A program manager for the Maine Department of Transportation, he lives in a cozy, country home, tucked into a hillside. He is indebted to his wife and wholly devoted to his three children, twin teenage sons and a preschool daughter.

His avocation for the past five years: Defensive coordinator and line coach for Winthrop/Monmouth youth football, culminating in a trip to the middle school championship game this season with eighth-grade sons Shane and Camden.

Like any coach, Tweedie calmly, authoritatively, often hoarsely, conveys instruction to a captive audience. The encouragement, eye contact, smiles, scowls and male bonding that have passed the game from one generation to the next for more than a century are on full display.

All is strikingly simple and beautifully normal, until you consider the wheelchair that gives Tweedie mobility, and the ventilator that sustains his life. And like so many in his situation, Tweedie, 47, would ask you not to dwell on it.

“Coaching never crossed my mind until the boys decided they were going to play,” Tweedie said. “When I was first hurt, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. I thought I was going to live in a facility somewhere and be forgotten about, but luckily that didn’t happen with loved ones and family.”

Twenty-one years have passed since Tweedie, then a graduate student in the engineering program at the University of Maine, suffered a broken neck in a rugby game.

Doctors told him the same day that he would never walk and never breathe again without assistance. Social workers counseled Tweedie’s family to place him in an assisted-living facility.

“There was no friggin’ sympathy in my family. That’s the way my parents were raised and the way we were raised,” Tweedie said. “If you had something to do, you did it. If you failed, you failed. If you succeeded, it was your success.”

Resilient, indomitable and successful, Tweedie is considered a hometown hero, one whose story family, friends and neighbors hope will achieve national recognition.

Directed by audiovisuals teacher Tiff Shaw, Winthrop High School students crafted a four-minute video for submission in a contest entitled “Together We Make Football,” a cooperative effort of the National Football League and NBC’s “Today” show. The winner, to be announced Jan. 8, will win a trip to Super Bowl 50.

Students captured Tweedie’s spirit in a hodgepodge of photos, newspaper clippings and interviews, presented with professional flair.

“He is an inspiration,” Shaw said.

In the film, Olympic skier Julie Parisien characterized Tweedie as a “whirlwind.”

Parisien, a member of the Auburn/Lewiston Sports and Maine Skiing halls of fame, is one of Tweedie’s home health care nurses. Her son, Henry Nuce, is a classmate and teammate of his sons.

“I don’t think the world could handle an able-bodied Jeff Tweedie, actually, because he is a force to be reckoned with,” Parisien said. “I just love him.”

Tough guy from the start

Football was Tweedie’s first love. When he attended Leavitt Area High School in Turner, there were two seasons, he said: “Football, and getting ready for football.”

He was an all-state center and linebacker and a captain for coach Doug Conn’s Hornets as a senior in 1986. Tweedie considered Norwich, Colby and other Division III schools before choosing Maine for its renowned engineering program.

The Black Bears’ rugby club became the sensible outlet for Tweedie’s toughness and fondness for physical contact.

“There’s not much call for a 5-foot-9, 185-pound center in Division I football,” Tweedie said. “I would have been looking out my ear hole too much.”

Tweedie was still engrossed in the game on Oct. 29, 1994, when he accompanied his team to the New England final four at Bowdoin College in Brunswick.

Two days earlier, Tweedie turned 26. He had a devoted girlfriend, Jennifer Hodgkins, and a promising future awaiting after graduation. Tweedie was near the end of his field research and was about to begin the data analysis and the writing of his thesis on the use of chipped tires as backfill in retaining wall construction.

“I should have just been focusing on my graduate studies is what I should have been doing,” Tweedie said. “Hindsight is 20/20. But it was too much fun.”

‘This is bad’

The whistle blew to begin Maine’s semifinal game against Babson. Less than a minute into the contest, Tweedie was the central figure in a set scrum, with players from both sides pushing into the pile in a battle for the ball.

Maine had bigger players across the board. The Black Bears expected more resistance from Babson. Instead, their overwhelming momentum and force collapsed the pile, with much of the mass coming down directly on Tweedie’s head and neck.

Fellow players signaled for help when it became clear that Tweedie could not move. He gasped to a close friend and teammate that he couldn’t breathe.

“It was lights-out after that. Then I remember riding in the ambulance and these guys were all freaking out around me, doing this, doing that,” Tweedie said. “All I remember thinking is, ‘I am totally (screwed). This is bad.’ In the ambulance they kept touching me. ‘Can you feel this? Can you feel this?’ I think that’s when I realized the severity of it.”

Emergency room doctors at a Brunswick hospital assessed Tweedie’s condition and immediately transferred him to Maine Medical Center in Portland.

Tweedie was hospitalized four months, but the hard news about his plight was delivered in a matter of hours. He underwent an MRI he described as “terrifying.” Later that night, a doctor met with him alone in his room.

“He says, ‘You’ve broken your neck very high, and the damage is permanent. You’ll never walk and breathe again on your own,’ and then he left. After that they let Jen and all my friends in,” Tweedie said. “But no matter how you tell someone, and I’ve thought about that for years, if I had a choice of somebody to sugarcoat it or just come flat out, I’d rather have them come flat out. But it was just like a shock. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad.”

Pressing onward

Possible breakthroughs in spinal cord regeneration and stem cell research provided hope in the mid-1990s. Higher profile injuries to Yarmouth, Maine’s Travis Roy and actor Christopher Reeve kept the conversation ongoing in the news.

“When you’re a D1 hockey player and a famous actor, you get slightly more publicity than the thug rugby player at UMaine,” Tweedie quipped.

Rehabilitation and the support of family, friends and colleagues propelled Tweedie forward. Associate professor Dana Humphrey, now the dean of engineering, helped him secure the voice computing technology necessary to complete his thesis.

Jennifer later became his wife.

“If it wasn’t for Jen, I wouldn’t be where I am, and I certainly would not be coaching,” Tweedie said. “I’d be stuck in a home somewhere, or worse.”

Tweedie never lost the perspective that his story could have ended differently. Inside the blue, hardcover thesis is a dedication to late Maine student-athletes Matt Baldi and Rhett Morse. Baldi drowned while sea kayaking. Morse lost his battle with a rare blood cancer.

Upon graduation in 1997, Tweedie underwent a rigorous interview process before earning a job with DOT as a geotechnical engineer. “I had to work my butt off like anybody else,” he said, attributing much of that persistence to lessons learned from his father, Duane.

“All the stages of grief, you go through all that, whatever those are,” Tweedie said. “I was angry crippled guy, bitter crippled guy, accepting guy, reality guy. There certainly are days of the week I’m more discouraged than I would be if I was able-bodied.”

Jeff’s parents, Duane Tweedie and Alice Nelke, were his voice in the hospital, stubbornly responding to suggestions that their son would be best off in a long-term, dedicated, supervised facility.

“You don’t know our son,” they said. “He will get out of here. He will go back to school. He will get his Master’s. He will get a job.”

Will, and sheer force of it, being the operative word.

“Quitting is not an option. Our son is the toughest guy there is,” Duane Tweedie said. “Coming from what happened to him to where he is today. Too many people get in a tough situation and they complain rather than be successful. You do what needs to be done. Jeff did that, and we’re very, very proud of him.”

Ramblers’ respect

Middle school coach Tom Choate recruited Tweedie to coach when their sons were on the fourth-grade peewee team together.

“He’s a smart guy,” Choate said. “It’s like having (Patriots coach Bill) Belichick in your back pocket.”

Winthrop lost to Lisbon, 22-6, in the league championship game. The season has been immortalized on a 2×4 that Tweedie dreamed up as a unique trophy two years ago.

The roster and schedule are etched on the board, which is painted in the team’s colors of green and red. MVPs and unsung heroes are selected and written underneath the final score of each game, with a point system awarding it to a player at season’s end.

“You pick a couple of kids who did the best to support the team,” Tweedie said. “To build a house, a strong structure, you can’t build it with one 2×4. They’ve got to work together with the same goal in mind, so that’s kind of what we stress.”

Football sidelines are a noisy, sometimes hyperactive place at the youth level. The constant supply of air allows Tweedie to give instructions at a dull roar, one or two sentences at a time.

Players surround Tweedie’s chair in groups of four or five, seeking the coveted advice.

“All the players look beyond his wheelchair, ventilator and disability, to his heart, soul and ability as their football coach,” Jennifer Tweedie said.

No regrets, no fear

Tweedie’s coaching career is over, he said. Coaching at the high school varsity level would be too time-consuming when combined with the demands of his professional and family life.

He is content to slide into the background as a football parent in an era when there are fewer football parents. Doctors, politicians and concerned parent organizations have banded against the game due to the risk of health complications from concussions, and yes, the threat of injuries such as the one that altered Tweedie’s life.

Shane also plays hockey. Jeff said the checking in that game concerns him more than football, or even rugby, if one of the boys chooses that route in college.

“They both know to tackle with their head up. I’ve never seen either one of them tackle with their head down,” he said. “The way Camden tackled this year, almost every tackle was textbook. He’s only 100 pounds and five feet tall. The bigger kids would get momentum, and he’d get hold of one leg and somebody else would come clean it up.”

Tweedie cannot roughhouse or play pass with his sons the way so many fathers enjoy. Instead, they analyze college and pro football on TV together. Dad takes pride in their understanding of the game.

“This is a guy who loves what he is doing and has completely normalized this terrible accident that he had as a young man and lives an absolutely normal life,” Parisien said. “He gets up and goes to work every day, comes out and coaches the kids. He’s really fulfilling dreams that most able-bodied people aren’t able to fulfill.

“He’s so much fun to be around. He hardly ever complains. Some days when I’m struggling and barely able to get out of bed, I think of Jeff Tweedie. He needs two people to help him get out of bed. He needs a wheelchair and a vent at all times. This is a guy who has normalized life, and you can see it in the boys who absolutely love him as a coach.”

His own sons get that mix of matter-of-factness and humor every day.

“Every day I come home, I say, ‘Did Matt Lauer call?’ I don’t know if I’ll make it to the Today show,” he said. “There are a lot more compelling stories out there than a crippled guy who coaches football.”

koakes@sunjournal.com

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