The anniversary of February 27 has haunted Corey Wilson for 17 years.
The countdown begins in the middle of the month, each passing day zapping his confidence more and more as he hurtles toward the day that changed his entire life. His radiant smile disappears. The jokes are no longer on the tip of his tongue. He’s drawn further and further inward, all his energy consumed waging war inside his mind.
His family stopped asking him what was wrong a while ago. They know what’s wrong; they’ve always known what’s wrong. But they also know they can’t take Corey out of this wheelchair and make him walk again. They cannot change the events of February 27, 2009, when a car trying to merge into Corey’s lane on I-35 clipped the back of his Chevy Trailblazer, fishtailing, then rolling it over, and ejecting him 45 feet, paralyzing him from the waist down, and ending his football career before he was ready. It’s no longer healthy to live in that moment, and all the ‘what ifs’ that came after.
But this year’s February 27 was different. Corey is spending the spring semester as a substitute teacher at Frisco Panther Creek High School, where his youngest brother, Ryan, is the team’s defensive coordinator. He’s working on an online alternative certification so he can become a full-time teacher and a football coach.
For a long time, Corey resisted the call to coach. Maybe it was because both his brothers, Travis and Ryan, are football coaches, and his entire life as one of three brothers who played Division I football has been a quest to differentiate himself. But the more he hangs around Panther Creek’s offseason program, the more he realizes Travis was right when he said coaches get too caught up in thinking about what they can do for kids. They need to think more about all these kids can do for you.
“If I was sitting at home on that day, it would’ve been a horrible day,” Corey said. “But I was able to be their after-school workouts and encourage and challenge guys.”
This is not the first time Corey has tried coaching. He spent two years on staff at Dallas Parish Episcopal with Travis and coached the freshman and JV 7-on-7 teams when Ryan was at Frisco Independence. But he’s never fully committed like this. Sitting on the sidelines is painful. What hurts him most is not that he cannot run around and catch jump balls anymore. It’s that he took it all for granted when he could.
“There was a lot of regret and beating yourself up over the fact you didn't always take everything seriously and work as hard as you needed to every day,” Corey said.
Confidence is at the core of Corey’s being. And, like so much of who he is, that confidence was a conscious choice meant to create his own identity outside of being Travis Wilson’s younger brother. How could he be different from Travis when they both played wide receiver, both wore No. 4, and both attended the University of Oklahoma? He had to walk the line between following his brother’s footsteps and carving his own path. So he modeled his game after players like Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens, players whose bravado made as many headlines as their play. He earned the childhood nickname ‘Superman’ and got it tattooed on his chest. But not the logo like everyone else gets, of course. His ink was Superman busting through a billboard. Different.
Corey was always a phenomenal athlete. He earned second-team honors on the 2006 Dave Campbell’s Super Team, despite playing wide receiver on a Wing-T Carrollton Creekview team. But he was also an incredible headache to coach. Selfish. Negative. When he got to Oklahoma, where everyone was just as talented, his attitude got exposed.
After redshirting his first year, Corey wanted to switch his jersey number to 4. All of the Wilson brothers had worn 4 at Carrollton Creekview, representing their ‘4 Strong’ family of three sons and their mother, Wendy. Travis had donned the 4 jersey at Oklahoma, where he finished his career second in program history with 17 touchdown receptions. After graduating, he’d passed it down to Malcolm Kelly. Kelly promised Corey he’d pass it down to him, too. Except there was another big-time recruit who wanted that jersey. The coaches allowed both players to wear it through two-a-days, seeing who would earn it. Corey didn’t.
Losing the number woke Corey up. He told legendary OU strength coach Jerry Schmidt he wanted to get stronger, so he began doubling up on workouts, first with the wide receivers, then the defensive backs. As a redshirt freshman, he was the model scout team player, serving as the practice version of stars like Texas Tech’s Michael Crabtree, Oklahoma State’s Dez Bryant, and Florida’s Percy Harvin. But every now and then, that ego inside would erupt, demanding to be catered to like it was in high school.
That February, Schmidt booted Corey from a winter conditioning workout for poor attitude. Corey usually deflected blame when this happened. But for some reason, this ass chewing stuck with him. Spring football was a week away. He was set to be a redshirt sophomore and was still making freshman mistakes. He stopped Schmidt’s car as he pulled out of the parking garage, saying he wanted to come in on Friday for extra work to make things right. Then, he called his mom. If he didn’t shape up, he told her, he was about to miss out on the best thing that ever happened to him.
“That was on Wednesday, when he called me,” Wendy said. “Friday, he had the accident.”
There was a blown-up picture of Corey catching a pass in warm-ups across from his hospital bed. He’s thankful for the supporters who placed it there, and he understands the thought process. But that picture taunted him, too. It forced him to remember all he could once do, and reckon with what he couldn’t do now. But Corey decided to use that photo as motivation to attack his rehab like he would’ve attacked spring football practice. Two days after the accident, lying in bed, he’d told Travis he would walk across the field during the last home game of the following season.
In Corey’s mind, he’d concocted an ESPN-worthy, and physically impossible, moment of running onto the field, leading his team out of the tunnel. After months of grueling rehab, 15 steps with a walker was all he could manage. But it was 15 more steps than anyone else could’ve taken. Travis swears it was the loudest ovation he’d ever heard at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. Standing at midfield, Corey heard the cheer he’d craved ever since he saw Travis score his first college touchdown. In that moment, you could’ve told him he’d made a 50-yard touchdown catch.
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