Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [38]
Jesse and his brother, my brother, and the rest of the crew had all come down to see the bike, and they were following me home. When I was showing off as we left the parking lot, the rear tire kicked out on me, and I realized this bike had some serious juice to it.
I blew through the intersection, and saw the light at the next turning from red to green as I sped down the street. Up ahead I see this car, and it looked like it was going straight, and there was a van ahead of the car pulling over into the turn lane in front of me. I planned to get behind the van and make the same turn. But then, all of a sudden, the woman driving the minivan who almost killed me decided she was going to cut me off and beat me to the turn, which left me nowhere to go. She was right beside me and moving closer, the van was in front of me blocking the turn lane, there was traffic coming toward me from the other direction, and there was traffic behind me. I had nowhere to go, and when I hit the brakes, it didn’t do much good. It all seemed like it was happening in slow motion. I was going forty-five in a twenty-five. By the time I hit the van, I had only slowed to thirty-nine miles an hour.
I went face-first into that minivan, then up and over the top. My bike went underneath. Torn into three pieces.
After I landed on the street and stopped rolling, I jumped up to my feet and ran to the sidewalk. I was full of adrenaline, and was thinking that I had got really lucky. I remember feeling a sharp pain in my abdomen area when I hit the van, but I had no idea my jaw was broken, along with eight bones in my left hand. I also didn’t know that the sharp pain I felt was my groin muscles being ripped from the bone. The pain didn’t start to set in until the ambulance and the cops showed up. I figured out later that the handlebars of my motorcycle had gone right into my pubic bone at thirty-nine miles an hour.
My brother was telling the EMTs, “He’s fine, everything’s okay!,” but as soon as I sat down, I figured out I had not only totaled my bike, but had wrecked my body, too. Still, I didn’t want to get in the ambulance to go to the hospital, so Jesse drove me.
They told me at the hospital I didn’t have any internal bleeding, but they ran down the list of injuries I did have. Broken jaw. Broken left hand. Bruised pelvis. Pulled my groin so severely, it’s painful for me to even list it here six years later. I had just gone through six or seven weeks at Athlete’s Performance to get into top physical condition. I was 298 pounds, doing high-impact weight training. I pissed it all away in about three seconds.
The first call I made was to Luke, and then to my football agent.
The only thing that held me together through that crash was the fact my body was rigid as hell. That weight training I had done with Luke saved my life. I could still talk because even though I broke my jaw, I refused to have it wired shut. My hand was in a small cast, which would stop my progress somewhat, but the worst thing was my groin injury. That was going to take forever to heal. There is no cast for that, no quick fix.
If I had any hope of making an NFL roster, and more importantly, if I was going to escape WWE, I knew there was only one choice. Injuries or not, I had to train.
I was pretty happy with my progress in the gym before the crash. I was bench-pressing 405, sets of eight; safety-squatting 860 pounds; and even though I weighed almost three hundred pounds, I was running a 4.67-second forty-yard dash. That was nearly running-back speed. I had NFL scouts interested in me.
But now, with my pro-day only two weeks away, I was all busted up. I was thinking maybe God wanted me to slow my ass down. I had just left pro wrestling, which I thought was smart; but then I jumped on my chopper and took off like there was no tomorrow, which was really a dumb-ass thing for me to do. Yes, I wanted to be a football player. First, though, I needed to get everything in perspective. It was a time for me to be looking at the