A Seattle area teacher suffered a broken neck when a raucous fan at Yankee Stadium tumbled several rows and landed on his neck - as his wife and son watched in horror.

Doctors said teacher Paul Robinson is lucky he wasn't paralyzed or even killed.

Robinson, 53, was in the top tier at the Stadium with his wife, Kathy, and 13-year-old son, John, during the Yankees' 12-0 blowout against the Los Angeles Angels last Sunday when the mystery fan's fall snapped Robinson's head forward so hard it broke the vertebrae below the skull.

Jackie Bartels of Euless, a board member and spokeswoman for the organization, said that most sports have handicapped counterparts, but that many disabled people aren't aware of such options.

After suffering a spinal cord injury at 13, Bartels was encouraged by a motivational speaker to play wheelchair tennis, which she didn't know existed then. She later attended the University of Texas at Arlington on a tennis scholarship.

"People don't know where to go or what to do," said Bartels, 23, who was crowned Ms. Wheelchair Texas this year. "We want people with physical disabilities to know that they can be physically and socially active."

Play it safe, paralysis victim says

It was close to midnight on a hot June night in 1992 when Eric Wildt dived into a friend's in-ground swimming pool.

His head hit the bottom, and he broke his neck.

That night was the last time Wildt walked; the last time he stood on his own; the last time he could clasp a friend's hand. For a long time, he thought it would be the last time he smiled.

That one late-night dive turned Wildt into a quadriplegic at age 17.

Out of hospital and extraordinarily positive, Michael D'Amelio has a joke with his girlfriend, Shennae Searle.

It was November when they got to Interlaken. And that is when everything changed.

Michael D'Amelio, 25, and his girlfriend Shennae Searle, 27, each paid 500 Swiss francs and boarded a sky-diving helicopter with nervous excitement. When it was time to jump, he went first, in tandem with an instructor. Within a minute, she followed. The free fall was fantastic. Then it was time to land.

Climber Michael Garton's life was saved by a man with a telescope after he survived a fall down a sheer rock face on a perilous Norwegian mountain.

Michael was two days into a solo climb to scale the notorious 3,600-feet Troll Wall , the tallest vertical rock face in Europe, when a piece of loose rock gave way and he fell 120 feet onto a sloping ledge still attached to his rope.

His neck was broken as he plunged leaving him paralysed and he lay motionless for ten hours unable to move and slowly freezing to death.

In March 1982, Pete and Liz Fordred began an incredible 18-month sailing adventure across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to Florida. They sailed by themselves as paraplegics, which in both their cases meant similar below-the-chest paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries at about the T-4 level.

“I was training a horse at an international event,” said 53-year-old Liz Fordred in a telephone interview of her accident in the 1970s. “The horse was tired and had been going all morning. I don't really know what happened, but others have said it was a simple jump. I must have lost my balance and gone over his shoulder. As for my husband, Pete was in a car accident at 19 and wasn't wearing a seatbelt.”