Living with a new perspective: Alan Zemaitis used a car accident to figure out his life

By Jenny Vrentas
Collegian Staff Writer

The "tough guy" persona, as his dad likes to call it, well, he's got that down.

He has the leather jacket and skull caps, headphones booming around his neck, and even the build -- 6-foot-2 and shoulders broader than expected for a defensive back. He'll talk about "putting helmets where you don't like it" on the football field and the mad times that go down in his crib with his two roommates, times they will, reportedly, have to take to the grave.

"I ain't no sensitive dude," he'll caution you, lest you think differently.

But let him talk for five minutes -- sometimes less will suffice -- and, perhaps, you'll start to believe otherwise. Mention the name Amber, and you'll know otherwise.

"That little dime piece over there," Alan Zemaitis will say, calling his baby sister a perfect 10. And that's all it takes -- he'll break into the grin of a sensitive dude.

He has countless pictures of the 2-year-old -- Amber stuffing her face with Cheerios, Amber being fed icing off her first birthday cake, Amber being kissed by Alan as she reclines with a bottle. The one he'll point to, however, is the one prominently displayed in his room at school -- Amber in the midst of some baby gurgle -- and he'll go off, talking about how she's a fat baby, how she's grown so tall, how she got the good hair in the family.

Zemaitis lives apart from Amber, away at Penn State where he's the football team's starting cornerback, and a good one at that. It tears him up that he's not home to watch his sis grow up, but the fact that he can see her at all, that she knows her big brother enough to yell, "Alan, Alan!" whenever anyone with a helmet and a football comes onto the TV screen -- that compensates for some of the pain.

Less than a year after Amber was born, on Jan. 20, 2003, Zemaitis fell asleep at the wheel while driving back to Penn State and lost control of his car. In his white Mitsubishi, he flipped twice, landed upside down and skidded for about 100 feet, leaving him scalped in two places and with a concussion and fractured frontal sinus bone. He was lucky to survive, and, whenever he tells the story, he recounts how, after the car flipped over the guardrail, little Amber was on his mind.

"When I got in the accident, when the car actually stopped, it was upside down, I actually did think about her," Zemaitis said. "And I was like, 'I've got to get out of here, man, because she doesn't know her big brother, she doesn't know him.' "

Zemaitis did get out of there, was air-lifted to Geisinger Medical Center, and, remarkably enough, made a full recovery for the 2003 season, the pink scars on his forehead the only daily physical reminder of the ordeal.

But though Zemaitis is caught up in the life he has built for himself here at Penn State, he doesn't -- he can't -- put these things out of mind. The accident is always there in his head, often causing him to tear up, and, in turn, it makes him think about Amber and his five younger brothers and two parents, all of whom he adores but has left behind in his childhood home in Rochester, N.Y.

See, the thing about Zemaitis is that he knows how to put everything in perspective. Yeah, he's a 22-year-old defensive back who, on the field, loves laying guys out and breaking up passes, but that, to him, is hardly even a part of who he is.

"Sports is just something I'm good at," Zemaitis said. "This is gonna be a stepping stone so I can be what I really want to be, but this is not who I am. I'm just good at it."

Zemaitis is the oldest child of seven, the son of Carol and Keith. He's from a big, Christian family that didn't have much in the way of material possessions but compensated with love.

He's a family guy who likes to take his 12-year-old brother shopping and who relishes hearing his little sister's incoherent toddler talk over the phone.

He loves his siblings, respects his parents and allowed a near-fatal car accident to change the way he goes about living. These are the things that he is, the things that have shaped him.

He's got his head on straight, that Alan Zemaitis; just don't let the tough exterior fool you. Because when it comes to the things he's learned that matter the most, he's a softy inside.

Zemaitis can eat as many helpings as he wants at training table with the football team, but, after years of doing otherwise, the change doesn't come about so easily.

"I'm content still -- at 22 years old -- to only eat one plate," he said.

That's how things work in a house of nine. Zemaitis' mother, Carol, would cook up a sizeable amount of the dinner entrée that night -- chicken's the favorite in the family -- and serve one plateful each to her husband and seven children. There would be just enough to go around, but if there were leftovers, they were reserved for the one who finished his plate first. This is why Zemaitis, whom his brothers claim eats up the whole house, devours his food at every meal.

"You gotta eat your portion as far as getting more," Bryan Zemaitis, Alan's 20-year-old brother, said. "Especially when Al is there. Al used to eat up groceries as they're coming in. He still does; they go right into his stomach."

The threat of six growing boys eating up, in a single day, the household's groceries for the week was so real that Carol was forced to put locks on the cabinets. With nine mouths to feed, the family couldn't afford to snack unlimitedly. But that's just the way things were, and the kids were used to it. You ate what you were allotted, and you took what your parents gave you, even if that meant sharing one bathroom among nine people or receiving just one or two gifts each at Christmastime.

"Whatever they were content on providing, we were also content on what they were providing," Zemaitis said. "We were never, ever spoiled, in any sense of the word, but we were always content, so it was never a problem. We got by only because of my dad's hard work and my mom's dedication to keep the family together."

Zemaitis' dad, Keith, works 12-hour shifts at Kodak four to five days a week to provide the income for the family. His job's always on the line, and it's a difficult place to work, but this is the sacrifice Keith makes for his family.

He works so much that he's away from his kids a lot, and that's something Keith knows they won't appreciate until they're older. That's how it was for Alan and Bryan, and how it will be for Christian, 13, Deon, 12, Alex, 9, Eric, 8, and Amber.

Sometimes the shifts are at night, so Keith will have his breaks during the day, with kids running wild around the house. When Alan and Bryan were younger, there were no doors to the bedrooms, just sheets, so Carol would have to kick her sons outside to play for their dad to get a few hours of sleep.

Keith, however, would rather be up with the kids, so if you call in the middle of the afternoon on the day after he's worked a night shift, he'll answer the phone, still groggy, but awake enough that he can answer Amber's call of "Daddy? Where's Daddy?"

"It didn't dawn on me then, but my dad, he was playing cards with me and my brothers, and it would be just straight up sleep," Zemaitis said. "But still going, playing cards with me and my brothers, just so he can make us happy. That's what fathering is all about."

Making your kids happy, providing for them and wanting to see them live the best lives possible -- yes, that's what parenting is in the Zemaitis household. It's the reason Carol, raised and hardened in some of the worst parts of downtown Rochester, had the family move to the suburbs before Alan started kindergarten. And it's why she insisted that, even if their house had more than three bedrooms, the sons would still have had to share a room so that they could bond with each other.

Indeed, theirs is a house built on love. A blanketing love that filled any possible void the children might have had while growing up. A familial love that stems from the true devotion between Carol and Keith, who have been married to each other for 23 years and seemingly have as much sweetness between them as ever.

"We've lived half our lives together," Carol said, her voice growing a bit softer. "People are surprised we don't look like each other by now."

There was a football game when Zemaitis was about 13, the age his brother Christian is now. It wasn't a big deal, just a silly little football game with the crowd of guys with whom he usually hung out. Keith, who used to play a lot of street football and maintains that he's no wimp himself, wanted to play too, perhaps for a little bonding with his oldest son.

But Zemaitis refused. He didn't want his father playing.

The thing is, Zemaitis is biracial -- his father is white, his mother is black -- and, in turn, he felt like he had to choose one race or the other. He looks black, and most of his friends were black, so that was the natural choice.

"I just felt like ... I was embarrassed by him," Zemaitis said. "I didn't want people to know that I had a white father."

It was the choice he made, and it's the reason he wasn't close to his dad when he was younger. Now, it's a decision he wishes he could go back and change. "It still hurts me today," he said.

But his father was the one who had gotten him into weightlifting, the one who had seen him come up through football since age 7, the one whom he looks just like, except for his skin color. And by the time he was old enough to drive, Zemaitis had it figured out that his father was the guy he would respect for the rest of his life, and that turned their relationship around.

"I got older and, just seeing what kind of man he was, I started to see inside myself," Zemaitis said. "I'm exactly the same way as he is; I'm exactly the same guy."

"And then I was just like, 'I don't care, I'm good at football, I'm good athletically and this is the man that was behind me the whole way. I don't care what complexion he is.' "

Zemaitis loves his mother, unconditionally -- he calls her a "dime" as well -- but it's the bond he has with his dad that has a little something extra special, simply because it hasn't been there all along.

When Zemaitis has a killer game, it pleases him most that his dad can stick his chest out just a little bit more at Kodak; that when he's among his co-workers, many of whom have sons who are in prison or haven't amounted to anything, he can think to himself, "I've got a son, he's in college and he's doing something with his life."

"He radiates when he sees his dad radiate," Keith said, "and I'm always radiating."

When it comes to women and money, Zemaitis draws, consciously or not, on his dad's precedent. Keith swears his son has stolen his moves with the ladies -- those same moves that helped Keith land his beautiful wife -- while Zemaitis admits that he learned a thing or two from the way his father helped keep the house running on a tight budget for so many years.

And when Zemaitis sits down with his roommates, defensive end Matthew Rice and utility player Michael Robinson, and the three discuss, on a whim, what type of men they want to become, he thinks of his father then, too.

"I want to be just like my father," Zemaitis said. "If I can be a little bit like my father, I'm straight. Because he's unbelievable."

"Imagine as quick as that blink is and you not opening up your eyes again," Zemaitis said. "Like forever. And you're actually being judged on your life -- that's what I believe anyway -- on your life."

Zemaitis asks you to imagine, but he doesn't have to. He knows all too well the feeling that one blink might change everything. He was traveling about 80 miles per hour on Route 15 near Williamsport on Jan. 20, 2003, returning to Penn State from dropping off his cousin, Chris Patterson, at Mansfield University after a weekend visit. Tired all day, he began to nod off at the wheel now and then, but, one of those times, he was jolted awake by his car bumping along the rumble strips on the side of the road.

He shouldn't have panicked, he says now, but he did, and, as a result, lost control of the car with the back end flying up over the guardrail. The Mitsubishi Eclipse, which he had just finished paying off, flipped twice before skidding across the ground and landing upside down. At some point during the crash, Zemaitis let go of the steering wheel, put his arms out to protect his head and blinked -- a blink from which he was fortunate enough to re-open his eyes.

Zemaitis' head actually went through the windshield, but he didn't feel it -- the nerve endings in his head had been stripped away. He knew he was in a crash, but he didn't know how bad the crash was. Truckers who were parked on the road, however, had an idea, and they were too scared he would die to offer assistance.

Zemaitis was on his own, alone in a demolished car on the side of the road, cars passing by too busy, distracted or frightened to help. This is when he thought about Amber, the little sister he had waited his whole life for, and found the strength to punch out the rear window, crawl out the back of the car and make the phone call for help himself, with the cell phone still attached to his hip.

He didn't believe, when the car was flipping or skidding or lying upside down, that he would die, that he was ready to die. But when he saw himself in the reflection of a window, saw the flaps of skin pulled backwards and the hole high on his forehead from which blood was gushing uncontrollably, that's when he first got scared.

"Right here, down here, this was completely flipped up, that flat part was flipped up," Zemaitis said, diagramming the scars on his forehead that he remembers so precisely he needs no mirror. "This is all bumpy right here, this is where I actually fractured my skull. Right here, you can see where it came close to getting my eye, my eyebrow. All this stuff was just flipped -- all flipped -- so when I saw myself in the reflection of a window, that was just nasty. That was when I thought I was gonna die, for real."

Medics came and life-flighted Zemaitis to Geisinger. Each time his eyes started to close, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, he panicked, not sure if that would be the time they would close for good. Adding to the worry was the fact that he only heard words of discouragement, such as those from a medic, "Oh man, you messed yourself up pretty bad there, bud."

The accident occurred somewhere around 5:30 p.m., but the call at the Zemaitis household didn't arrive until exactly 6:26 p.m.

Carol had just come in from picking up groceries, and asked a single question, unflinchingly: "Is he alive?"

"Yes," was the response, after which Carol asked for the specifics of how severely her firstborn had been injured. She didn't cry -- no, she doesn't like to show her emotions in front of the children like that. But Keith was visibly shaken, as he was brought back to the day, over a decade ago, when he received news that his sister had been in a car accident.

"It was eerie as far as it being so similar," Keith said. "She had been in a car accident, and they said she would be OK, but then she died. And this sounded way more serious than what my sister was in."

Zemaitis' siblings, still little boys for the most part, had no recourse but to be scared. Here was the big brother they thought was invincible, the one they emulated in so many ways, critically injured in a car accident. And now they didn't know if he'd come home.

"Very scary," said Christian, the brother Zemaitis expects to eventually be a better football player than he is. "It was so scary to the point where I thought I lost him. And that scared me so much."

The next morning at Geisinger, Carol and Keith found their son, head wrapped tightly in a huge turban the size of a watermelon, with countless tubes projecting from his head so as to drain the massive volume of fluid trapped between his scalp and skull. He had been in surgery, and the injury report was lengthy: a concussion, a fractured skull, scalp lacerations and a bruised lung.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst was that Zemaitis was absolutely furious. Furious he had spent the night alone in the hospital; furious he'd been through the worst bit without encouragement; furious because he remembered every time he'd ever been the last one picked up from football practice and it seemed like all those times had converged at this one instance, making him feel more on his own than he'd ever thought possible.

"Why didn't y'all come?" he screamed at his parents. "I needed y'all now, I needed y'all right now! I'm alone, I'm alone, don't y'all see? Look at me, look at the bandages."

The problem is, his parents were looking. They were looking at their firstborn son, the very first product of the love between the two of them, and all they wanted to do was turn away.

"To see him lying in bed the way he was, with stuff draining down out of him, I could see the hurt in his eyes," Carol said, "and I just wanted to take away the hurt and pain he felt."

For all of the recovering Zemaitis had to do, his turnaround was unexpectedly quick. In three days, he was back in Rochester, anxious to be the same old family jokester. But, despite the ways in which Zemaitis pretended he was fine, he wasn't. In the brief period he spent at home, he didn't leave the house once and only emerged from the master bedroom sparingly, knowing the fresh cuts across his forehead would scare the little ones.

The only visitor from outside the house was his former coach at Spencerport Central High School, Anthony Lipani, who came by, of his own accord, to offer encouragement to his first star player. Zemaitis is the kind of guy who thrives on motivation from others, which Lipani certainly knew, but he stopped by for more than that -- he came because Zemaitis never forgot about Spencerport, and he wanted him to know that Spencerport hadn't forgotten about Zemaitis.

"He's our pride and joy," Lipani said. "A kid we use as an example. But that's the kind of person he is, he doesn't forget where he came from."

Zemaitis left Rochester just one week later to return to Penn State and football. Bandages still covered his physical wounds, while emotional and psychological scars lay beneath, all of which had yet to be healed.

"The Lord won't put on you anything that you can't bear" is the saying Zemaitis uses to explain the accident.

A deeply religious guy, from a religious family, Zemaitis believes that, when the car flipped over the railing, whether or not he lived or died wasn't up to him anymore. It was pre-determined that he would survive because neither Zemaitis nor his family could have borne his passing.

"The accident, I could bear that," Zemaitis said. "Death, I couldn't. None of my family could be able to bear that, so the Lord didn't let me go."

Religion has always been a part of Zemaitis' life -- his parents became church-goers about 14 years ago after Keith's sister died, and, before then, Zemaitis' grandmother would take him to services. Before every game, he and his mother pray together, dating back to his Pop Warner days, and he wears a large metal cross around his neck and keeps a Bible on his nightstand, daily reminders of his faith.

When the accident occurred, his faith was much of the reason that it was such a life-changing event. Even now, it's hard for him to fully explain how deeply the spiritual and emotional reflections went -- he just points to the journal he keeps on a shelf in his room, near the picture of Amber, to try to demonstrate how much he was affected.

"Only some people can feel what I say when I talk about this, but the scary thing about it is that what I had to go through, knowing that whenever your life is on the line and you don't know whether you're gonna live or die, everybody is gonna go through that," Zemaitis said. "When it's time for you to pass, it's gonna be a time in your life where it's not up to you.

"You think you've got control of your life and, at that instant, you don't. That's crazy. And to know that I'm gonna have to do that, I'm gonna have to go through that again when I pass away on this earth, I'm gonna have to one day shut my eyes and not be able to open them back up ... That's crazy. That's crazy."

In the months following the accident, Zemaitis was forced to wrestle with the question of why he was permitted to re-open his eyes, why the Lord gave him what he considers a second chance, when others around him had not been so lucky. He remembered his aunt's accident, and how she passed away. Two months after his crash, his childhood friend died in a car accident. And that summer, Penn State freshman quarterback Greg Hennigar was involved in a fatal wreck.

"He was real shaken up after one of the Penn State players died in a car accident, questioning why he's still here," Bryan said. "He knows that there's something here for him; he wouldn't be here if there wasn't. Because he technically shouldn't be here."

The change in Zemaitis after the accident was quite apparent. He became more contemplative, thinking about the accident when not otherwise occupied. And his behavior changed as well.

He hates traveling, hates seeing his loved ones travel. He's serious when he says it takes a lot to get him in a car.

He learned to appreciate his family more, appreciate living, appreciate each time he can go out on the football field or give Amber a hug.

And he knows that he became closer to God, the guy who he feels gave him this renewed opportunity, which is why he finds himself giving thanks for even the smallest things, such as having a good day of practice.

"It makes me want to live my life differently," Zemaitis said. "And I have done that. I haven't gone the necessary lengths to totally make that 360 to the way I want to be, but I'm making strides."

"Say if I was out of my body, if I was somebody else, and I saw Alan Zemaitis die. [I'd say] 'Oh, Alan Zemaitis, I wonder how he would be acting if he was alive from that day.' Well, I'm alive, and look how I'm acting. This is what I would be doing if I was alive, which I am."

This is his second chance to make sure his life goes in the direction he wants, and there isn't a chance Zemaitis is going to let that slip away. He'll become that man he wants to become and pursue this football gig until he can't pursue it anymore. After that, he'll raise a family, be part of a community and, perhaps, become a preacher, something he feels he has the calling to do later in life.

And he's serious about it all -- "This ain't no joke. People might say that, but this is me," he says, just in case you didn't buy it.

"I told Alan the Lord is going to use him for the world to see," Carol said. "How a young man is able to get into an accident and still play and be successful like that. If it wasn't for God ... he wouldn't be where he is without God. He's using him for the world to see love and power. And Alan knows that."

Just watch for a bit. Watch him jump in the air deftly and with perfect timing, so he can knock the football out of a receiver's hand. Notice how tightly he plays his man, so that getting burned is a rarity, if an occurrence at all. See him make one of those trademark Zemaitis tackles, in which he ruthlessly slams his body into a receiver, taking him down in a manner that makes you wonder if anyone else on the defense is capable of such a move.

Watch all that, and you'll know it's true -- Alan Zemaitis is good at football. And that's fine with him. He likes being good at football. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Zemaitis lives to be good at football.

"If you came in with a gun and shot my kneecaps out, I wouldn't be like, 'Dang, I got a game this weekend, what did you do that for?' " Zemaitis said. "I'd be like, 'I'm already moved on.' The minute you press that trigger, I'm already moved on from all that, immediately."

He'd be moved on, to do any number of the things he has laid out for his life. And, in fact, he'd be content walking away from the game as soon as his Penn State career is over. College football -- loyalty and camaraderie and all -- is his NFL, as he says time and again.

No, Zemaitis is not the type of guy who would want to mess with the professional game, were there not one thing on his mind: his family. For his family, he'd do it all if given the chance -- sign the contracts, deal with the agents -- if it meant that they could live a better life, "a life they've never, ever, ever dreamed of."

"One thing that tickles me [is that] he always says to me, 'Dad you're not gonna have to work this hard for the rest of your life,' " Keith said. "I'm always gonna work, that's just how I am, but for him to think of me that way, that he would take some of the burden off me that way -- you just look at a kid like that and say, 'Geez, thank God for you.' "

That's just how Zemaitis is -- the kind of guy that goes out on Saturday to play this game he's good at for everyone else but himself; the kind of kid his parents thank God for every day. List anything that defines him -- his upbringing, his life-threatening accident, his love for Amber -- but don't list football.

See, he'd be just fine without football -- mention the prospect of not having the game, and he doesn't flinch a bit. But mention the notion of having to move forward without, say, the pure love of his parents, and the tough guy gets a bit choked up.

"Knock on wood, say if they would pass, something freak happened," Zemaitis said. "Guys on my team that are able to move on and still play the game, I would not be able to do. I would tell [Penn State coach] Joe [Paterno], here you go, you can have my scholarship -- oh, not that, because my dad would want that. But I'd be like, I need some time off, I don't know how long it's gonna be, but I'm out."

"But I don't want to talk about that...," he added, his voice trailing off.

And in saying so, he's shown the true inner workings of himself. In a life put so sharply into perspective, love, faith and family are the things that matter above all else.

Sure, he's only 22, young for such perspective, but that's inconsequential. He's Alan Zemaitis, sensitive dude and all, and he's got this life thing figured out pretty darn well.