Casualties of the NFL

He came off the snap and started upfield, the linebacker dead in his sights. Brian DeMarco -- 6-foot-7 and ripped at 320 pounds; the rare pulling guard who could run like hell and bench press 500 -- led his tailback, Corey Dillon, into the hole. DeMarco, with a full head of steam, was set to bury the linebacker, put a helmet between his numbers, and plant him, when someone tripped Dillon from behind. Dillon fell crosswise on the back of DeMarco's legs, pinning his knees to the turf. In slo-mo DeMarco was falling forward himself when the linebacker lowered his helmet and drove through DeMarco, knocking his chest downfield as his hips went upfield, practically cleaving him in two.

"I heard the pop in my back as I was going down and just felt this pain like I'd never felt before," says DeMarco, who had recently signed with the Cincinnati Bengals after four solid years with the Jacksonville Jaguars. "I'm at the bottom of the pile under a thousand pounds of guys, and I'm thinking, I'm never getting up. I'll never walk again."

In the grand scheme of things, he'd been hit harder: shots that broke ribs and left them slapped on sideways; head-to-head collisions that knocked him senseless and smashed the orbital bone around his eyes; blows that sheared knees and turned elbows inside out. None of those, however, had managed to shove his spine forward on his pelvis and shave off bits of vertebrae like ice chips. Here was terror: DeMarco couldn't work his legs, and the pain between his hips sawed him in half.