The memory still stings.(A Devastating Hit--25 Years Later)

Says the man in the wheelchair, 25 years and one day after the collision that so drastically changed his world: "It's funny, but sometimes I feel as though I'm living a charmed life."

Darryl Stingley could dwell on August 12, 1978, but he is looking ahead to October 18, 2003, when he will go into the Hall of Fame of Chicago's John Marshall High School. "I might not get to that Pro Football Hall of Fame," he says, "but fame in and of itself, living a life worth remembering, each of us would like to do something like that."

We in the media often do our remembering with anniversaries, when we pile on a story all at the same time. The phone calls. The interview requests. Unfortunately, they can freshen a man's pain. "The memory of everything was so intense that I actually went all the way back to that day," says Stingley from his high-rise condominium on Chicago's lakefront. "It was uncomfortable to experience all that again. What has happened, has happened. If I had to wish one thing in particular was different--I was always aggressive, and I tried to make a catch that maybe would have been spectacular had I done it, but it also was the preseason, and I could have just let it go."

Stingley extended his body through the air above the field at the Oakland Coliseum. A head-on hit from Raiders safety Jack Tatum took all the feeling from Stingley's body; in essence, took away Stingley's body. The damage to his neck left the wide receiver a quadriplegic.

The damage to Tatum's image lingers, too. Already a feared, physical force in the Raiders' secondary before the hit on Stingley, Tatum was one of college football's all-time greats and one of the NFL's best defensive backs throughout the 1970s, but he is a stranger to Canton, Ohio. "Does he care about the Pro Football Hall ...