Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 11:47 AM
Subject: NFL Alumni Short Story about Clinton

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Where Are They Now?: Clinton McNaughtan

By Ron Lemasters Jr.
What would you do if your dream, the one thing in the world that you wanted above all others, was snatched away from you in the blink of an eye?
Clinton McNaughtan knows, because it happened to him.
McNaughtan was playing in semi pro football after graduating from Portland State University, and was about to sign a free-agent contract with the Green Bay Packers when that event, which happened in the blink of an eye, arrived in his life.
A tank truck accident left him with a traumatic brain injury, clinging to life in a coma. Everything he had worked so hard to achieve was gone.
Gone was the dream of playing professional football. No longer would he see himself as living the dream. Merely living at all was going to be a struggle, given the effects of the injuries he sustained.
Simply put, he wasn’t going to join that elite fraternity that is the National Football League as a player.
At 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds, he was a veritable mountain of a man, and he’d been aiming at this one thing for most of his 25 years. As he lay, in a coma, with his body fighting to heal itself, that dream still resided in his subconscious mind.
When he woke up, he knew things would be different.
“At first, when I started waking up from my coma, I don’t remember a lot,” he said. “It really didn’t start to hit me until I was going through rehab. I had to relearn everything…walking, talking, everything. In my mind, and I more than likely was saying it out loud too, I kept telling myself I was going to get out of this, everything was going to be fine. I just kept working hard, doing everything, to get everything back.”
His dream, prior to the accident that left him in a coma, was to be a center and long-snapper in the NFL. He had played tackle for the excellent football program at Portland State, which turned out among other players star quarterback Neil Lomax.
“When I was going through the scout camps and combines, they moved me to center,” McNaughtan recalled. “The center has a lot more responsibility than everybody thinks. He’s the offensive line captain, because he has to tell the guards, tackles a