LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Athletic trainer Jeff Porter had for close to 30 years been a guy who rushed to the aid of many a banged-up Brave. He was a first responder to the scene of an injury, the first comforting voice a downed player would hear.
Within two hours after the crash that killed his wife, Kathy, it was a team’s turn to tend to the man they all knew as “Bubba.”
Word spread quickly among coaches and players that something grotesque, unthinkable had happened. While driving to the Dec. 31 Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Porters, their only son David and his friend Courtney Ann Williams were plowed into by a Georgia State Patrol car rushing to join a chase on I-20.
Three people in the Porter’s car suffered relatively minor injuries. Kathy Porter died at the scene.
The survivors were taken to Grady Memorial for treatment. Emotional reinforcements began arriving shortly afterward. The Braves managers past — Bobby Cox — and present — Fredi Gonzalez. Nearly the entire clubhouse support staff. First-base coach and former Brave MVP Terry Pendleton and his wife. Pitching coach Roger McDowell. Catcher Brian McCann. Their New Year’s Eve gathering spot had become a hospital waiting area.
“That’s a special list,” Jeff Porter said Friday, before another work day commenced at the Braves’ spring-training site.
It’s a list of those who weren’t going to allow Porter to leave that night through a fog of unfamiliar faces.
“All you can do is just show up and tell him, ‘I’m always here for you. I love you.’ There are no other words you can say,” McCann said.
The process of tending to Porter, 56, and his 19-year-old son began there at Grady. In the 11 weeks since, there have been too many caring gestures and little kindnesses to count.
Coming to peace with what happened that late afternoon is an ongoing negotiation.
The trooper, Donald Crozier, was fired as a result. With a history of three other “at-fault” crashes since 2008, Crozier was found by investigators in this case to have “failed to use due regard when traveling through the intersection on a red traffic signal.” The legal system is still mulling what to do, a spokesman for the Fulton County district attorney’s office said an investigation into the crash is continuing.
And to this day, whenever he is about to roll up to an intersection, Porter involuntarily braces for another collision he can’t see coming.
“I get to an intersection and get a bad feeling,” he said. “You’re looking. You’re slowing down. People behind you start honking. The light turns green, you look again. People honk.
“But it’s getting better.”
Every day is an attempt to make it a little better. On Friday, hoping to express how much the surge of support they received lifted them, father and son spoke publicly for the first time about the tragedy. They declined to discuss specifics of the accident or any future lawsuit that may stem from it. Frequently, the interview was salted with a widower’s tears.
As the Porters spoke, they constructed a chronology of how, with much help, one goes about trying to make some sense of the senseless.
The first week
That Braves show of force at the hospital was just the first sign that the Porter men would not have to shoulder the grief alone.
The funeral service was crowded. Texts, phone messages and email messages overwhelmed one man’s ability to respond.
Kathy and Jeff were only children, who had an only child. Yet, as Joe Chandler, the Braves’ orthopedic consultant and Porter’s closest friend through the ordeal, noted, “People kept saying that they had never seen someone with such a small immediate family have such a large extended family.”
It wasn’t just members of the Braves and their fans who were moved by the story of sudden, shocking loss.
North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams discovered that Porter, who grew up in Wilmington, N.C., was a huge Tar Heels fan. He penned a personal sympathy note and sent it south.
Auburn’s Gene Chizik, the football coach at the school where David had just finished his first semester, sent the family a cloned sapling from the famed Toomer’s Corner oak, inviting them to plant it in honor of Kathy. It is growing in the front yard of the family’s Loganville home.
Porter met Mets third baseman David Wright only briefly, when they both toured Japan with a major league All-Star collection in 2006, but Porter made such an impression that Wright called him soon after the accident.
These gestures distracted Porter from the dual chores of grieving and reordering a life.
Porter was a baseball lifer. Over the 27 years that he and Kathy were married, he was off somewhere patching up ballplayers. He worked his way up through the minors like any other prospect, before joining the Braves in 1985 as an assistant trainer.
While Porter was away, Kathy had organized every detail of the home. Now that she was gone, her husband had to start keeping the place in order, keeping all the details straight. Too many details. Like what is the PIN number for this account? What is the password for that one? You can pay bills online?
And now that Kathy was gone, Jeff was the sole source of parental support for David. That was going to be a gaping void to fill.
“We were only blessed with one child. Kathy raised David like she already had done it 10 times,” Jeff said.
Going back to school
That was the greater question for Jeff: How would David react?
His son was scheduled to return to school just a week after the accident. Jeff worried that it might be too soon.
David, though, never wavered about his plans. “I always had it in the back of my mind I wasn’t going to skip the semester,” David said. “I didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to add on more stress.”
On Jan. 7, three days after Kathy’s funeral, Jeff drove his son back to school. Dad continued to fret right up to the moment they pulled up to the dorm.
There, waiting outside, were David’s roommates, all welcoming him back before he could get in the door. Jeff knew then that his son had made the right call.
That night, back at an Auburn hotel room, Jeff in a quiet moment pulled out his laptop and Googled his wife’s name. He came upon a site he didn’t know existed — legacy.com — a collection of obituaries and condolences. He thought he would check out the sentiments for Kathy for a few minutes. Four hours later, he stopped, having gone through nearly 500 messages.
What he read astounded him. The prayers and good wishes came from everywhere, not just the Atlanta area: Boaz, Ala.; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Pataskala, Ohio; Kansas City; Fort Atkinson, Wis.
“I am so incredibly sorry for your loss,” wrote a Braves fan from Dunwoody. “This is so incredibly unfair. There is no way my words can do anything, but just know that complete strangers are hurting with you.”
The next night Porter stayed with Tim Hudson and his wife, Kim, at their Auburn home, watching the BCS championship game.
Going back to work
The Braves told their head athletic trainer (since 2003) to take as much time as he needed to deal with his wife’s death.
He reported to spring training Feb. 13, nearly a week before the first wave of players were scheduled to arrive.
“I didn’t go back for therapeutic reasons. I went back because that’s what I do,” he said.
By the time the full squad reported Feb. 25, Porter had in mind a simple message he wanted to deliver to them during a brief, teary team meeting.
“I asked them to try to keep it status quo,” Porter said. “Don’t change anything; that would be the most helpful thing for me. I’m there to work, I told them.”
Approximating normalcy around Porter “is a daily process,” McCann said. “You try to be the same around him, that’s what he wants and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to tiptoe around him. We’re all here for him, and I think he knows that.”
The Hudsons have made that clear enough. Through their charitable foundation they established a Kathy Porter scholarship at David’s high school, the George Walton Academy in Monroe.
For the last week, his son and a friend from school have been spending spring break with Jeff in Orlando. You can pick out the Porters from the crowd by the bright blue wristbands they wear, the ones that read: “Celebrate Kathy Porter’s Life Forever in our Hearts.” Courtney Ann Williams, David’s friend, the other passenger in the car, had those made. (She currently is at school at Samford in Birmingham).
Awaiting in Atlanta are ample more emotional hurdles to clear.
Like the homer opener at Turner Field, coming April 13. That was a high holiday for the Porter family, Kathy and David always in the seats while Jeff paced the dugout.
Driving to the park this year, Jeff and David will pass near the intersection of Memorial Drive and Capital Avenue, where the accident occurred. Neither has revisited that spot, nor do they care to.
When father and son are at the park, with the happy music playing and the air charged with the possibilities of a new beginning, Kathy’s absence will be felt all over again.
“That will be kind of a weird experience. It eventually will work itself out,” David said.
Not without a little help, available in whatever quantity the Porters require.
“You can ask anyone on the Braves and they’ll tell you,” Chandler said, “that they’re not doing anything for Jeff that he wouldn’t do for them.”
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