LOS ANGELES — Six seconds remained in the first half of the junior varsity football game on Monday afternoon, Oct. 2, 1967, between Detroit East Catholic and Grosse Pointe Woods St. Paul.

East Catholic had just scored a touchdown. Sophomore lineman Kevin Lee was holding the ball for teammate John Harris to kick to the Lakers. They ran side by side down the field.

Lee attempted to make a tackle.

The next thing he knew, he couldn’t get up.

“I couldn’t move my legs or my arms,” Lee recalls more than half a century later. “There was something seriously wrong.”

Harris and teammates grabbed Lee to help him up.

“No, no, no. I can’t move,” Lee cried out.

Police rushed Lee in the back of a station wagon to St. Joseph’s Hospital on Grand Boulevard. He was diagnosed with an injury to the C4 vertebra at the base of his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

Classmate Denise Crittendon remembers in school the next morning, “a nun announced Lee was injured and that he might not live. We all prayed for him.” A short time later they heard, “he had a little movement in his fingers.”

Lee was 15 then. He’s 70 today, a semi-retired licensed family and marriage therapist in California.

His journey from back then to now testifies to his indomitable resolve to take control of his life. “I didn’t dwell on ‘Why me?’ I learned to be more accepting,” he says.

Growing up on Detroit’s east side, Lee played sports year round: football, basketball, track. “I was a switch hitter in baseball,” he says. “I always pushed myself to the limit.”

That determination sustained him through intensive care at the hospital, the Rehabilitation Institute and at home. He rejoined his classmates in the fall of 1968 at East Catholic, eventually graduating in June 1970.

“I’ve known him since the third grade. It was a constant struggle. He tried to do everything on his own. Nothing was unsurmountable,” says John Harris, who moved to California some 30 years ago, about 90 miles from Apple Valley near Los Angeles, where Lee lives.

Lee’s daughter, Danielle, a middle school teacher in Texas, says her father’s story is “a really great inspirational one. He has overcome a lot, coming from an African-American family, having a major disability which has helped him become the person he is today.” 

“He resisted to let you help him,” says Critttendon. “He had to muscle through everything.”

Crittendon, a native Detroiter and a former staff writer for The Detroit News, recently moved to Las Vegas, where she runs her multi-media company specializing in writing and publishing.

“I’ve always loved writing. I give credit to Kevin for encouraging me,” she says. “He helped me put out a school paper. He was always upbeat. There isn’t a bitter bone in him.”

She last visited Lee during the Christmas holiday three years ago. He had progressed through the decades from wheelchair to cane to walker: “I can see he’s losing strength in his legs, but he has the same spirit,” she said.

That spirit motivated Lee to graduate from the University of Detroit in 1974 with a major in psychology and a minor in chemistry, and then enroll at Long Island University in New York for his master’s degree.

“It was like coming home,” Lee says. The family was originally from New York. They had moved to Detroit when he was 3 years old. His father was an electrician, and his mother worked in the post office.

“My mother had relatives in New York, and we’d go back during summers to visit,” Lee said.

Lee remains paralyzed on his left side. Before his legs started to deteriorate, “I could walk eight or nine blocks, nearly a mile. And I’d use the stairs instead of the ramp.”

Lee moved to California to take advantage of an internship offer. He received his license to practice in 1982. His office in Pomona is an “hour’s drive” away.

Lee says he can “empathize” with people, especially senior citizens, who “complain they are not as mobile as they used to be. They talk about their backaches, things I experience all day.”

Before the pandemic, he traveled to jazz festivals back to the Motor City, New Orleans, Portland, Atlanta, Charleston, Las Vegas, Phoenix. “I’ve cut down now to just Vegas and Arizona.”

“In Detroit,” Lee says, “I got to know about jazz, rock and blues.”

He adds, “I’m not a sedentary person. I can be a role model.”

Lee counts his blessings often during his reflections about the turn his life has taken.

“It’s a blessing” he says, “that my spinal cord wasn’t broken. I’m blessed that I have a good career, have a family, am active, still in touch with my classmates from East Catholic.” Their 55th anniversary will be coming up in 2022.

About that fateful day, just six seconds before players would have paused for halftime, “I really can’t speculate,” Lee says. “I’m blessed where I am at.”

Contact Don Horkey at [email protected].