SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Lockette injury brings back painful memories for Terry Hollimon
Nov 4, 2015, 8:35 AM | Updated: 2:35 pm
Almost two years after making a tackle that paralyzed Curtis Williams, he returned to the University of Washington to watch a football game. He died later that year. (AP)
(AP)
Terry Hollimon and Marcus Trufant were texting each other while watching Ricardo Lockette lay motionless on the field Sunday.
Trufant, a former Pro Bowler for the Seahawks, wrote that in the game of football it’s, “one inch to the left and you’re paralyzed for life. One inch to the right and you’re dead.”
That lesson was not new for Hollimon, who was a friend and teammate of former University of Washington safety Curtis Williams, who was paralyzed below the neck after making a tackle in 2000. Williams died 18 months later, days after celebrating his 24th birthday.
“It looked like a routine tackle and, again, it’s just a matter of inches,” Hollimon said on “The Barbershop” with KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.
Hollimon said he put Williams under his wing during his junior year, helping the then-freshman – who already had a wife and daughter – get his life together.
Related: Ricardo Lockette’s injury a reason to consider ‘concussion clause’
Williams’ injury happened on a seemingly innocuous helmet-to-helmet tackle in his senior year against Stanford running back Kerry Carter, causing a spinal-cord injury between the C1 and C2 vertebrae. Dori called the incident “one of the great tragedies in Seattle sports history,” adding that those types of collisions happen dozens of times every game, though typically the athlete bounces right back up. Hollimon remembers hearing later from his friends on the field that they knew immediately that this was no typical collision.
“Something about it said this is different than the normal hit, this is different than the normal injury,” Hollimon said. “And as I was watching it, because I was watching it on TV, it’s a gut punch. It’s almost like you can’t catch your breath; you don’t know what to do and you run the gamut of emotions.”
Although Lockette will be sidelined for at least the rest of the season, the Seahawks announced that the wideout had a “successful neck surgery” and that he was expected to be “up and moving around” as early as Tuesday.
