If someone were to ask about the most memorable interview of my career, there would be an immediate, no-doubt-about-it response.
It occurred in April 2000 and the interview subject was Dan Bitson. The former Booker T. Washington and University of Tulsa wide receiver was shockingly detailed about the Dec. 4, 1989 car crash that changed his life and ruined his shot at an NFL career.
Last week, the Tulsa Public Schools announced that Bitson, now 55, is the new Booker T. Washington head football coach. In the Tuesday Tulsa World, we again are publishing the April 2000 Bitson profile that resulted from a chilling interview on the TU campus.
If anyone would have a license to seem bitter about having been dealt a bolt of brutally bad luck, it would be Bitson. Instead, he is a classy, sweet-natured guy who forgave the unlicensed driver who on Dec. 4, 1989, police reported, had a seizure while behind the wheel of a car that smashed Bitson’s red Nissan Sentra.
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Bitson had been traveling westbound on 11th Street, near the TU campus, and was on his way to a statistics class that morning.
The results of that horrific, head-on crash: After having been a second-team All-American during the 1989 season — and while trying to determine whether he would stay at TU for one more season or make himself available for the 1990 NFL draft — Bitson sustained two shattered femurs, two destroyed knees, nerve damage and a broken wrist. He was hospitalized for 50 days.
Although he was on the 1991 TU roster and a member of a 10-1 Golden Hurricane team, Bitson’s football career essentially ended when those cars collided on 11th Street.
If you read the Bitson feature in the Tuesday World, it’s impossible to not be moved by his commentary from the 2000 interview.
Jerry Ostroski and I agree that it’s important for everyone to be informed or reminded that Dan Bitson was a great football player. Thirty-three years removed from his senior year, Bitson still is No. 3 on TU’s career list for receiving yards.
“Dan was one of the best receivers I ever played with at any level,” said Ostroski, who was Bitson’s TU teammate before a nine-season NFL run on the Buffalo Bills’ offensive line. “He was a smooth, dynamic route-runner who owned the middle of the field.”
If not for the tragedy of Dec. 4, 1989, Ostroski says, Bitson would have been “a day-one draft pick, with a long career in the NFL.”
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