Thursday, August 26, 2004
Suiting up again
An injury ended Stephen Magenbauer's playing career at Salem; at age 30 he's back as head coach.
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Sixteen-year-old Stephen Magenbauer lay outstretched on an operating table at Lewis-Gale Medical Center on the night of Nov. 10, 1989 wracked with fear as doctors huddled nearby.
A Friday had turned frightening for the Salem High School football player, made more so by the nurse who approached his bedside with a pair of scissors aimed at his damaged spinal column.
Oh God, please, no! Don't cut .... not that! You can't cut that off! You can't cut off ... my jersey!
Liz Magenbauer was there. She felt all the pain her young son couldn't at the moment, his arms and legs going numb from a collision just before halftime of Salem's Region III playoff game against Dan River.
She was struck by something too. Her brave boy was worried. He had worked most of his life to be become a starting quarterback and defensive back, an important part of the fabric of Salem's football program.
No, you can't take that away!
"When Stephen was first hurt, the only thing he was worried about was that they took those scissors and cut off his game jersey," Liz Magenbauer said. "He couldn't believe they cut off his jersey. To him, that was so sacred."
Magenbauer never put No. 8 over a pair of shoulder pads again.
Fifteen years later, Magenbauer is wearing a different Salem uniform. In eight days he will walk out on the same Salem Stadium field where he once left strapped to a stretcher for his first game as the Spartans' head coach.
Magenbauer will replace the man ... the man he played for ... the man who won four state championships in five years ... the man who took Salem to the playoffs for 18 consecutive years.
Yes, replacing Willis White will take plenty of backbone.
Postgame talk
Liz Magenbauer most appreciates White for being the man who might have kept her son alive.
In cases of severe neck and head trauma, it can be critical to keep the patient awake. Otherwise, the injured person might lapse into a coma.
So shortly after White arrived at the hospital following Salem's 38-0 victory in the playoff game, Liz gave the coach a new game plan for her injured boy.
"The doctors came out and told me not to let him go to sleep," she said. "Willis sat there and talked to him until 6 o'clock in the morning to keep Stephen from falling asleep. He and I went and got a cup of coffee. Then he left at 7:30.
"To me, that was way over and above the call of duty."
White, who resigned after 21 seasons at Salem in March, doesn't recall the content of his overnight filibuster.
"Just whatever came to me I guess," White said. "What I do remember was that he started screaming at one point, 'My legs are tingling so bad I can't stand it.' I said, 'Stephen, that's a good thing.'"
That's a difficult notion to accept for a high school sophomore. It was probably a hard idea to sell for a 48-year-old math teacher, football coach and father of two children.
"That was a frightening time," White said.
Painful aftershock
Salem football fans had seen it before.
