
Each year, about 1 in 100,000 high school football players suffers a serious spinal-cord injury.
In 2004, when Friday Night Lights was being made into a movie, director Pete Berg invited me to the Astrodome in Houston to watch the filming. It didn't take long to realize that the magic of moviemaking was no magic at all repetitive and dull. I became bored, which is when I saw a small cluster of young men in wheelchairs on the sidelines.
I can still feel the stiffness of their fingers as I grasped their hands. I can still see the eyes of longing as they watched a movie being made about the...