FORT WAYNE – Greg Strack remembers nothing of the moment that nearly stole his life.
Seventeen months along he can close his eyes and turn off the world and still it’s a blank slate, that moment, white noise in the brain. No neurons fire to bring back the awful instant of impact, the explosion of sounds that so often jerk accident victims awake at night, their hearts going like trip hammers.
None of that for Strack, who Friday will be kicking footballs in Lucas Oil Stadium for Bishop Luers in the Class 2A state title game against Evansville Mater Dei. The Knights will try to become the first team in history to win three straight state titles.
And so here is one small blessing in a tale piled so high with them there’s nothing for it but to plunge your hand into the middle and pull up a moment, any moment.
Here’s one: It’s raining like God left the tap on today.
Tuesday afternoon, battlement-gray light dimming swiftly, and, outside the ASH Centre, it’s raining so hard impromptu little streamlets are coursing through the parking lot. And so, yes, it is a blessing the Knights are practicing indoors on the carpet this day.
Call it a preview of coming attractions.
“Yeah, it really means a lot to be able to go down to Lucas Oil, a place where so many professional kickers have kicked,” says Strack, a senior.
Just how much traces back to that other moment, the one Strack can’t recall.
It traces back to midafternoon on the last day of school in 2010, the intersection of Fairfax and Hoagland. Strack, a sophomore goalie for the Luers soccer team at the time, was on his way back to school after dropping off a buddy. He drove through a yield sign on Fairfax. A school bus coming down the hill on Hoagland had no chance; it T-boned Strack’s car on the driver’s side.
It took firefighters 20 minutes to get him out of the car. By the time his dad, Joe, got there, he was in the ambulance with a badly broken pelvis and major head trauma.
“The only feeling I had was, ‘Thank God he’s alive,’ ” Joe Strack recalls. “When I saw the vehicle, … I didn’t know if he was alive or not.”
As it was, he spent five days in the hospital, his pelvis held together by what his dad describes as a “halo brace on his hips.” Then he was in a wheelchair for six weeks. As for his athletic career, … well, the docs didn’t quite tell him to forget it, but almost.
“They told me I would never be back to full strength,” Greg Strack says.
What came after that is the meat of this tale: How Strack began by walking and riding a stationary bike, and how that eventually led to him playing a little tentative midfield for the Luers JV soccer team in the fall of 2010. By this fall, he was back in goal and placekicking for the football team – a busy autumn that culminated in him being named an all-SAC goalkeeper and helping Luers reach the Class A regional finals.
“I never thought this could happen, but it did,” Strack says. “It really does make me appreciate it. Especially when I was told I’d never ever play a varsity sport again.”
Not that the accident hasn’t left echoes that still linger. Large parts of that summer are lost to Strack, and he notices in class now that his memory isn’t good as it was. His head still hurts sometimes after exertion. And his dad notices that his gait has changed slightly, his shattered pelvis leaving its own calling card.
“He kind of walks like John Wayne a little bit now,” Joe Strack says.
Still, he’s lucky beyond measure, and he and everyone around him know it.
“As many bad things as he went through, he’s going through that many good things now,” Joe Strack says. He goes on to mention what happened to his son last Saturday morning, a handful of hours after Luers beat Bremen to head downstate again.
It seems Strack, an avid hunter, took down an eight-point buck, no more than a handful of minutes after settling into his deer stand.
“You could say he’s got a lot of good things going right now,” Joe Strack says.
You could say.
