A Time to Heal

JUST MONTHS AGO, DUKE RECEIVER BLAIR HOLLIDAY CLUNG TO LIFE AFTER HIS JET SKI COLLIDED WITH TEAMMATE JAMISON CROWDER’S. NOW, HOLLIDAY WILL BE ABLE TO CHEER ON HIS TEAMMATES AS THE BLUE DEVILS PLAY IN THEIR FIRST BOWL IN NEARLY 20 YEARS. FOR EVERYTHING, THERE IS A SEASON.

BY MATT CROSSMAN

HOLLIDAY, CUTCLIFFE-HOLLIDAY: JON GARDINER / DUKE PHOTOGRAPHY

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B

lair Holliday looked dead.

He was face down in Lake Tillery, only his life jacket preventing him from sinking. A jet ski accident had launched him into the water.

Holliday was unconscious.

A dazed Jamison Crowder—a Duke teammate and fellow receiver who was driving the jet ski that collided with Holliday—saw his friend’s limp body and swam to him. The 5-9 Crowder lifted the 6-3 Holliday onto the back of a jet ski. Someone else drove while Jamison, facing backward, held onto Holliday, his feet and legs trailing in the water.

A nursing student named Chelsea Gibbons heard the accident as she floated in a cove. As her mom called 911, Gibbons climbed onto a dock nearby. When she saw Holliday taken to another dock, she worried she might not be able to swim the 100 yards to get there. She grabbed a floatie, tucked it under her right arm, jumped in the water and started kicking.

She swims faster under water, so she ducked under, popped back up and shouted instructions. “Lay him flat!” she hollered. She swam farther.

“Don’t move his head!” When she got to him, she assessed his injuries. The only visible ones were to his head, which bore the brunt of the crash. His mouth was bleeding. His jaw broken.

Gibbons found a weak pulse. It disappeared. She started CPR—she had been recertified just a few weeks earlier. She guesses she did CPR for 10 or 12 minutes. An emergency crew arrived, put an oxygen mask on Holliday and drove him to a nearby hospital. From there, he was flown to a University of North Carolina hospital.

Crowder was physically uninjured.

But he was deeply wounded.

The crash was an accident, a

horrendous accident. Holliday slowed to say hello to somebody, and when he did, spray from his wake hit Crowder, who was behind him, in the face. He never saw Holliday stop before they collided. Crowder knew it wasn’t his fault—it was no one’s fault. But his heart ached just the same.

Blair Holliday is such a good athlete that there is disagreement about which sport he plays best. His parents say baseball. He and his high school friends say basketball—he was named player of the year for the class level he played in as a high school senior in California. But he earned a football scholarship. He had hoped to go to Stanford, but coaches there didn’t seem interested. Other schools offered scholarships, but he didn’t think they were good enough academically.

One of his high school coaches was former Tennessee quarterback Casey Clausen, brother of Carolina Panthers backup quarterback Jimmy Clausen.

Casey Clausen called Duke coach David Cutcliffe, a former Tennessee offensive coordinator, and that led to a scholarship for Holliday.

Cutcliffe is an old school Southern football coach, and Holliday carries himself with California cool. Maybe too much California cool. Cutcliffe rode him, pushed him to work harder in 2011, Holliday’s freshman season.

“It was a little culture shock. And it was fun shocking him, to be honest with you,” Cutcliffe says. “I kind of picked on him. I coined the phrase because he wouldn’t be as intense,

‘Every day is a Holliday.’ ” That became the rallying cry of Holliday’s friends and family as he recovered from the head injury that nearly killed him.

Cutcliffe was driving across Tennessee on the Fourth of July, about 5:30 p.m., when his phone rang. It was Crowder, calling from Lake Tillery, about 50 miles east of Charlotte. “The pain in his voice was beyond description. He said, ‘Coach, something really, really, really bad has happened. Something bad has happened to Blair.’ I’m just, oh my gosh. He tried to tell me. He told me they were airlifting Blair. I said, ‘You’ve got to call your parents.’ It was horrific to hear that pain in that young man’s voice.”

In California, Holliday’s mom, Leslie, gathered her husband, Rick, and their two other sons. When they arrived in North Carolina, the diagnosis was bad. Holliday had a traumatic brain injury. He was nonresponsive. He wasn’t expected to live.

Days passed. A week. Two weeks.

Holliday caught pneumonia. Doctors said he was the sickest person in the intensive care unit. His mom and dad called relatives to tell them it might be time to come to say goodbye to him. Duke football officials prepared themselves for his death, too.

Crowder, who left Duke to return to his parents’ suburban Charlotte home after the accident, was too distraught to go to the hospital. He didn’t know how Holliday’s parents would react to him. Word of Crowder’s pain reached Leslie Holliday. She could not bear the thought that she would lose her son and that Crowder’s life would be ruined, too.

Crowder had not let her son drown in Lake Tillery.

She would not let Crowder drown in despair.

She had to see him. She kept asking for him. Finally, he and his parents went to the hospital. When they got to Holliday’s room, it was silent, except for the noise of the machines. “Jamison was just visibly … just … I don’t even think initially he could look at our family eye to eye. He just didn’t know how to respond to us,” Leslie Holliday says. “So I grabbed him. I hugged him.

I told him that I loved him.”

Two months after his accident, Holliday, having been to hell and back, joined Cutcliffe for the team’s Devil Walk before the N.C. Central game.

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Cutcliffe says that hug is one of the most beautiful things he has ever seen.

“I can’t tell you words because it went beyond that,” Cutcliffe says. “All of us, all of us, as children, hopefully, hopefully identify with a mother’s comfort. The first thing we do when we scrape our knee is run to see our mother. This was a mother comforting a young man in a way that you would describe as taking her own. She took Jamison as her own for that moment.”

That embrace started his healing.

Holliday’s was still to come.

Cutcliffe spent so much time in Holliday’s hospital room that he learned to read the devices that were plugged into him. The all-important pressure gauge, which bore deep into his brain, fluctuated based on who was in the room and what they were doing. When members of the Duke women’s volleyball team, who had been part of the outing at Lake Tillery, talked to Holliday and rubbed his hand, the number dropped—which was a good thing.

“Then he’d hear my voice, it’d be like, I’m irritated like hell—you get out of here,” Cutcliffe says. “It would go in the other direction. I said, ‘I got you, I got you. I’m gone, brother.’ ” Another constant at Holliday’s bedside was David Helton. Like Holliday and Cutcliffe, Holliday and

Helton make an odd couple—and even odder roommates. Holliday is a wide receiver from California and a neat freak, Helton a linebacker from Tennessee and slob. (“He dealt with it well. I acknowledge that,” Helton says.)

They became best friends amid endless soccer video games. When Holliday won, he let everyone know.

When Helton won, he acted like he had done it before, so therefore it was no big deal. That drove Holliday crazy.

“I never really felt real anger until I started playing FIFA against Blair,” Helton says. “Real, true anger.”

As Holliday sat in his hospital bed, at a 60-degree angle because that position reduced the pressure on his brain, day after day, Helton read to him. He chose The Great Gatsby because he recalled Holliday saying he liked it.

Characters in The Great Gatsby wonder how Gatsby came to be who he was. Helton wondered who Holliday would be once he healed—if he healed.

Would he get his friend back or merely the shadow of him? Would he be the same Blair he knew and loved—the kid with the big personality, the guy who always had a smile on his face? Would he remember all the good times? More important, would he be able to make more?

Leslie Holliday barely ate. She barely slept. Once, she was so exhausted in the hospital room that she fell asleep … and woke up on the

windowsill. On August 6—a month and two days after the accident— Holliday still hadn’t talked or walked, but he had shown some improvement, so he was moved from the UNC hospital to The Shepherd Center, a rehabilitation facility in Atlanta.

Leslie Holliday took her husband to the Atlanta airport one day, leaving her cousin behind with Blair. On the way back, Leslie stopped to get gas. Her phone rang. It was her cousin, asking if Leslie wanted to talk to her son. He said, “Hi, Mom,” and “I love you.”

From there, Holliday progressed rapidly. This once vibrant athlete relearned to walk, to go to the bathroom, to sit. He could only take a few steps at first. He couldn’t go to the bathroom alone. Someone, often one of his brothers, went with him, holding on to a strap that wrapped around Holliday, to catch him in case he fell. He was released to outpatient care on September 1, 10 days ahead of schedule.

The improvement he made physically mirrored the improvement he made cognitively. Helton first believed Blair would become himself again when he started acting like others. The two do impressions of Cutcliffe and of linebacker Chris Hoover, whose cry of “Let’s go!” before each game fires up his teammates even if they like to make fun of it. When Blair did his Hoover impression, Helton knew he had gotten his friend back.

Holliday hasn’t been cleared to play, but he hopes to return to classes next semester.

Leslie Holliday knew Blair would be himself again when she caught a cold.

“Normally, I’m taking care of him.

He started taking care of me. He made sure I had Kleenex, asked if I needed something to eat, helped me get in and out of the car,” she says. “That’s the type of son Blair was before the accident.”

For every step he takes, for every time his bright eyes light up at a joke, his friends and family see 99-yard touchdown runs. They all thought he was going to die. “A walking miracle,” Leslie Holliday calls him.

“I don’t know if I really realize how much of a miracle it is,” Helton says.

“He’s one of the most special people you’ll ever meet. The fact he’s come so far and is progressing the way he is, it’s one of the most inspirational things any of us can really feel.”

Amid the heartbreak and healing, Helton, Cutcliffe and Crowder prepared for one of the most anticipated Duke football seasons in years. The Blue Devils hadn’t won a bowl game since 1960 and hadn’t had a winning record since 1994, but they had gotten incrementally better since Cutcliffe arrived before the 2008 season.

Now, months later, the Blue Devils have won six games, none bigger than the sixth. Not only did it come against archrival North Carolina, but it also

HOLLIDAY-MOM: MATT CROSSMAN / SPORTING NEWS; HOLLIDAY-CROWDER: JON GARDINER / DUKE PHOTOGRAPHY

Holliday’s mother watched as her son wasn’t able to walk or talk for over a month, but now his familiar smile is back.

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CROWDER: JON GARDINER / DUKE PHOTOGRAPHY

made Duke bowl-eligible for the first time since 1994. The Blue Devils will head to the Belk Bowl, where a win against Cincinnati would give them a winning record for the season.

In that game against North Carolina, Duke trailed by four and faced fourthand-2 from the UNC 5 with 19 seconds left. The play call was “chin x angle.”

Quarterback Sean Renfree took the snap from the shotgun. For 3 seconds, he stood in the backfield, waiting for a receiver to flash open. His fourth option did. Renfree floated a pass into the end zone. The receiver jumped so high to grab it that when a linebacker arrived, his shoulder connected with the receiver’s hips. At the same time, a cornerback pushed the receiver from behind, and he flipped. He landed on his head.

There were so many bodies going every which way that nobody on the sideline could see exactly what happened. They saw the throw, they saw the receiver jump and get hit, but they didn’t see whether he caught the ball.

They waited. For a flag. For the ball to come out. For some indication of what had happened.

There it was—Jamison Crowder ran out of the chaos, celebrating his catch, one of the biggest plays in Duke football history.

He had just made the biggest play of his life.

“I told my wife later, I said, ‘Karen, that wasn’t by chance,’ ” Cutcliffe says.

“I hate to seem so mystical. But I am spiritual. I just told her, ‘That was not an accident that it was Jamison.’ People can believe what they want or comment what they want about that. I believe that. There’s a worthiness in the way Jamison has handled himself through all of that. How great is that gift to him?

How great is it to be a sophomore from Monroe, N.C., and forever to be the one who caught that pass?”

Catch and tuck, catch and tuck.

Coaches beat that into Crowder’s head. You don’t know who might hit you or where he might hit you or how hard he might hit you, but you had better be prepared when he does.

Crowder’s leaping catch in the final seconds against North Carolina made Duke bowl-eligible. “That was not an accident that it was Jamison,” his coach said afterward.

That’s the lesson of this whole story in a broad sense, and in a narrow sense, it’s what was going through Crowder’s head as he caught the ball that made Duke bowl-eligible.

The events in his life in the last few months amaze him. “It’s kind of strange how that happened, everything I went through, being able to make the catch like that. One of the greatest moments of my life, one of the greatest moments in Duke history,” Crowder says. “I’m pretty much speechless about it.”

Leslie Holliday’s hug started his healing. The catch didn’t complete it, but it helped, and it sure felt good.

“It meant more than just a catch, just winning the ball game, to me,” he says.

Cutcliffe says that after the catch—and after he made sure the extra point and kickoff were handled—he scanned the sidelines. If Crowder and Holliday hugged, he wanted to see it.

They didn’t.

But here’s what happened.

After the catch, Crowder was mobbed by his teammates. Holliday wanted to join the fun, but given his head injury, decided not to. He waited a few minutes, then found Crowder on the sidelines. “Nice catch,” he said to the teammate and friend who saved his life. “That’s my job,” Crowder told him. Later, Holliday sent a text to Chelsea Gibbons, the other friend who

saved his life: “Did you see the catch my boy made?”

It’s a crisp fall Sunday in Durham, exactly four months after the accident.

Blair Holliday sits on the outdoor patio of a restaurant. He looks healthy—a little skinny, maybe—and his only visible scar is on his throat, from the tracheotomy.

He and Leslie Holliday tell their story with laughter and joy, not tears and sadness. Life is fun when it stops being serious. They have a list a mile long of people they want to thank, including Crowder, Gibbons, Cutcliffe, Helton, the volleyball players, the staff at the hospital and The Shepherd Center and Tracy Ross, a stranger who raised money for them.

The future is ahead of Blair Holliday, and he can’t wait for it to get here.

“I’ve come far. I can go farther,” he says. “I realize if I’m maybe a quarter of the way there, I need to be 100 percent. Maybe I’m not the best I can be now, but I can get to that point.”

He wants to get back to class in January and, eventually, back to football, but he is not obsessed with the sport. That was true before, and it’s one of the things his friends like about him. As much as he wants to play again, he admits if doctors

never clear him to play, “I won’t be bummed.”

He lost 40 pounds in the hospital, and he calls the 20 pounds he has put back on bad weight, not the muscle he used to have. He can’t lift weights yet, and only recently could he jog without pain in his knees. He laughs when he remembers relearning to run—his arms flopped like an unattended garden hose.

There are small, unexplainable differences between the Blair Holliday he is becoming and the Blair Holliday he used to be. He likes vanilla milkshakes now instead of chocolate and snickerdoodle cookies instead of chocolate chip. He used to be a burger guy, but he recently went through an obsessive Chick-Fil-A phase and now can’t get enough salmon. He thinks silly things are funnier now, and he laughs more than he used to. Which is saying something because he laughed a lot before the crash.

Whatever grief and anxiety the son and his mother went through is gone, or at least it is for this day. To explain how that can be true, Holliday pulled on the neck of his blue Duke hoodie to reveal a tattoo a few inches below his tracheotomy scar: Blessed, it declares him.

He believed that was true when he got the tattoo long before the accident.

He believes it more now.

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