The voice is raspier, the 6-foot-8-inch frame that once housed a body so powerful it earned him the nickname "The Durham Bull" is now in a wheelchair.
But Rodney Rogers still has his familiar broad smile and an ability to engage an audience, as he did Thursday during an appearance at Wake Forest University.
Rogers, a former star basketball player at the school and a veteran of the National Basketball Association, spoke to a packed audience in Pugh Auditorium as part of Losing to Win, a two-day conference on race and college sports.
There was a clamor in the audience, followed by dead silence as Rogers was pushed into the auditorium through a side door. The audience applauded as Rogers took center stage, speaking for almost an hour about his life as an athlete and as a quadriplegic since breaking his neck in a dirt-bike accident in 2008.
He was interviewed by Tyler Caldwell, a first-year law student at Wake Forest and a former safety on the UNC football team.
Rogers talked about his upbringing in Durham in a housing project, which he described as filled with fights, shootings and drugs. His father died when he was 8, and his mother was an alcoholic, which meant he often had to fend for himself.
"You had to be a survivor," he said.
Making the transition from a predominantly black neighborhood and high school to Wake Forest was a culture shock at first, he said. Some professors didn't take him seriously because he was on an athletic scholarship and they figured he was looking for an easy pass through class.
"I had to say, 'Don't judge me as an athlete. Judge me as a student because that's what I'm here for,'" he said.
Rogers was Atlantic Coast Conference rookie of the year in 1991 and the ACC player of the year in 1993. He left Wake Forest after three years to go professional and was the ninth pick in the draft by the Denver Nuggets.
Dave Odom, Rogers' former coach, said Rogers was key to Wake Forest's basketball success in the 1990s, even after he left, because he gave the school recruiting power.
"He may be the most important recruit we ever had at the school," Odom said.
Rogers retired from the NBA after 12 seasons and eventually took a job working with heavy trucks for the city of Durham.
One day in November 2008, Rogers told his wife, Faye, he was going dirt-bike riding with friends in rural Vance County. She asked him not to go, but he didn't listen to her.
While racing his friends, Rogers hit a ditch and the dirt-bike flipped.
When his friends came over to check on them, he told them, "Faye is going to kill me … I can't move my arms or legs."
Rogers was paralyzed from the neck down. He spent the next several months in The Shepherd Center, an Atlanta facility that specializes in spinal cord injuries. Rogers lives now back in North Carolina in a wheelchair-accessible home in Timberlake, in Person County.
"I said, 'I'm not going to a nursing home. I'm going to my own home. Whatever happens to me will happen there," he said. "You just have to keep fighting."
He requires round-the-clock care, and his annual medical expenses are about $400,000, Faye Rogers said. The wheelchair alone cost $90,000.
Faye Rogers said he is lucky because he made millions in the NBA and saved a lot of money before the accident. He also had insurance through his job with the city.
That insurance will run out in 2012, she said, and she expects to take over his care. She said he should qualify for insurance again in 2014 when the federal health-care reform takes effect, barring insurance companies from denying patients with pre-existing conditions.
Rogers has started a nonprofit organization, the Rodney Rogers Foundation, to raise money for his expenses and for surgery and equipment for others with spinal-cord injuries. The money comes from his speaking engagement fees and donations to his website, www.therodneyrogersfoundation.org. The nonprofit's first fundraising event is a golf tournament June 13 in Chapel Hill.
She said she hopes the foundation will grow as large as the one actor Christopher Reeve started after his spinal cord injury. But Rogers' foundation won't focus on research as much as services to patients who otherwise couldn't afford them.
"Maybe that's God's way of getting him into people's lives and helping them," she said. "That may be his calling, maybe not just basketball."
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