Wanna put on weight? Try getting hit by a car

Published online on Monday, Aug. 10, 2009

Fresno State football coaches once told Marcel Jensen to put on some weight.

He did. Almost 50 pounds. It just wasn't what they had in mind. Not even close.

In the beginning, Jensen was a hard-hat sort of basketball player at Rodriguez High-Fairfield. He started his prep career barely able to dribble and ended it as a 6-foot-6 wall who blocked almost 100 shots his senior season.

Football was an afterthought, really. He never played even varsity until his senior season, when a friend persuaded him to go out for the team. He called his dad 10 minutes before the first practice and said he was having second thoughts.

They put him at defensive end, and even though he missed four games with a broken hand, he was quickly getting more interest as a college football project than a basketball player. He signed with Pat Hill's Bulldogs in the spring of 2008, but at 230 pounds, they wanted him to gain weight.

They did not, however, want him to get hit by a car. It was not his plan either, but it is what happened.

In June 2008, he and his girlfriend and her mother were in Sacramento. At some point, the girlfriend was at the wheel of the Nissan sedan and Jensen was standing at the driver's side front corner of the car. She thought he wanted her to pull forward. He thought she was waiting for him to pass in front of the car.

She hit the gas at the exact moment he stepped out with his right foot. Both bones in his lower leg snapped.

The girlfriend is an ex-girlfriend now, which you might have assumed. Jensen says that whole hitting-him-with-a-vehicle, almost-ending-his-college-career thing was not really responsible for the breakup. He was vague about the details of the accident to his family, especially his dad, and the awkwardness between her and his parents after that was thick.

"He never fully blamed her, so it must have been an accident," says his dad, Mark Jensen. "I think he was just embarrassed about it. He could have lost a scholarship to a Division I school, and he could have lost his leg. I think he just didn't want to talk about it."

After the bones had been set and a rod put in to stabilize the leg, doctors told him it would take a year for it to heal, but it would probably be 100% again. They also told him there was a small chance of developing compartment syndrome.

Then he did get compartment syndrome, a bunch of fluid built up in his leg and started cutting off blood to the muscle. The doctors had to cut it open, expose the muscle and drain it for days with a sponge.

More than a year has passed and Marcel Jensen finally is playing football at Fresno State. No one was more excited for fall camp to start. Jensen did go through spring drills, but when practice started this week he finally had full clearance, even though the muscles in his legs are so weak he can't squat as much as he can bench press.

The rod is still in his leg because it would have meant six more months of rehab to take it out, so he told them to just leave it in there. Two of the three screws have been taken out. You can still see where they grafted skin from the back of his leg to cover the wound in his shin, and where the two dozen staples held his skin together.

In the football scheme of things, he really hasn't lost that much. He will most likely redshirt this year and still have four seasons left to play at Fresno State.

"Everybody tells me I have a lot of potential," he says. "But I'm not anywhere near playing yet. I have a lot of work to do."

When Jensen's dad called Coach Hill from the hospital last year to tell him about his son's leg, Hill told him not to worry, that the scholarship was still good.