A week ago today, Adam Taliaferro received a call at his home in suburban Philadelphia. It was Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel on the line, and he was calling from a location with which the former Penn State cornerback was very familiar.

Tressel was calling from Ohio State University Medical Center, where Taliaferro spent five days in September of 2000, after a head-first tackle in a road game against the Buckeyes left the cornerback with a fractured C-5 vertebrae -- essentially a broken neck.

But this call was not so much about Taliaferro as it was Tyson Gentry, a third-year walk-on at Ohio State who lay just a few yards away from the bed Taliaferro occupied in 2000. Gentry was a backup punter for the Buckeyes last year, but had been practicing as a receiver on April 14, when he was brought down with what looked like a fairly routine hit.

Gentry lay motionless after the play, though, as he had sustained a serious neck injury from the collision. He was rushed to OSU Medical Center as Tressel ended practice early and followed his player to the hospital.

Gentry underwent his first surgery soon after his arrival at the hospital on that Friday. A second surgery was performed last Monday. Though Tressel commented that the second surgery went well, the Gentry family requests that no details of the severity of the injury or the prognosis be made available to the media.

Tressel's call to Taliaferro, placed one day after the second surgery, was made while the coach was right next to his recovering player.

"Jim Tressel called our house and talked to me and my dad and told us about the situation," Taliaferro said. "When he called it was while he was at the hospital with Tyson. After I talked to Coach Tressel he put Tyson on the phone, and I just talked to him for about 10 minutes."

The two talked about what Taliaferro had been through and about what Gentry could expect to encounter in the coming months.

Taliaferro worked tirelessly to recover from what doctors originally feared might be an injury that would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Taliaferro walked out of a rehabilitation facility the following January, and led the Nittany Lions onto the Beaver Stadium field in their 2001 season opener against Miami on Sept. 1.

"He probably sounded better than me [a day after surgery]," Taliaferro said. "After my surgery I don't even remember talking to anybody. You never would have known he was injured, he just sounded like a regular person talking on the other end of the phone. He sounded surprisingly good."

Tressel wasn't quite sure how to deal with the situation. The only similar scenario he'd been involved with during his coaching career was in his first game on the sidelines many years ago, when a player actually died.

Taliaferro thinks that Gentry's injury is similar to his own, and that hearing about recovery stories will boost Gentry's spirits.

"It's very helpful," Taliaferro said. "I look back to when I was in that situation, and whenever I had the opportunity to talk to somebody who recovered from the injury it really brightened my day and motivated me to want to get better myself."

Now a first-year law student at Rutgers, Taliaferro will continue to speak with Gentry throughout the recovery process.

Taliaferro looks back at his recovery and truly appreciates the care given to him at OSU Medical Center, where he had his successful spinal-fusion surgery two days after the fateful tackle, where he visited five years ago this month to say thank you.

"I told him that from my point of view, there's no better place in the country to be at right now than the Ohio State Medical Center," Taliaferro said. "He'll get top-notch care."

Gentry's father, Bob, was a member of the Ohio State team in the mid-1970s. In a release from Ohio State, he and his wife Gloria thanked the doctors and nurses for their excellent care.

As much as they may now share in medical experiences, the football players still living inside Gentry and Taliaferro will strengthen the bond.

"I'm sure once he recovers from surgery and gets to a rehab facility, he's going to be pushed just like he would be in football practice," Taliaferro said. "Just like on the football field."