NFL Player Nick Schuyler Recounts His Survival Tale

Nick Schuyler Recounts His Survival Tale: 'I Still Ask, Why Me?'
Posted Aug 16, 2009 11:50AM By Michael David Smith

Six months after a boating accident took the lives of NFL players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith and former South Florida player Will Bleakley, the lone survivor has spoken out on the harrowing ordeal of being stranded in the ocean and watching his friends die.

Nick Schuyler, who played with Bleakley at South Florida and worked as a personal trainer for Cooper and Smith, went boating with his three friends the morning of February 28 thinking they had a fun fishing trip ahead of them. But, as he told HBO's Bernard Goldberg in an interview for Tuesday's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, things went terribly wrong when they attempted to speed the boat forward while it was still anchored.

"It flipped," Schuyler said, "and we went right into the water."

And then Schuyler spent 46 hours clinging to the overturned boat, hoping and praying for a rescue that he thought might never come, while Cooper, Smith and Bleakley died of hypothermia, one by one around him. Schuyler said that he still wonders why it was that he made it out of the ordeal alive while his friends were lost at sea.

'I still ask every day," Schuyler said: 'Why me?''

Schuyler said that as Cooper, Smith and Bleakley died, their final words were about their families. And Schuyler, too, was thinking about his family, saying that what kept him alive was insisting to himself, "There's no way I'm going to let my mother go to my funeral."

Around 24 hours after the boat capsized, Schuyler -- who was wearing thicker clothing than his friends and was less susceptible to hypothermia -- was alone and his friends had died. He spent almost another 24 hours wondering whether a rescue would ever come.

But a Coast Guard crew finally did spot the overturned boat, more than 30 miles west of Tampa Bay, after a long search-and-rescue mission that was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. That crew saved Schuyler's life.

"I still can't believe it," Schuyler said of the rescue. "I remember being with the Coast Guard, in the helicopter, and their main concern was with the other guys. They said, 'Where are the other guys?' And I had to explain, 'There is no other guys.'"

Asked how he's coping six months later, Schuyler answered, "Not that good. I think about it all the time. Every day."