Tragedy ·
The Collision That Left Darryl Stingley Paralyzed
A hit by Raiders safety Jack Tatum in an August 1978 preseason game ended the Patriots receiver’s career. The two never met afterward, though Stingley said he had forgiven Tatum.
On Aug. 12, 1978, Darryl Stingley stretched for a pass over the middle during a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders. Jack Tatum, Oakland’s safety, hit him. Stingley was taken from the field at Oakland Coliseum on a stretcher. The collision broke his fourth and fifth vertebrae and left the 26-year-old New England Patriots receiver almost totally paralyzed from the neck down.
John Madden, Tatum’s coach, later recalled the play as a slant: “Tatum is going for the ball, Stingley is going for the ball. Stingley leaves his feet, they have a collision, and Stingley doesn’t get up.” Recounting it still unsettled him. “Even saying that, you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach,” Madden said. “That’s something no one wants.”
Stingley had grown up in Chicago, starred as a high school running back and attended Purdue on a football scholarship. The Patriots selected him in the first round of the 1973 draft. Five years later, his playing career was over. He retained limited use of his right arm, but the paralysis lasted for the rest of his life, until his death in 2007 at 55.
Tatum’s force as a tackler had been part of his appeal to Oakland. Madden said the Raiders had struggled with tackling before drafting him in 1971. “We took Jack, and we never had a tackling problem the rest of his years there,” he recalled. Madden said the collision affected Tatum, though Tatum would not discuss it. “He never talked about things, and you couldn’t get him to talk about it,” Madden said. “It was something that ate on him for his whole life.”
Tatum did not apologize for the play. “I’m not going to beg forgiveness,” he told the Bergen County Record in 2003. “That’s what people say: You never apologized. I didn’t apologize for the play. That was football.” In 2004, he told the Oakland Tribune that he had tried to visit Stingley in an Oakland hospital shortly after the collision but had been turned away by the receiver’s family. The two never met after the hit.
Stingley declined several proposed meetings or joint appearances, including an HBO program planned for the collision’s 25th anniversary. He questioned the purpose of those approaches. “It seems like every time we get to that point, there is something on his side where he is trying to capitalize from it,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “I’m not available to help people sell books.”
Fans and friends helped sustain him, Stingley said, though coming to terms with the injury took time. “I was at my peak at that time,” he told the Tribune. “You have to try to find a rhyme or reason when things like that happen.” His refusal to meet Tatum did not mean he still harbored ill feelings about the hit. In a 2003 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he put it plainly: “I forgave Jack Tatum years ago. You forgive, but you just don’t forget.”