‘If you still have life, you can do anything’: How Kendrick Norton embraced life after trauma
A few weeks ago, Kendrick Norton went fishing, and it made his mother cry.
It has always been a favorite hobby for Norton, who grew up in Jacksonville and has lived nearly his entire life in Florida. In high school, Norton and Daniel Burdetsky, one of Norton’s best friends and the son of Norton’s defensive line coach at Jacksonville Trinity Christian Academy, would often spend weekends together on the Burdetsky family’s boat. It was solace for Norton, who spent most of his time chasing an NFL dream, first as an Under Armour All-American at Trinity Christian Academy and then as a an all-conference defensive tackle for the Miami Hurricanes.
The process isn’t simple like it once was for Norton, who has now lived without most of his left arm for nearly a year after losing it in a car accident on the Fourth of July in 2019. He casts one-handed with his right arm, then he tucks the rod into the crook of his left armpit. He angles his shoulders and back until he can grip the reel with his right hand with enough leverage to pull in his catch.
“Sometimes it takes longer my way,” Norton said, “but I can do everything.”
Thinking about her son fishing or playing basketball with his two brothers actually made Tess Stephens most upset as she waited inside Jackson Memorial Hospital and watched Norton sleep through a two-day, medically induced coma, unaware of how his life had been so fundamentally changed.
Norton lost consciousness as the ambulance pulled into the hospital, still thinking there was a chance doctors would be able to reattach his left arm, which was crushed off his body when his Ford F-250 flipped over a concrete barrier wall off Florida State Road 836 last year. His football career was over. Although the Miami Dolphins would pay the rest of his salary for the season, Norton was going to have to start an entirely new career, but Stephens was more worried about her son just being able to be normal.
“You think about all the things that he loved to do that he won’t be able to do,” Stephens said.
Everyday life is like a puzzle sometimes. Norton will stare down a task he used to do with ease and think through all the steps he needs for his new solution. Sometimes it’s as simple as just swinging a golf club one-handed and sometimes it’s more complex, like his shoulder-aided fishing routine.
The other day, he went to the gun range and shot an AR-15-style rifle one-handed by pressing the butt firmly into his right shoulder. Last month, he even returned to another one of his other favorite hobbies: riding a Jet Ski.
When Stephens heard about Norton fishing and then saw a video of him on the Jet Ski, she broke down and cried.
“He just wants to figure out how to be normal and he seems to be doing that — he seems to find ways to still be normal and be independent,” Stephens said. “He makes me look at myself and think about ways that you can be a better person, if he can take something like that and still have a good attitude and a good outlook on life.”
Football was taken from him in the accident. Purpose was not and Norton spent those two weeks in the hospital after accident figuring out what his new purpose would be. In the year since, he has taken up a long list of occupations. He has appeared as a contributor on WFOR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Miami, and has started working to get his real estate license. He has also had motivational-speaking engagements.
Mostly, he decided he wanted to help his community — both in South Florida and the global community of amputees and limb-different children. Not everyone could have the support system he had as a Dolphin and Hurricane in Miami. Not everyone could achieve a lifelong dream like reaching the NFL before traumatically losing it. He decided he wouldn’t hide.
“This was the plan for me. You never dwell on the bad because that doesn’t get anything solved,” Norton said. “I was always taught by my parents and people that raised me that being a solution person would help you get through life, so you don’t focus on problems. You focus on solutions, you’ll go through life a lot easier because when you dwell on the problem, that brings a lot of stress. ... Instead, you turn around and you focus on, OK, that happened, so what can I do now? Where do we go from there?
“Life is all about your perception on things. Life is what you make of it, like people say. It really is, so if you can take the worst scenario, if you can find just a glimmer of light and cling to it, it’ll help the greatest to get through it.”
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‘Planning a different future’
Norton woke up in a daze. He looked around the hospital room at all the faces there waiting for him. Stephens was there with Norton’s grandparents. Kendrick Norton Sr., his biological father, was in the room. Coach Brian Flores had even cut vacation short to be there when Norton woke up from his coma.
Norton managed a little half smile. It took a moment for Norton to realize just what had happened. At about 1:18 a.m. on Independence Day, Norton was driving on State Road 836 with Kira Williams, his girlfriend at the time, in the passenger seat. He tried to exit on to Florida State Road 826 and clipped an approaching Maserati. His truck slammed into a concrete barrier. As it flipped through the air, the force of the tumble crushed Norton’s left arm and tore it off midway between his elbow and shoulder.
The car landed upside down. Norton realized his arm was gone when he tried to do a push-up to lift himself out of the truck. He stumbled out as onlookers, including two off-duty officers from the Miami Beach Police Department, pulled over to see what happened. Where his left arm had been was instead a mess of tendons and bone.
They urged him to lie on his side and fashioned makeshift tourniquets to stop the bleeding as best they could. Saving the arm — and a chance at continuing his NFL career — was secondary to just saving his life.
He fought to stay awake through the ambulance ride to Jackson Hospital, then finally lost consciousness when he arrived. Williams got to the hospital a little while after Norton, carrying his severed arm in a plastic bag, but the nerves in the limb were irreparably damaged.
Norton was angry when he learned all this lying in his hospital bed. How could he not be? How could this have happened to him? He promised his mother he hadn’t been drinking or doing drugs. Tears welled in his eyes. Eventually, Stephens spoke: “What’s more important: that or your life?”
“I would not let him have that type of anger,” Stephens said, “because we could be planning his funeral instead of planning a different future for him.”
He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then he was quiet for a few minutes. Norton had lost about half the blood in his body in the accident. He fell asleep without any idea what his life would look like when — if — he woke up. Just waking up at all was a reason for joy.
For the next two weeks, Norton saw visitors almost nonstop. The waiting room at Jackson was filled with a dozen people at a time, stretching from 9 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m., when Norton was too exhausted to keep talking to whoever was next in line. Friends and family drove down from Jacksonville. Flores was there almost every day with donuts and coffee for the hospital staff helping Norton. Former Hurricanes teammates and coaches checked in on a daily basis.
“I was like a therapist. I had people in the lobby all day,” Norton said with a laugh. “That helped a lot during those two weeks to know that you weren’t by yourself.”
Norton would welcome horrified faces and wet eyes into his hospital room every few minutes, and he’d greet them with a smile and a joke. Often, he was sitting up in a chair in a room rather than lying in the hospital bed. When sister Leaha Stephens came to visit him for the first time, she was bawling as she entered, so Norton sent her back to the waiting room to regroup. “Don’t bring that energy,” Norton told her.
At night, he could finally let his guard down, when the hospital room was vacated of everyone but Norton, his doctors and nurses, and his mother. Stephens could look at his elevated heart rate on the machines he was hooked to and see he was struggling to process. He barely slept for three nights.
In these moments, he thought about his future. He asked his mother how many units of blood he had needed to survive.
“I’ve got to give these people their blood back,” Norton said.
When he got out of the hospital, Norton founded the Kendrick Norton Angel’s Initiative, a nonprofit to help child amputees and the local community. He organized about half a dozen blood drives across Miami-Dade County in the fall and hosted a food drive ahead of Thanksgiving last year at Hard Rock Stadium to give out 500 turkeys.
He still has vulnerable moments, but he mostly keeps them between himself and his mother. Outwardly, he’s always upbeat. He wanted to be strong for everyone else.
“I think the way he sees it is, My career might be over, but I’m not done. I’ve got other stuff to do,” said Malki Kawa, Norton’s agent, “and that’s kind of where he’s at now.”
Said Norton: “If you still have life, you still can do anything and get anything out of life that you want to.”
‘Like me’
A few months after his accident, Norton was standing off to the side of the field at the Miami Dolphins Training Facility. Norton was watching the defensive linemen go through drills. He high-fived players and coaches as they passed. He heard the voice of a boy call out from behind him.
“Hey!” the child cried. “He has one like me!”
Norton turned around and saw a 12-year-old in a wheelchair. He had no left hand and no fingers on his right hand, and he struggled to walk from a battle with cancer. Jafar — Norton didn’t want to give out his last name — wheeled over to Norton and asked the former defensive lineman to touch nubs.
It was the start of a months-long relationship. Norton invited Jafar to practices in Davie and games in Miami Gardens. Jafar didn’t know Norton’s story — Norton’s still not sure how much he does. Jafar was just excited to see someone like him, big and healthy, and happy.
“We never even talked about me,” Norton said. “He just likes seeing that someone else is like him.”
When he was Jafar’s age, Norton decided he was going to play in the NFL. He didn’t start playing football until he was in middle school. He was always gigantic and he didn’t want to run while wearing trash bags to cut weight, so he just worked instead.
Lee Stephens, Norton’s late stepfather, owned a security guard agency and a cleaning business on the First Coast, and Norton worked for him all throughout his childhood, sticking fliers inside doors at apartment complexes and tagging along for cleaning jobs. In high school, he sometimes would join Stephens for a cleaning job at 3 or 4 a.m. and then go to work out all before school started. It instilled in Norton the no-excuses attitude he leans on now.
“Oh, you can’t get it done?” Stephens always told his stepson. “I can get someone else to do it.”
One day not long after he started playing football, Norton and some friends were hanging out at a park, and some of his more experienced friends started talking about how they were going to make it to the NFL one day. Norton figured he could probably do it As Norton recalls, at least one friend laughed off the idea. Norton made it his new goal.
At Trinity Christian, Norton was still inexperienced, but coaches saw him bursting with potential. He played both guard and defensive tackle, and earned All-American recognition as a senior, picking the Hurricanes on National Signing Day in 2015. He played three seasons in Coral Gables, earning third-team all-Atlantic Coast Conference honors as a sophomore and helping the Hurricanes reach the Orange Bowl as a junior. He then headed to the NFL and waited impatiently on Draft day as he tumbled all the way to the seventh round, when the Carolina Panthers finally took him 242nd overall. He was a little frustrated, but he perked up when he saw how excited the rest of the family was.
“Just seeing how they responded to it,” Norton said, “that kind of helped me out through it.”
He spent his entire rookie season on the Panthers’ practice squad before the Dolphins signed him late in 2018, but he never got a chance to play a game for them. The car accident ended his career less than a month before training camp began.
Norton admits he has thought about still trying to play at some level, “just to show kids that you really can do anything you want.”
“I’ve thought about that,” he said, “but I played so hard and I put so much into it that I know, walking away from the game, I gave it everything I had.”
‘The whole world supporting me’
Sam Kuhnert heard about Norton the same way every other die-hard Dolphins fan did. He came across one of the dozens of articles written on July Fourth last year and read it in disbelief. He also read it with understanding.
Kuhnert, who was born without a left hand. In 2011, he founded NubAbility Athletics, a national camp series for limb-different and amputee children. He sent Norton a message as soon as he could find a way to contact him. When Norton got out of the hospital, he responded. He wanted to get involved.
“People can view an amputation one of two ways,” said Kuhnert, who played college baseball. “They can view it as a hindrance, a disability, something that was put on them that is going to hold them back and not allow them to do what they can do or they can use it as what it’s supposed to be used as, which is a way to bolster others around you, a way to lift others around you.”
Norton got Jafar a paid-for trip to NubAbility’s Florida camp earlier this year. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Norton planned to travel to Illinois to visit the foundation’s headquarters.
Norton always thought he would use his football career to to start some sort of foundation or charity. It just happened differently than he expected.
At the top of his foundation’s Instagram page, a quote of his own is pinned: “My life didn’t end.”
“I have a lot of help around me. I have basically the whole world supporting me. Being able to just help a kid or somebody that’s going through something that doesn’t have hundreds of people trying to come to the hospital and calling, that doesn’t have that kind of support,” Norton said, “we just wanted to find a way to help.”
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 1:55 PM.
