He was always sensitive as a child. So it made sense to Marvin Hixon that the accident, years later, would come to torment his son Domenik. How could it not?
This was his son’s first professional football game in 2007, and Domenik, 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. As Domenik left the stadium in Buffalo that evening, he looked at Marvin with fear in his eyes then said: “Dad, they say he’s paralyzed.”
Something changed in Domenik Hixon that day. Gone was the fearless bravado that Marvin had come to depend upon 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. And even though Everett was walking again by the middle of December, Hixon 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: Two months later when Broncos coach Mike Shanahan 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.
And 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 best 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 spinal cord 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 such things happen in football and that he shouldn’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 added. “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.
“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 Domenik 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 and 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 receiver and asking him to help block on punt returns. And as fate would have it, the schedule called for the Giants to play Dec. 23 at Buffalo, coincidentally the very day Everett was planning to return to the stadium, walk across the field and wave to the crowd. Hixon was asked if he wished to meet Everett. He did.
“There were a lot of questions I had,” Hixon recalled. “What does he think of me? What are his feelings toward me?”
Hixon remembered being nervous. He was unsure how to approach the meeting, how to apologize.
“I didn’t know how I was going to respond to him or what we would say to each other,” he said.
After Hixon described his anguish, Everett smiled and said not to worry. He didn’t blame Hixon for anything.
Suddenly Hixon felt better. Months of guilt dropped from his shoulders. He was not afraid of football anymore. And from then 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.
“It’s definitely been a blessing,” he said.
Now with Burress gone, the opportunity is there for Hixon to be anything he wants. This year he had 43 catches for 596 yards, most of them coming in the season’s final five weeks after Burress was suspended.
And in Ohio a father rejoiced. Marvin Hixon has always believed his son was destined to be different from 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 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.
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