Ed Reinhardt Sr., right, jokingly wipes sweat from his son Ed Reinhardt Jr.’s neck after an intense physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt Jr., left, sings one of his favorites, “Camp Granada,” while his father Ed Reinhardt Sr. looks on after a physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt Sr. helps his son Ed Reinhardt Jr. keep a hand on he paddle that keeps the lawnmower running as the two work together to mow the back lawn on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo. (Timothy Hurst/The Denver Gazette)
Ed Reinhardt Sr. keeps a hand on a paddle that keeps the lawnmower running and he and his son Ed Reinhardt Jr. work together to mow the back lawn on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt Jr., right, looks on as his father Ed Reinhardt Sr. shows a shirt he had made combining the jersey numbers and school colors of all his children that played college football, as seen on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt Jr. points to some of the cards he made for his mother and father with niece Leah Reinhardt, not pictured, in the kitchen of his home on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt Jr. clenches his hands together while clinical exercise specialist Benjamin Roberts provides resistance for leg extensions during a physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
Ed Reinhardt was already a phenom as a 6'5", 235-pound tight end for the University of Colorado.
Ed Jr. in high school.
In the secluded corner booth of a family restaurant, a man sings for his father.
Just when you think the performance is winding down, he starts another verse and another. And then he gathers himself for the finale: "Fathers don't just love their children every now and then. It's a love without end amen. It's a love without end AMEH-H-NN!"
A beat or two of silence.
"Pretty good," said the son.
The father deadpans, "That's about the 410th time I've heard it. He never misses a cue."
The singer rolls his eyes. "Give me a break."
Ed Reinhardt has been brain-injured for two-thirds of his life, outliving most of the doctors who warned his family of the dismal odds: If he didn't die, he'd never leave the wheelchair, and might never communicate at all.
Ed Reinhardt Sr., right, jokingly wipes sweat from his son Ed Reinhardt Jr.’s neck after an intense physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
Ed is 57 years old. He was 19 years old when a collision on an Oregon football field while playing for the Colorado Buffaloes left the elite tight end horribly brain-damaged. Today, his conversation skills are limited, but he understands what people are saying to him. He walks with a cane.
When he's shown an action photo of himself in college, he notices something is wrong with the picture, because he's wearing a different number than the "88" burned into his memory. "Dad, 84. Why? Explain it to me."
Ed just saw Top Gun: Maverick with his brother, Tom, and he cheers on the Avalanche at Fuzzy's Bar.
Craig Hospital's former Medical Director of Brain Injury Alan Weintraub calls him the "poster child" for living with disability. "Moving forward, the key for Ed to living a high quality of life is how does he age gracefully and well. I call it 'the pie of life.'"
If life is a like a pie, Ed has had two hefty portions: The one before the accident on Sept. 15, 1984, and the one after.
Ed Jr. in high school.
There's one in every high school: The guy who earns respect from the guys and swoons from the girls. That's Ed in his black and white Heritage High School yearbook junior photo. It's the size of a postage stamp, but the dark tousled hair and wide smile jump off of the page.
As a three-sport athlete he was recruited by just about every school west of the Mississippi, but there was really no one else for the Reinhardts but a new coach at the University of Colorado by the name of Bill McCartney. "When Mac came into the living room and met our family I was ready to sign the papers," said Ed Sr.
At 19 years old, the 6'5" 235-pound phenom set a CU school record with 10 receptions during the first game of the season against Michigan State, and was leading the country for that short week in number of passes caught, according to CU Sports Information Director David Plati. Going into the following game against the Oregon Ducks in Eugene, all eyes were on the sure-handed sophomore.
The Buffaloes were driving down the field in the final minutes when he caught a clutch 14-yard pass over the middle from quarterback Steve Vogel.
Ed Reinhardt was already a phenom as a 6'5", 235-pound tight end for the University of Colorado.
Vintage 1980's game video shows Ed catch the ball and turn to drive forward when he collides with the shoulder of one Oregon player, bounces off of the knee of another and hits the artificial turf. The video shows the tackle as seemingly routine, not particularly cringeworthy or violent.
But Ed didn't get up right away and was helped off the field. The game continued.
To hear Ed Sr. tell the story, one can almost feel what it was like to grip a steering wheel, stomach as tight as a drum as he drove Ed's younger brother Tom back home to Colorado fresh off of a recruiting trip to Laramie, Wyo. Something sounded wrong as they listened to the CU-Oregon game on the radio. "I said to Tom, 'Hey, they're advancing. Ed should be out there.' And then the announcer said there was some commotion at the bench. They said that someone collapsed. As a parent, you just go 'ugh.' And then they announced the number … 88. That was my Ed. 88."
Ed Sr. made it to Eugene at midnight to meet McCartney just as his unresponsive son was wheeled from surgery to his hospital bed. Doctors had removed a chunk of Ed's brain. McCartney later described it as "the size of my fist."
Doctors said that the trauma bounced Ed's brain in his skull causing a subdural hematoma, a brain bleed. After years of study since, some physicians believe this was not the first, but the second or third head trauma Reinhardt had experienced in a short amount of time. "We now think that his brain was already injured. Your brain gets jarred kind of like your knee gets jarred, but at a cell level it's saying 'ouch' and going through microscopic phases of bruising. Then you get another jolt and the wires give out and get a secondary bleed," said Alan Weintraub, who retired last year from Craig Hospital.
Teammates remembered that during the game Ed had been complaining of headaches. Seconds before he collapsed on the sidelines, Reinhardt remarked to his trainer, "This isn't good."
Doctors who removed the blood clot from the left side of his brain gave him a 10% chance for survival.
Barely able to comprehend that the third of their six children might die, Ed and Pat Reinhardt filled out their son's organ donor card.
Ed Reinhardt Jr. points to some of the cards he made for his mother and father with niece Leah Reinhardt, not pictured, in the kitchen of his home on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
After 62 excruciating days waiting out his coma, Ed Sr. heard two chuckles in response to a story told by a high school friend about the time Ed tried to hijack a school bus. "I said, 'Is that' Ed? The next day he chuckled again." Craig Hospital's official announcement that the football star was conscious came the day before Thanksgiving.
His mom, Pat, was determined to keep the wires in his brain firing, so she started scouring stores looking for books and magazines with photos which she cut out and pasted on cards: Pictures of Nelson Mandela, ships at sea and Mount Kilimanjaro.
She fed him apple pie and Wendy's milkshakes. His first words were, "I'm full."
Ed Sr. shaved his son's beard and handled bathing duties.
The Reinhardts considered brain injury programs all over the country and settled on Philadelphia's Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, a place which used an unconventional method called "patterning," or motor learning, to treat brain damage.
At the Institute's direction, a slew of volunteers in Colorado worked in shifts to roll Ed's long body back and forth, adjusting his neck from one side to the other. He started with crawling and graduated to somersaults.
A jungle gym was built in the backyard, and Ed's 140-person army had him crawling in Clarkson Park first on his belly and then on hands and knees.
Reinhardt's dusty medical records from the Institutes' archives show that at his first in-patient visit a year after the injury, he had grown half an inch and had gained 30 pounds. He could crawl 700 yards, but he was having seizures, and had no sight in his right eye.
Today, he wears glasses with the left side blacked out to prevent him from seeing double, because the right eye is fine.
Ed explains it: "One-two, all the time." His index finger traces a half-circle starting on the left side of his eye and ending at his nose: "Nothing, nothing, nothing … NOW. No, no, no. NOW!" he says and shakes his head. "Discouragement."
He thrives on relationships and never knew a stranger. "What's your name? First and middle?" he asks. "Me? Edward Gerard. Edwardio Gerardio."
The ones who are uncomfortable with his openness smile and move on. But the curious and open-minded are rewarded with a short version of his story. "Ten catches, two touchdowns, one game then BONK in the head. 62 days in a coma," he recites.
Ed Reinhardt Jr. clenches his hands together while clinical exercise specialist Benjamin Roberts provides resistance for leg extensions during a physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
At Craig Hospital's Peak Center gym where he works out with other brain-injured patients, Ed belts out the song of the moment, which this day happens to be "The Gambler."
Listeners nearby whisper to each other about the mountain of a man with no filter. "Isn't that the football player?" they wonder. "It's Ed Reinhardt," they're told, and they look him up on their phones.
His trainer, Ben Roberts, says he's "the hardest working person here." When he asks Ed to lift a 50-pound barbell 8 times, he does 20. Then he starts a similar routine on his legs.
If Roberts stops for a minute between repetitions, Ed gets after him, "Come on. Come on! Let's go." Ed counts the repetitions, "One-Two-Three!" "Uno-Dos-Tres!" It's a trick his high school math teacher taught him.
But music is his ace in the hole.
The missing part of his brain was on the left side, which controls speech, so his words are spotty.
But he can sing like a bird.
Ed Reinhardt Jr., left, sings one of his favorites, “Camp Granada,” while his father Ed Reinhardt Sr. looks on after a physical therapy session on Thursday, May 26, 2022, at the PEAK Center at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colo.
Ed has performed on stage with disabled theater groups like Phamily ("Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Damn Yankees") and Littleton's Magic Moments ("Take The High Road") and even once sang the national anthem at a CU football game to thousands of cheering fans.
Doctors expected a plateau in his learning, but Weintraub now says "sky's the limit." Amazingly, Ed picks up material new to him like Gladys Knight and the Pips as easily as he recalls the familiar. God Bless the USA, Sundown and Desperado are old favorites. Country music is his preferred jam.
Weintraub says since Ed's right hemisphere is intact, his aptitude for tone and rhythm make sense, and so does his practice of using sweeping gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. "He has deficits in understanding, but he can learn. Just not in the same ways we do," Weintraub explained.
Before the pandemic hit, the two Eds gave 400 motivational talks to various groups about Ed's rehabilitation, but COVID-19 put their travel escapades to a halt. "There wasn't much to do. We couldn't go out and people couldn't come in, so we watched 35 episodes of M*A*S*H," said Ed Sr.
Off to the side, Ed hums the Theme from MASH.
Ed Reinhardt Sr. keeps a hand on a paddle that keeps the lawnmower running and he and his son Ed Reinhardt Jr. work together to mow the back lawn on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
Hours on yawning highways traveling across the country to perform were passed with repetition as Ed Sr. taught his son to memorize song after song.
There were times when Ed Sr. questioned why of all people it was Ed's star which fell so abruptly. "I look at it a lot from the spiritual point of view. There have been times I would go to my priest, bawling, and I would ask "WHY did this happen to my son?" He would say there's no answer to that, but let's look at what good can come out of this. And he would use scripture. In Romans 8:18, all things happen for good," said the elder Reinhardt. "So we didn't feel sorry for ourselves. We went out and did something."
Rose Reinhardt Campbell, the Reinhardt's second child and only daughter, told The Gazette, "Our dad as always been our world, which is amazing to say considering he never had a dad. And it only became more of a commitment after Ed's accident." When was 9 years old, Ed Sr.'s own dad, whom he describes as a "tumbleweed," left the family. "I remember being with him all the time before he took off. I'm left-handed like him and I'm named after him. I'd say, 'Mom when's dad coming home?'"
Floyd Ed Reinhardt never did come home. When the son was 19, he testified in court against him. Years later, feeling adrift, he decided to make a visit to the dad who had abandoned him. "No one else wanted to spend time with him. They all hated him for what he did to us." Ed Sr. remembers the moment he let the resentment go. "I told him, 'I love you Dad. I've always loved you.'"
In that vulnerable moment of forgiveness, his dad could only respond 'You're okay, kid,' but it was enough. "For the first time in my life I felt like maybe from head to toe I wasn't such a screw-up," said Ed Sr. He even wrote a book advocating for fatherhood with anecdotes about his experience called "You're Okay Kid." A grainy photo of Ed Gerard Reinhardt with a wide smile behind the grill of his CU football helmet is on the front cover.
Ed Reinhardt Jr., right, looks on as his father Ed Reinhardt Sr. shows a shirt he had made combining the jersey numbers and school colors of all his children that played college football, as seen on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo.
The days are long and the grass is high so on an early June morning, the two Eds trim the hours and the lawn. Once the grass is cut, younger Ed rolls out the charm with a serenade of The Theme from Blazing Saddles.
From the kitchen window Pat Reinhardt watches from her wheelchair, her late morning coffee long-cooled. "So much of Ed is still missing. Like his memory. His speech. But so much has returned. His joy in life," she said. "He's like a wild horse in a pen. There's no holding him back."
Like a general, she once ordered her "gallant warrior" to the park for a mile of crawling in a rainstorm in their galoshes. Life has taken a cruel turn in that she is now suffering in an advanced stage of Parkinson's. She worries about what will happen when she and Ed Sr. are gone. "It's our big question. We have our daughter and our sons. Things keep changing. You get new people you get new direction but I think they're all invested in him," said Pat, 83, her voice almost in a whisper. "Pray for Ed. For his future."
Ed Sr., who is 88, said they have brought up the subject of their deaths with Ed, but mostly "We just ignore it."
Says Ed Sr., "He will be with me until I'm not able to do it any more. I don't see an immediate need for anything else. It's in the back of my head that someday it's going to come about."
Pat's gaze follows Ed fresh in from mowing the lawn under the watchful eye of a garden statue of Mary. He plops his commanding frame into a chair across from her. There's sweat in his mop of dark brown hair and he looks at her, content.
"You look 20 years younger without that beard," said the forever-mom.
"Gray beard," says Ed, who shaved for the photos in this article. "Sad state of affairs."
"Mom?" he says, pointing at a colorful hand drawn picture on 8x11 computer paper taped to the kitchen window. It portrays three smiling stick people surrounded by flowers and trees. "It says 'Mom, I love you. Ed.'"
"His niece came over and helped him with that," says Ed Sr.
Alan Weintraub is nostalgic about the athlete with the broken brain whose family put him together again. "That's the beauty of this. Ed's goal is to be all that he can be in terms of loving relationships, sense of purpose, recreation and socialization. With or without a brain injury, that's what defines happiness," he says. "It's not what big Ed has done for little Ed. Think about what this boy has given his father."
"Come on! I'm a million-dollar baby. Me," says Ed.
The dad answers, "That's right. I could have had a million dollars in wages just taking care of him for 37 years. I'm waiting for a pay day. But so far…."
The son doesn't miss a beat. "Not diddly squat!"
Tip your waitresses. The Eds have all night, and they're just warming up.
Ed Reinhardt Sr. helps his son Ed Reinhardt Jr. keep a hand on he paddle that keeps the lawnmower running as the two work together to mow the back lawn on Friday, June 3, 2022, in Centennial, Colo. (Timothy Hurst/The Denver Gazette)
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