!” Mathias yelled. “Don’t move!” Ben, wearing his brother’s blue No. 94 jersey in preparation for the Giants’ Super Bowl matchup against the Patriots at Lucas Oil Stadium 13 miles south, exhales as he sits at the family’s dining room table Sunday evening. “He saved my life,” Ben says. “He didn’t even break stride.” Mathias, 29, watched the cycle of life spin wildly in the last 19 months. He rescued his brother, suffered a herniated cervical disk in his neck that nearly cost him his career and is planning a Miami wedding with his fiancée, Tessa, now pregnant with their first child. For weeks after the crash, he wrestled with nightmares, still seeing his brother prone on the ground. His mother counseled him to move past the scars. Then she implored him to consider stepping away from football if his neck worsened. “You don’t have to play again,” she said. “You don’t have to lose your life.” He considered his options and compiled a sizable list of what he would be suited to do outside football, including a return to school. He never narrowed it; instead, he sought opinions from specialists, touching down in Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina and back to New York. He declined to have surgery, and rehabilitated away from the Giants’ facility in light of the owner-imposed lockout last spring and summer. In February, doctors cleared him to play and the Giants signed him to an incentive-heavy contract once league operations resumed. He cherished the chance. “You have to see every day for what it is and that’s a blessing,” says Mathias, who has sworn off riding until after his career is over. His brother’s recovery proved more taxing. At Methodist Hospital, where their mother worked for 10 years as a nurse, Ben learned the extent of his injuries. His heart was bruised, his ribs were cracked, his left leg was fractured, his right foot broken in two sections, the skin on his right arm was all but scraped off, nerves and veins were ripped, his pelvis was cracked and he’d lost 10 pints of blood. He spent three weeks there. So many friends and family members paraded through that nurses labeled it “The Rock Star Room.” On Sundays, his uncle, a priest, held Mass. His mother and aunts passed rosary beads to each other and prayed around the clock. During one session, his 84-year-old grandmother, Veronica, raised her voice, “Let us pray for our little one.” “I was like, ‘Grandma, we’re both in wheelchairs. Let’s just say prayers for each other,’” Ben says. Ben, back at work as a ramp agent for Fed-Ex at the Indianapolis Airport, can make a hard fist with both hands and operate with a full range of motion. He still hobbles at times, but is otherwise healthy. He has one more step that he would like to take. “I’m trying to quit smoking,” he says. “I know it’s bad. I’m getting there.” * * * * * It was mid-July 2010, a month and a half since he was first hospitalized, and Ben Kiwanuka could no longer sit still, his movements improving only incrementally. He was home by then, sequestered in a room off the main hallway in the house his brother bought their mother after being a first-round selection in the 2006 NFL draft. He needed to challenge himself. When his son, Joseph, seated in his dad’s lap, left the room one afternoon, Ben surprised him upon his return, lifting himself off the bed and standing without support. “Daddy!” the boy shouted. “Sit down! Sit down!” Family members flooded the room, motioning and screaming for him to sit. “Joseph blew my cover,” Ben says. The Kiwanukas understand the urge to take a challenging path. Benedicto, the grandfather for whom Ben is named, studied law in Britain and was elected the first prime minister of Uganda in 1961 when the country gained independence from Great Britain. Deodata, then a nun in Konge, escaped to the United States. She studied in Scranton, Pa. and worked at a camp with children in the St. Francis parish of Indianapolis. By then, she had reconnected with Emmanuel Kiwanuka, a friend from Uganda who was studying to be a priest, and wrote a letter to her superior in Uganda to inform her that she was leaving the community. “Early retirement,” she says. Benedicto, meanwhile, was assassinated in 1972 at the command of dictator Idi Amin, whose terror reign led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. “He was a true leader,” says Mathias, who has the nation’s seal of two spears, a shield and a crane tattooed onto his back. “The people loved him; as did family.” Indianapolis offered new roads. Kiwanuka’s parents divorced by 1994, and the boys lost themselves in long bicycle rides on the city’s east side. Mathias, forever running with a slight jump to his gait, earned comparisons to a gazelle in the open soccer fields and developed his aggressiveness as a middle school wrestler. Once, at Cathedral High, he charged up the middle while attempting to block a field goal and over-jumped the ball’s trajectory. He missed with his arms but knocked it with his thigh pad. “My jaw just about hit the ground,” said former teammate Odets Shannon. College recruiters eventually gravitated toward him. When he told Ben he wanted to attend Boston College with Cathedral teammate Jeremy Trueblood, Ben blinked. “Boston what?” Ben asked. Mathias beat his own path, bull-rushing offensive linemen, blocking field goals and burnishing a reputation as a respected leader. Defensive line coach Keith Willis, who played for the Steelers, noted the well-defined demeanor. “He had an agenda to make sure he walked a straight line in the eyes of many,” Willis says. The Giants drafted Kiwanuka, and the image of coach Tom Coughlin, a former Boston College head coach, first introducing him at the team’s facility hangs on the wall connected to the room Ben stayed in during his recovery. He has used his brother’s success as motivation. “How many times can one person win the lottery in their lives?” Ben says. “I tell him, ‘Just go somewhere where there’s a big pile of money and put your name in there.’” While fantasies have been fulfilled, the family’s love is only so flexible. During a rehabilitation session, a physical therapist started talking about various types of motorcycles to provide Ben with a goal to work toward. When his mother and wife Scovia learned of the ploy, they made clear their feeling toward Ben riding a bike again. “If this happens again,” his wife said. “You’re recovering on your own.” * * * * * In February 2008, the last time the Giants reached the Super Bowl, Kiwanuka, who broke his left leg in Week 11 that season, wore a protective boot and watched the NFC Championship from Las Vegas. He watched the thrilling, last-second win over the Patriots from the sidelines in Glendale, Ariz. “Talk about mixed emotions,” Ben says. “He would have given anything to be with his teammates going after (Tom) Brady.” Kiwanuka considered the weekend a family opportunity nonetheless. He bought tickets and brought his family out to Arizona, celebrating all the while. “It’s a career accomplishment for many,” he says. “You never lose that appreciation for the moment.” His mother, a frequent traveler to games, be it Dallas, Green Bay or San Francisco, was caught by surprise in recent weeks. As the Giants struggled during another second-half slump, she watched her son declare his team capable of reaching the Super Bowl despite the continued setbacks. She shook her head. “Mathi, you’re not a Super Bowl team,” she said. “Really, mom?” Mathias said. She erupts in laughter. “Now he is getting back at me,” she says. No flights are needed for immediate family this time. His nephews and nieces paraded from Ben’s black F-150 — license plates “KAMPALA”, their hometown in Uganda — through a door and into the living room wearing No. 94 jerseys Sunday night. “Are you ready for the Super Bowl?” Deodata asked. “Yes!” yelled Joseph, the youngest. “Who’s playing?” she asked. “Mathias!” Joseph said. Ben, dressed in a white Giants coat and dark shades, looked at the gathering. “I’m going to lose it on Sunday,” he said. “We’ll get emotional in private.”

Source: New York Daily News