January 29, 2006

     NOTE: Pam Malcolm played for the CT Storm. Former CT Starters player Lauren Glenney and former CT Starters coach Mark Caruso are quoted in the following article.

     SMITHFIELD, R.I. - The tape is tucked away deep in the recesses of an apartment closet, its contents deep in the recesses of Pam Malcolm's mind. She says she doesn't know where it is, but her roommate says it's there.
     The color has faded; the picture is grainy. After all, it's a tape, not even a DVD, giving an indication how long it's been since Pam ran the length of a basketball court.
     The tape serves as proof. Pam used to play.
     Her handshake is delicate and the left foot leads the right side of her body as she balances her slow gait. The only visible evidence of that early morning, April 16, 2002, are the skin lesions on her neck. With the help of crutches, she makes her way through the Bryant University women's basketball office, around couches and tables and reaches for the door. It looks as if she's recovering from an anterior cruciate ligament injury. That's what she tells people who wonder, who stare at her as she pulls her 6-foot-2 body to class, around campus, to the end of the Bulldogs' bench.
     That's what she tells them when she's in the joking mood, that she tore her ACL.
     Otherwise, she tells them about the accident.
     Pam will graduate in May, just three and a half years and a handful of summer classes since the morning of her 18th birthday, when she found part of the engine of friend Lindsey Messervy's red 1992 Mazda 323 in her lap. The top of her torso hung out the car; her legs were pinned against the seat. For the better part of two years, Pam was confined to a wheelchair. She slowly regained the use of her arms. Unless science finds a cure, she will never regain full use of her legs.
     She's graduating after a coach fulfilled her promise and a team accepted her, after surgery and rehabilitation, after a hospital error and after an old friend served jail time. Pam is 21 and has never played college basketball. She holds the Connecticut schoolgirl record for blocked shots. Her name remains in the state record books and a ball with her accomplishments sits in a trophy case outside the Bacon Academy gymnasium in Colchester.
     There will be nothing at Bryant like that. The program has listed her for all four seasons as a scholarship player. She stands in the back for all the team photos, the same indelible smile and piercing blue eyes. She'll never score a point, and Pam has accepted that. When May arrives, she will leave Bryant with a diploma and no debt, only to a woman named Mary, whom Pam's mother refers to as "the saint."
     It took two years for Pam to realize that she'll never play at Bryant. She has the tape and used to bring it out during parties. Bacon is playing Norwich Free Academy. On the floor are Pam and Lindsey and NFA's Lauren Glenney, now Pam's roommate.
     "She pops out the tape and shows people how good she used to be, just so people know," Glenney says. "She doesn't do it as often. She doesn't really need a reminder. I think she just remembers now."
     By now, most players from that first year are gone. Bryant coach Mary Burke told her team during that first meeting in 2002 that Pam will always be part of this program. Burke kept her word. Pam is now a senior and sits on the bench at Southern Connecticut State in early December, watching Bryant lose by 27 points with a team that just didn't know how tough that first year was for Pam.
     She sits there at Southern, joining team huddles, talking to Glenney, watching the game pass her by.
     PLEASE ASK
     Burke cuts a striking figure on the Bryant sideline, looking very much like the three-time All-Big East selection she was at Providence College.
     Smiles are few. Responses are quick. Her stern demeanor translates well on the court, but changes when she talks about Pam. Burke is sincere. For the past 14 years, she has been Bryant's head coach. An errant pass flies against the wall at an early-season practice. Burke's accent gives away her deep Rhode Island roots.
     "I was going to take the hard road on this one from the start," Burke says. "I was brought up to believe that you don't run away from things."
     Pam is on a full basketball scholarship at Bryant. Every year, the Bulldogs hand out 10 free rides. Every year, Burke plays nine of those players. This is the first year her team needs that final body. Number 10 is Pam.
     Since Bryant has advanced to the NCAA Division II women's tournament in each of the past two seasons, including a Sweet 16 performance two years ago, there could be legitimate gripes. Instead, it has only known success during the four years Pam has been a part of the program. Except this year. The Bulldogs are in the middle of a rebuilding season. They struggle in the post. That wasn't in the plan.
     A week after Messervy's car careened off Route 16 in Colchester, Burke walked into Hartford Hospital and saw Pam with tubes running from her body, motionless in bed. Never before had Burke seen one of her players in this physical state. She knew Pam would never play for her, let alone walk again. Burke approached Joyce Malcolm, Pam's mother, and said her daughter would never have nothing to worry about. Ever.
     Eight months later, Joyce dropped her oldest daughter off at Bryant in the deep January winter for her freshman year. Pam was left in a single room, away from college life but close enough to the team. Joyce thought she would be on the road the next day back to Smithfield. The call never came.
     An old rival, then friend, the one from the neighboring high school, the one who still looks for elevators at malls instead of stairs, slept on a couch in Pam's room most of the semester. Glenney became a willing shoulder. The players slowly adapted. Most questions were directed toward Glenney, not Pam. Teammates then began to help. Those stairs down to the locker room at Saint Anselm? Two teammates carried Pam on their backs. The icy walkways at St. Rose? The men's team took this one, Pam's arms around their necks, carrying her to the door.
     They adjusted. Some members of the student body were slower, but they learned.
     "People think I'm sensitive, I wish people would just ask me. I like it when people ask me," Pam says. "People don't look at me, they see the accident. You sit there and know they want to ask what happened. It would make both of us comfortable."
     They ask, and they're told.
     The night began hours before Pam's 18th birthday. She and Messervy went to AAU practice, then Messervy picked Pam up later that evening. Both were drinking. Pam no longer denies it. They made a mistake.
     Court documents show Messervy had consumed a 40-ounce Budweiser at about 11 p.m. on April 15, about an hour and 46 minutes before the accident. Pam had roughly the same amount. The car headed toward the village on Route 16 and started to slide toward the tree-lined road. Messervy never hit the breaks. Her car bounced off the tree line.
     Messervy walked away. Pam sat in the car, unable to feel her body. The EMT unit showed up and Rick Lagrega approached the car, folded like an accordion. He knew Pam. She grew up with his daughter. Pam smiled and told him she couldn't move her legs.
     She still has photos from the accident, tucked away in the recesses of the same closet and her mind. The photos don't show that she was airlifted from the village circle or the tracheotomy tubes pushed down her throat. They don't show the officer who knocked on the Malcolms door at 1 a.m., and they don't show Joyce driving through the Connecticut countryside to Hartford with Pam's father, Scott.
     They show the accident that happened yards away from Buckley Hill Road, around the corner from where Joyce now lives. When she moved there three years ago, she knew the site of the accident was less than a mile from her front door. She thought about that before she moved.
     Now, every day, on her way into the village, Joyce passes the spot.
     She doesn't think about it as much as she used to, but still passes it every day.
     A REASON WHY
     The morphine dripped into Pam, leaving her in a delusional state for most of the first two weeks she was in Hartford. She remembers looking across the hall at room 2626, only to find out later when she was released and heading to Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford that her vision had doubled.
     Her neck was broken, the result of her C7 vertebrae sliding into her spinal cord and bruising the column. From her waist up, doctors knew there was hope; her legs would take some time, though. To complicate matters, nurses at Hartford allegedly placed a nasogastric feeding tube through her throat and into her lungs instead of her stomach, feeding her food and medications for eight hours. Federal law prohibits health care providers from discussing details of former patients' care. The tracheotomy and tape scars remain on Pam's neck, a reminder of perhaps another mistake.
     "My body responded, my brain would never let me feel the fact that I couldn't use my legs right away," Pam says. "It was one of those things where my brain still told me that I had legs and that I could walk. But I was numb to everything else."
     Numbness spread in a number of ways.
     To Smithfield, where Mark Caruso, a Bryant assistant coach who recruited Pam, received a call from a friend offering apologies the day after the accident. No one at Bryant knew. It was the spring before her freshman season. She was ranked as the 86th top senior in the country by Street and Smith's and held the state record for blocks.
     To Colchester, where Bacon girls' basketball coach Dave Shea visited Pam in the hospital and placed an angel pin on her motionless body. He remembers her arriving from Deep River as an eighth-grader, a little tentative but having potential. As a freshman and sophomore, Bacon made the semifinals of the Class M state tournament. As a junior, it lost in the final. In the school's trophy case, generations of Bacon players reflect through the glass. There is Shea as a high school standout in the 1950s. There are Division I and II scholarship players. There is Pam, a photo of her face on a ball, touting her accomplishments.
     To Norwich, where Glenney heard from a friend about the accident the night it happened. Glenney thought the worst. Only Pam lying in the hospital assured her that Pam was alive. She is the reason Glenney went to Bryant. Now, Glenney said nothing has changed. They'll still read People magazine, drink coffee and live in the house next door. But before that, they will get through four years of college.
     Doors on campus make Pam think. Ice has a similar effect. Pam arrived at Bryant in a wheelchair and has advanced to crutches. The physical rehabilitation center has segued into the weight room and a regiment she knows won't improve her condition, only keep her muscles fresh.
     She has fallen and stood up. During her freshman season, a professor told the section to introduce themselves. Pam's turn arrived. Later that day, the professor ran into Burke on campus.
     "I met one of your students," she recalled him saying.
     "Oh yeah, which one?"
     "Pam Malcolm. She said she's on the basketball team."
     "Yeah, I know Pam."
     "Well, she's in a wheelchair."
     "I know."
     Few things, Pam says, gave her hope. Burke's decision to keep her scholarship is the primary one. Glenney is another. Joyce had one talk with Glenney when Pam first arrived on campus. If Pam becomes a burden, let me know, Joyce told Glenney. Once again, the call never came.
     Pam also believes there is a reason she's at Bryant. When the high school recruiting process accelerated, when calls from Division I schools filled the summer months before her senior season, when she wanted to just decide and get it over with, Bryant was the answer. Most schools run from problems when scholarships are involved.
     Caruso was the last coach to show considerable interest in Pam and the first to offer a scholarship.
     Decisions made by a friend and a nurse mean little now, Pam says, the best one she made was when she called Burke before her senior season in high school and told her they had a center next year.
     MOVING ON
     Saint is a label often misused. Joyce calls Burke a saint for honoring Pam's scholarship. Glenney calls Joyce a saint for adopting in three kids to complement her four other children. And Joyce calls Glenney a saint for taking care of Pam at Bryant.
     The last three years have been disconcerting. Everyone has moved on; three and a half years have been a temporary salve.
     Months after the accident, Joyce found threatening letters from Messervy to Pam that were admitted as court evidence. She wrote of death and friendship. Joyce first believed the accident wasn't premeditated. They were teenagers that made a teenager mistake. After she found the letters, she now thinks otherwise.
     Joyce attended the sentencing on Jan. 20, 2004. Pam did not. Messervy was convicted of third-degree assault and driving while intoxicated and received a one-year sentence, serving a six-month prison term for the assault and two-year probation for the DWI charge.
     Supportive of the fact that Bryant has honored Pam's scholarship, Messervy says she has little left to say, only that she has moved on.
     Everyone has tried to move on.
     "I'm trying to work my way to forgiveness, but I'm not sure now," Joyce says. "I think Pam forgives faster than I do."
     Pam thought about playing once at Bryant. She can't remember when it was, but she remembers a thought did exist. Her ultimate goal is to keep improving, hoping one day science will erase the struggle to perform everyday tasks.
     Just eight months after the accident, she was a college freshman. Just three and a half years later, she uses crutches. During breaks from school, she pulls herself through her mother's house, using walls and counter tops as guides. The wheelchairs have been tucked away.
     Pam's room has the remnants of an average teenager's life. There are autograph photos of musicians and a prom photo taken just two months after the accident, a scarf hiding the tracheotomy and tape scares, her smile not as big as the one in the Bacon Academy trophy case. There are the usual scrapbooks and the dark basketball snapshots.
     It's apparent that basketball ended for Pam in high school. Nothing from Bryant exists at home.
     But it's a different feeling a few hours away in Rhode Island. Burke has always made it a point to include Pam in everything the team does. She works the clock at practice, attends team functions and is reprimanded when she makes mistakes. Bryant's 10th scholarship is used for a purpose, Burke says, but it's never used as an excuse.
     There are times when a teammate slacks off in practice. Burke turns to her 10th scholarship and asks her team if they think Pam wouldn't give anything to be out there running with them. On recruiting visits, parents ask Burke if she will take care of their daughter if something happens, if an ACL tear means no education, if an unforeseen problem arises and changes their daughter's future.
     Burke then tells Pam's story. It's not an example. It's just proof.
     "I saw my future center in a hospital bed, and she couldn't move her legs. She had a big smile on her face, and I think I was more upset than her," Burke says. "I was so blown away about her. She was in this rehab room, in the corner, trying to pull her body up. The scholarship was never an issue. I know this was big for her. I knew if she had this, then she would still have an identity."
     Everything is a big dream, Pam says. Subconsciously, she still has the use of her legs, still the chance to play. She says there are good days and bad days but remains optimistic that life will return to normal.
     Burke has discussed Feb. 21 with her assistants and the school, when the Bulldogs will honor their seniors with the obligatory night, thanking them for their four years of service. Pam is a bit apprehensive. Burke would like to put her on the floor for the opening tip, a move that would register her as playing one minute.
     Proof that she played again. At least one more time.