A few yards away a guy stood playing a guitar. To her left, two students behind a table were handing out t-shirts proclaiming the unrivaled passion of the Red Scare cheering section. All around her people came and went with books and laughter and camaraderie.
Such collegiate embrace was something of a security blanket as she recounted sights and sounds and circumstance so devastatingly different a year ago:
“I had no control. Glass was flying and I remember being in the air and slamming backward, then forward and the next thing I knew I was out of the bus and I watched it roll a couple more times.
“It was a terrible, surreal feeling, like I was out of my body watching.”
The former UD women’s basketball star had just begun her professional playing career in Hungary. Her Uni Gyor team bus was traveling down a two-lane road to a preseason game in the city of Sopron when it was hit by a drunk driver whose car veered into their lane.
The bus driver swerved, but the car still slammed into the side of the charter — near where MacKay was seated — and that caused the team transport to catapult off the road and flip violently. In the process MacKay was ejected through a window and landed in a ditch, severely injured.
Others fared much worse.
“I was lying there and I kind of looked and saw Peter (team manager Peter Tapodi) lying right behind,” she said. “He wasn’t moving and I knew he was gone.”
Nearby, a teammate had an open fracture on her foot. “I looked over and saw her bleeding pretty badly,” MacKay said. “The knob on the side of her ankle was gone. She had blood on her face and she was freaking out. In my mind I had to get to her before she saw her ankle, but there was a vibrating sensation going down my entire body and it got worse each time I tried to get up.
“Finally, I began to crawl toward her and that’s when a civilian came up, pushed me back against the dirt and wouldn’t let me move.”
That person was a guardian angel. MacKay had three partially-fractured vertebrae in her neck, broken ribs and scrapes and bruises across much of the rest of her body.
In all, 16 people were injured and two — Tapodi and nationally acclaimed head coach Fuzy Akos — died. Natasa Kovacevic, the 19-year old Serbian forward sitting in the seat in front of MacKay, would end up with her left leg amputated at the knee.
As MacKay recounted that moment, her voice filled with emotion:
“Even with all that, so many things went right for me that day — not only for me to still be here, but now for me to go back.”
And today she is back in Hungary.
She left Columbus for Budapest last Saturday and began practicing this week with her new team, ZTE-NKK, a first division club located in the city of Zalaegerszeg near the Austrian and Slovenian borders.
Friday her team — which has been in camp without her since early August — plays in a preseason tournament. And that means another bus ride.
“It’s time to stand up,” MacKay said. “You get knocked down. You spend all this time in a neck brace and you can’t do anything about it. Eventually, though, you have to make the kind of choice that Jaime Potter (the former UD athletic trainer now at Cal State Fullerton) said best: ‘Rehab tells you a lot about yourself. You get asked that one question. Do I really want to go through all this pain to get back?’
“I decided I did and now I’m going back for a couple of reasons:
“No. 1, I’m going for myself. I want to prove to myself that I can play.
“And No. 2, I’m going back for the people who can’t go back. They will always be a part of who I am.”
The road back
After the accident, it was a month before MacKay was cleared to fly back to the States. She showed up at a UD women’s exhibition game in November wearing a hard collar neck brace and a big smile and when she stepped out onto the court during a media timeout, the crowd gave her a warm standing ovation.
After a brief return to Hungary for an unsatisfying stint of rehab, she headed to California and the demanding care of Potter.
“She was absolutely amazing,” MacKay said. “She helped me get back, not just physically, but mentally. I had to learn the difference between pain and scar tissue and she kept me focused. She said, ‘You’re strong enough. You can do this.’ ”
The director of basketball operations at Cal State Fullerton then began helping with her on-court skills and by April, MacKay was back in Columbus to take part in an invitation-only combine for top college players and free agents before the WNBA draft.
After UD, MacKay had become the school’s first women’s player ever to sign a WNBA contract. She played one preseason game with the Seattle Storm and was released. This time at the combine, she wasn’t yet in shape to fully compete, but she wanted to show everyone that she was back.
She spent this past summer in Philadelphia — where she lived much of her life before graduating from Dublin Coffman High School outside Columbus — and worked out with performance-based trainer Jeff Morgan. Eventually she was playing in games — with collegiate women’s players, men, in gyms and outside — five days a week.
Through it all she’s stayed in contact with the players on her former Uni Gyor team and those connections were one reason she and her Chicago-based agent decided she should return to Hungary this season.
“I’ll be playing against top-tier WNBA caliber players.” she said. “And even though I’m on a different team now, I think it will be good to be close enough to my (old) teammates. We play each other during the season and I can hop on a train to go see them. They understand what happened.”
Returning ‘home’
MacKay came back to UD one last time late last week because, in her words, “this is home. There might be different faces and the place is always growing, but the feeling never changes. There’s a real family tradition here. A real love.”
She spent early Friday morning watching a workout of the point guards on the women’s team and after that, she and current UD star Andrea Hoover had a shooting session. Back on campus she saw UD president Dan Curran, who gave her a hug, and later that day she returned to Columbus for the next morning’s flight to Hungary.
“Call me superstitious, but last year when I went over things didn’t turn out too well,” she said. “This time I wasn’t saying ‘goodbye,’ but I was making sure I got those last hugs, those last smiles, those last ‘I love yous.’ ”
Although she said she’s physically healed “100 percent,” she admitted there are some mental scars: “Absolutely. I don’t have nightmares or panic attacks, but different triggers do bring back some of the traumatic images. The sound of a helicopter takes me right back there.”
Now, though, she’s back in Hungary for an experience she didn’t get before:
“I want to have the rookie experience I never got last year. I’ve never played in a real (pro) game yet. I played in one preseason game in Seattle and two overseas. I was just becoming the player I was meant to be.”
And yet, in the year since the accident she said she’s learned some things about herself:
“A little over a year ago, basketball was the only thing I had. That’s what filled my mind. That’s who I was.
“I’ve learned a lot since then that basketball isn’t who I am, it’s what I do. Sometimes you lose that in college, but it’s different now. Basketball is what I want and there’s a renewed passion, especially because it was almost taken away from me, but I also realize if I had to walk away from the game I’d be OK.
“I want to be known for more than just basketball. I want to coach one day — I think you can make a big impact on college-age players — and I believe I’d have something to offer. I think there’s more to me than just playing ball and I want to show it.”
Sitting on that stone wall in the middle of the UD campus, she did just that.
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