Head Injury

College track star Kevin Dare shook the track and field world four years ago when he attempted to pole vault 15 feet, 7 inches during a Big 10 track meet in Minnesota. The vault was no record attempt. It was not even Dare's personal best. The jump was sadly unforgettable because Dare missed and was killed when he landed head first in the steel takeoff box that vaulters use to catapult themselves into the air. After years of debate on ways to make the sport safer, a standards panel approved in May the first specifications for a pole vaulting helmet, spurring production of several models.

When George Khalid Jones enters the boxing ring tonight at Michael's Eighth Avenue in Glen Burnie, most of the cheers will be for his opponent, local fan favorite Darnell Wilson. But Jones will have at least one enthusiastic fan in attendance, and Denise Scottland vows to scream loudest for the New Jersey light heavyweight. That's how she used to yell for her husband, Beethavean Scottland. "I'm going to be rooting for Khalid, just like I used to root for Bee," Denise Scottland said. "I'd say, `Come on, Bee. Come on, you can do it. Hit him with some one-twos.

It was one of those sounds crowds love to hear: when the running back and the linebacker collide, helmet to helmet, power against power. Cracks like those, football fans say, are sweeter than any crack of the baseball bat. The hit between the Washington Redskins' John Riggins and the New York Giants' Harry Carson not only sent a crack reverberating through the air at RFK Stadium that Sunday afternoon, but it also left Carson lumbering back to the huddle...

The estate of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Baltimore against the NFL's pension plans, claiming the longtime center was denied a fair pension because the plan ruled his injuries were not the result of an "active football injury." After retiring in 1990, Webster had "multiple head injuries" and a "dementing illness" that "resulted in complete disability in terms of being gainfully employed," the suit contends. Webster, who died in 2002, had received about $7,000 a month from the pension plans under what are termed "football degenerative" benefits, said the attorney for his estate, Cyril V. Smith of Baltimore law firm Zuckerman Spaeder.

Annapolis police are investigating whether an incident Sunday in which a Calvert County husband and wife were injured by a crowd that threw bottles and rocks at their car in Eastport was drug-related. After the attack on Madison Street near the Harbor House public housing neighborhood, the victims - identified by police as Gregory Louis Mercillott and Juanita Jean Mercillott - drove to the Bay Ridge Avenue fire station to seek help for head injuries, saying they had been shot, police said.

The body of a man who had died of a head injury was found yesterday morning near a liquor store on West Street in Annapolis in a wooded area that locals have known for years as a trouble spot. Patrons of Lighthouse Wine and Spirits noticed a man, covered by a rug, lying face-down on a walking path used as a shortcut between the liquor store and Admiral Drive. The man had identification on him, but police would not release his name last night because they had not notified his family. They said he is a 55-year-old area resident.

Annapolis basketball player Elliott DeVoe, who suffered a head injury Monday night at Glen Burnie, was released yesterday from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center. According to coach John Brady, DeVoe is resting at home and is expected to miss a few days of school. -- Pat O'Malley

Sarah Ellenberger still goes to all her high school team's soccer games. She just doesn't play anymore. The Annapolis 15-year-old has been sidelined permanently after suffering two concussions within a week - the second of which left her in a heap on the field after she routinely hit a ball with her head, unable to remember her birthday, the day of the week or what had happened to land her in the emergency room. The Ellenbergers didn't realize at first how serious Sarah's head injury could have been.

Mind Catcher, by John Darnton. Dutton Books. 387 pages. $25.95. For readers who prefer to hit the ground running and never look back, John Darnton has delivered a medical sci-fi thriller which, despite its predictability, hurtles along like an ambulance, hightailing it nimbly around every sharp corner of technical knowledge and scientific research. Darnton's chosen racecourse in Mind Catcher is the uncharted nexus of super computers and the human consciousness. What might happen, for example, if someday a damaged brain could let a computer take over some of the workload?

A 71-year-old man lay motionless on a hospital gurney, tubes entering his mouth and arm, a foam brace holding his neck unnaturally taut. "Can you wiggle your toes?" Dr. Shawn Varney called out yesterday, his face just inches from the unconscious patient. "Can you wiggle your fingers?" Varney, a 37-year-old emergency physician, is an Air Force major who has come to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore to gain experience treating the sorts of injuries that are encountered during war. An elderly man with a head injury - the patient suffered a brain hemorrhage when he fell and hit his head at his home in West Baltimore - might seem to have little in common with an injured soldier.