Adam “Pacman” Jones will be featured Sunday night in a contrived pay-per-view wrestling show labeled “Hard Justice.” Tommy Urbanski, a former wrestler, will not be watching from his hospital room in Englewood. He has paid enough and understands that justice is too hard.
Jones would give anything to play pro football again. Urbanski would give anything to walk again.
Jones, a prized cornerback, has been suspended from the NFL for this season as the result of multiple conflicts with the law. The most serious involved a triple-victim shooting incident that rendered one man a paraplegic during the NBA All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas. Jones was charged with felony coercion.
Urbanski, an innocent bystander, was shot three times in the sordid episode. One of the bullets remains lodged in his spinal column. “It took away everything from me as a man, except my hope,” Urbanski says.
While Jones prepares for his performance – following approval by a Tennessee judge that he can appear at the event, but can’t wrestle – Urbanski, who also was wounded in his left wrist and broke his right wrist as he fell, prepares to play guitar in Craig Hospital’s talent show Wednesday.
Urbanski was channel-switching last week when “I happened to see him (Jones) doing an interview. It was the first time I ever saw or heard him….He is a disturbed person, and I’m sure he knows the man who shot me, but I can’t focus on him or what went on.”
Tommy, his wife Kathy and his wheelchair rode a bus, then the light rail to downtown Denver for lunch on the 16th Street Mall and a visit to the Museum of Natural History on Saturday afternoon. Finally, Urbanski can escape his suffering for a little while.
The 44-year-old Urbanski is going home to Las Vegas on Aug. 25, but he and Kathy might return permanently to Denver.
“I love this city. The people here have been so incredible. And if I hadn’t come to Craig Hospital (in March), I believe I wouldn’t be alive today.”
The Tennessee Titans obtained an injunction preventing Jones from actually wrestling tonight, but the judge declared that he can attend.
In another interview on ESPN, Jones said: “I don’t know what you all want me to do. Just sit in the house and be miserable all day?”
Urbanski lies in a hospital room at Craig (world-renowned for treatment of spinal cord and head trauma injuries), and he is beyond miserable a lot of days while undergoing constant, intense therapy, taking painkillers every four hours and being hooked up to a tube in his stomach and a catheter.
“I admit that I have mood swings and feel sorry for myself, but I’ve got my wife, who is my best friend, the rest of my family, my doctors and my friends, and they help me get through this,” said the native New Yorker.
Jones said on TV that he had been arrested twice, not five times. Police records indicate he has been arrested six times and charged three times for various offenses. Tommy and Kathy have contempt in their voices and hearts for Jones, but, on advice from their attorney, wouldn’t talk about their feelings, or any personal interaction, on the record. Urbanski did say: “He (Jones) wouldn’t like being in a wheelchair.”
Urbanski has been described in most media accounts as “a bouncer.” He actually was a real estate salesman who worked part-time as a manager at Minxx, a Las Vegas “gentlemen’s club,” to pay law-school tuition for his wife, an elementary school teacher.
Life is about timing. Urbanski arrived 15 minutes early for his job at the strip club on Feb. 19 and was told there had been a major disturbance, with Pacman throwing money ($81,000, police claimed) at a dancer, demanding the cash back, slamming the woman’s head against a wall and being told to leave with his entourage (five other men and a woman.) The club’s owner asserts that Jones threatened to kill a bouncer.
According to Kathy Urbanski, “there was a metal detector at the front door of the club. We’ve been told by the authorities that one of the men left, went to a car, got a gun and came back to the outside of the club” to confront the bouncer. “I went to the scene, saw where Tommy and the shooter were, and I don’t know how my husband survived.”
Urbanski had gone outside to check the situation and immediately was shot in the stomach. A female customer and the bouncer also were shot. Both were treated at a hospital and released. Jones’ attorney denies his client was present during the shooting or was a friend of the assailant. The shooter has not been arrested, but a “person of interest” has been identified by police, and his photo is on the Internet.
Urbanski spent two weeks in an induced coma, then was sent to Craig Hospital. He was in critical condition for weeks.
“Most of my ribs were broken. I couldn’t move my wrists for weeks, and I thought I was a quadriplegic. They couldn’t remove the bullet in my spine, and I have no sensation below my belly button,” he says.
He was a 390-pound pro wrestler who occasionally filled in at World Wrestling Association matches and grappled with The Iron Sheik in South Africa, George “The Animal” Steele in Europe and Hulk Hogan in the U.S. He is now 270 pounds and, in a wheelchair, battled tight turns in an Italian restaurant Saturday.
“There is incredible irony,” Kathy says, “that Tommy was a wrestler, and Pacman was hired by a wrestler promoter.”
Urbanski said he was “hurt” that Total Nonstop Action would “sell its soul for a few bucks to bring in this guy. If I were a wrestler and this happened to someone else in the business, I would wish I could be in the ring with him (Jones).”
It was rumored in Nashville that the wrestlers taking part in the pay-per-view event intended to “rough up” Jones, which might have led the Titans to demand that the banished defensive back not become an active participant, even if the match is a farce. (The Titans have not released Jones, and he could play for them again. In another irony, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will decide after the Titans play in Denver against the Broncos on Nov. 19 if Jones is to be reinstated for the final six regular-season games.)
Urbanski played football in high school on Long Island, but he really liked to make music. He played guitar in a rock band. Recently, two of his old bandmates presented Tommy with an electric guitar.
“When I was on the ground after being shot, my first thought was I was dead. My second thought was about Kathy. And my next thought, when my arms were covered in blood and I could move them, was I couldn’t play the guitar ever again,” Urbanski said.
After five months of rehabilitation, Urbanski can move his fingers, barely. And he is strumming the guitar.
On Wednesday evening at the hospital’s patient and staff talent show, he will play “Plush” by the Stone Temple Pilots. Urbanski asked his principal doctor, Thomas Balazy, to join him in a duet.
Craig Hospital has done all it can for Urbanski, whose chances of regaining use of his legs has been estimated by doctors at 3 to 6 percent.
“We can only hope for a miracle, or scientific advancements in stem cell research somewhere else in the world,” Kathy says.
The Urbanskis are not optimistic that Tommy will walk again, “but I’ve seen so many kids and others at the hospital who are in worse shape than me.
“I will play the guitar, and I will start a band, and I will record songs, and I will help those who are in similar situations like me, and I will live.”
And he will ride an electrical stimulation bike, if the Urbanskis can raise the $15,000 to buy one while trying to make their small home handicapped-accessible. Workers’ compensation is paying only a share of Urbanski’s medical bills, which eventually could run into the millions of dollars. If you would like to assist, go to the website started by friends in Las Vegas.
The lives of two men are intertwined. One is only a Pacman. The other is a good man.
Staff writer Woody Paige can be reached at 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com.
