A New Game Plan
For the son of a Redskins coach, football mattered more than anything else. Until a life-threatening injury on the field changed everything.
Used with permission
By Eli Saslow
Sunday, October 29, 2006
DREW HIXON SOMETIMES STOOD IN FRONT OF HIS MIRROR in the morning and pretended to get dressed for a different job, the kind he’d expected to have after graduating from college. He imagined himself as an up-and-coming businessman, and that it was important to look nice. Everything he wore needed to coordinate, even his sunglasses. Drew removed his earrings and trimmed his thin mustache, lingering in front of the mirror until he looked completely professional. Then he went to work and took orders from teenagers.
Doctors called it miraculous that Drew, then 23, held any job. But every time he walked into the Nike store where he worked, he thought: Failure, plain and simple . Not long ago, Drew had played college football, and Nike had provided him with its best merchandise for free. Not long ago, he’d interned for the Washington Redskins, where his father, Stan, is the wide receivers coach. Now he swiped shoes and shirts across a scanner at the Leesburg outlet mall.
Drew longed to tell everyone he met that he didn’t belong at this store, that he had been on the verge of accomplishing great things before a crushing tackle in a Tennessee Tech football game knocked him first close to death, then back to infancy. He’d spent months recovering, but he still walked with a limp, slurred his speech and struggled to retrieve words from a brain so badly bruised that it once looked like a peach hurled against a brick wall. Drew worried people would think he was a dummy.
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