Three Lives, Two Hits, One Happy Ending

He kept on Jacobs about his studies, helped him write a paper on Sicilian culture; they scored 100 on that one. Jacobs was up at 5 a.m. for classes. Buoniconti would wake to find a note about another good test and beam over Jacobs's A's and B's like a proud parent. The two men went to concerts and barbecues together, Marc including Herman in everything, Herman feeling reborn.

"The lack of confidence, the feeling selfish, holding myself responsible: All that went away," Jacobs says. "See, I'm getting back to ... me. I thank Marc all the time, I want to do for him and the Miami Project—as much as I can."

It might seem a one-sided exchange, but Buoniconti says people get it backward. "Herman has helped me," he says. "I've felt recently that you need to tie up all things that are incomplete. The fact that he was in the state of mind he was in and I could help him? It makes me feel good. I haven't done much—phone calls, made some promises, that's all. Tragedy brought us together, but we're turning it into something beautiful."

Last December one of Buoniconti's nurses had a heart attack, leaving him unable to perform the rigorous, delicate tasks needed to keep Marc going. Jacobs had filled in before—spooning food into Buoniconti's mouth, fetching him drinks, helping him blow his nose—but this was different. At bedtime Buoniconti needed to be moved gingerly from his wheelchair to his bed. So night after night Jacobs would lean over and gather up Buoniconti, all 170 pounds of him, lift him out of his wheelchair and turn toward the bed. Even in that small moment, with Jacobs gasping and Buoniconti floating, the balance kept shifting. It was hard to know who was lifting whom.

Now Buoniconti is sitting outside, as the Miami sun chases everyone else into the shade. It's May, the school year is winding down, and the freshman has just come from class, wearing his white Johnson & Wales chef's uniform, blue scarf pulled tight around his neck, HERMAN JACOBS name tag on his chest. They talk about the hit and its aftermath for the umpteenth time, but soon the two middle-aged men are bantering in that jeering ex-jock way, two guys who know what it was like to sink cleats into the dirt and feel young and strong and special.

They're speaking about the season after the accident, when Jacobs went to The Citadel and got tackled and heard That's for Marc but romped for 112 yards and two touchdowns anyway. "You won the game too," Buoniconti says, eyebrows waggling.

"Yeah, we did," Jacobs says softly. When he laughs, Buoniconti's face brightens too, and Jacobs wants to keep it going. "Actually I had a good game that day—a real good game!" And for those few seconds Buoniconti is a linebacker again, mean and loving it that Jacobs is embracing the code that says you stick it hard to whoever dares push you. "Yeah, that's for me," Buoniconti says, smiling. "Bitch."

"For the longest time, no matter what anybody said to me, I just took it," Jacobs says. "So I started working on that, every day. If someone says, 'Herman, I don't like your shoes,' now I'll say, 'I don't dress to make you happy. It's for me.' I had to get back control of who I am."

He moved out of Buoniconti's place after six months, moved in with one of Marc's friends. Seeing the way Buoniconti has spent the last few years reconnecting, Jacobs has caught the bug too. He e-mails photos back and forth with his stepdaughters in Johnson City, speaks weekly with his daughter in Tampa and in July went there to visit his mother. He also, for the first time since high school, tracked down Henry Mull.

They met for lunch, talked a half-dozen times, and slowly Jacobs learned about Mull's life: How he eventually went back to school and got a degree in English literature, how at 43 he's finishing up a second degree in education, how he wants to reach and teach Tampa's toughest kids. Jacobs also learned that Mull wanted to meet Buoniconti and feel their circle close in a new way.