FIND A WAY

By Wayne Drehs
ESPN.com

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Rolling back and forth, the water bottle picked up blades of grass and specs of dirt from the ground, its sloshing contents an unlikely source of motivation.

“You thirsty? You want something to drink?” the football coach yelled before throwing the container onto the field. “There you go. Find a way.”

It was another grueling practice in the heat of an Ohio summer. Brad Hurtig hadn’t participated in any drills, but like his sweaty teammates, he craved a drink of water. Only a month earlier, a factory accident had crushed his arms, leaving him with a pair of stubs. Still dazed from the trauma and groggy from the medication, he needed every ounce of energy just to watch practice. And now he had to work for a simple sip of water.

“I knew it was a challenge. I knew I had to do it,” Brad said. “I just didn’t know how.”

So he fell to his knees. Bent over the bottle. Squeezed it between his stubs. Lifted it to his mouth. Pulled away the cap with his teeth. And let the cool water pour into his mouth and over his face.

“We wanted to push him to see how far we could,” said Tom Sheninger, Fairview High's assistant football coach. “Could he do this? Could he do that? We wanted to see how bad he wanted it. If something didn’t work, we’d try something else. It was an experiment.”

The results weren’t fully revealed until the next season, when Brad, playing with specially designed pads that wrapped around his stubs, started at middle linebacker and led the 5-5 Apaches with 111 tackles. After the season, he was named first-team All-State and the district co-defensive player of the year.

“If you didn’t know his number and didn’t know his story, you never would have guessed he didn’t have arms,” said John Downing, the head coach at rival Archbold High, which beat Fairview 38-26 this past season. “Every Friday night, he was a guy you had to account for.”

This was the same kid who, after doctors cleared him to play months after the June 2002 accident, needed Sheninger and assistant coach Dave Robinson to dress him from head to toe. The same kid who everyone figured would be a football sideshow. A nice story, they thought, how he came back after losing his arms to kick a field goal or make a tackle on special teams. But nothing more.

“I hate to say it, but [football] was one goal I didn’t think he’d be able to do,” admitted Jim Hurtig, Brad’s father. “I didn’t know how it would be possible.”

The road from bilateral amputee to star linebacker started with Brad’s prosthetist, Sam Santa-Rita. Unable to find anyone in the country who had lost both hands and was playing football, Santa-Rita designed a pair of custom pads from scratch for Brad. A plastic, shoulder pad-like shell on the inside and foam padding on the outside protected his limbs.

“The concern was that if he suffered a forceful hit, the bone might go right through the skin,” Santa-Rita said. “But nobody was going to tell him he couldn’t play because he might get hurt. He needed this.”

On the field, Brad’s comeback fell to the shoulders of his coaches. They had to teach him how to play with his new body. Every day for a month, they covered a corner of the field in padding so that he could get used to falling and getting back up. They would purposely throw him footballs that were out of reach so he’d tumble to the ground as he tried to catch them. Day by day, it eventually became easier.

“It had to hurt,” Sheninger said. “But he’d never say a thing. He was willing to go through a lot of discomfort -- physically and mentally -- to get what he wanted.”

The first season after the accident, Brad struggled as the team’s kicker, at one point booting a ball off Sheninger’s head in practice. It took him five games before he finally converted his first extra point. Once it was just easier to run the ball into the end zone for a two-point conversion. By the final game of that season, though, coaches got a glimpse of what Brad’s senior year would bring.

The game was a blowout so coaches put Brad in at middle linebacker, just to see how he’d react. On the first play, the opposing team ran a swing pass to Brad’s side. Instantly, his football instincts returned.

“I just saw the guy, he had the ball, it was my job to stop him, so I did,” Brad recalls. “It all happened real naturally. After the game, I couldn’t believe what happened.”

The crowd and his teammates roared. And Brad's confidence soared.

The following summer, he became a gym rat, working out every day with pliable rubber balls to strengthen his upper body. Still, in the back of his mind, he wondered.

“Can I really do this every week?” Brad said. “I don’t have hands.”

It wasn’t easy.

When a blocker got his hands on him, he was done. Several times he’d have a quarterback all but wrapped up for a sack, only to watch him slip through his grasp. More times than not, though -- 111 to be exact -- Brad did just fine, regaining his role as the team’s best player and its quiet leader.

The season highlight came on offense, when coaches put Brad into the game toward the end of a lopsided victory against Ayersville, hoping he could catch a touchdown from his twin brother Chris.

First down. Second down. Third down. Three times they tried and failed to execute the same, simple play. “Get in the end zone, turn around and look,” Brad was told. The opposing defense, though, wasn’t helping.

“They were complaining that I was pushing off,” Brad said. “A guy with no hands was pushing off.”

On fourth down, Chris fumbled the snap. With a sea of defenders converging, he recovered the ball, scrambled to his right and, on his back foot, lobbed the ball into the end zone. Brad knocked the ball back up into the air, fought off a defender, then cradled his arms to make the catch. Touchdown.

And as he lay in the end zone, his teammates piling on top of him and celebrating the improbable, a series of thoughts flashed through Brad’s mind. There was his family. His friends. His coaches. And that day with the water bottle. Without all of it, he says, life would have been “ruined.”

“Football helped me realize that no matter what had happened, life was still normal.

“Well, sort of.”

Wayne Drehs is a staff writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at wayne.drehs@espn3.com.