BY ANDY BAGGOT
UWBadgers.com Insider
MADISON, Wis. — It was 3 a.m. and D'Cota Dixon, a man in pain, was wide awake.
Outside his fourth-floor hospital room it was serenely quiet, but inside Dixon was in such discomfort that he couldn't help but sob into the darkness.
"It hurt so bad," he said, "I couldn't close my eyes."
Things were fine 48 hours earlier.
Dixon, then a sophomore strong safety for the Wisconsin football team, worked out with his teammates inside the Don Hutson Center in Green Bay.
The unique practice session last April 2 was designed to give the Badgers a sense of their iconic surroundings in advance of their season opener vs. LSU at nearby Lambeau Field.
The experience was especially meaningful to Dixon, who was determined to be a starter when the inaugural Lambeau Field College Classic was staged Sept. 3.
Dixon would ultimately fulfill that mission, playing a vital role for unranked Wisconsin in its 16-14 triumph over the fifth-rated Tigers.
He would go on to start all 14 games for the Badgers as a junior, earning All-Big Ten Conference third-team honors and joining senior free safety Leo Musso in anchoring the back end of one of the stingiest defenses in the nation.
Dixon finished second on the team with four interceptions — including one that sealed the victory over LSU — and ranked fourth on the club with 60 tackles.
That he did all that now borders on the unthinkable.
Dixon is fortunate to be mobile at all, much less playing the rugged, strenuous sport he's loved since his days growing up in South Florida.
Hours after UW players and coaches bussed back to Madison from Green Bay, Dixon contacted veteran athletic trainer Kyle Gibson to say he was experiencing intense pain in his groin area.
By the time Dixon visited the emergency room at UW Hospital and was admitted, he was in a wheelchair, unable to walk.
"I was in bad shape," he said softly. "A lot of people didn't know."
Dixon spent a week in the hospital going toe-to-toe with a severe infection that baffled specialists and put his life in danger.
"They said I was in critical condition and stuff like that," he said.
"It was scary seeing D'Cota like that," Musso said.
"It's very tough watching a kid be in pain and not know why," UW defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard said. "That's the scariest part."
After a series of antibiotics were tried without success, one finally proved effective. Upon leaving the hospital Dixon spent six weeks with a pic line attached to his arm. Twice a day he had to pump the medicine directly to his heart.
"They don't know to this day what the infection was," he said.
Dixon had three surgeries as a freshman — including one for a sports hernia — and Gibson said it's believed that the infection may have gotten its start deep inside Dixon's body during one of those procedures.
"It had to be festering for a long, long time," Gibson said.
"The best speculation that they had was there was something in there that was low grade for a while and his body was trying to fight it off. Eventually it got to the point where he couldn't fight if off on his own and needed help."
It's hard to get past the severity of the case. Gibson recounted a moment where Dixon asked one of the attending physicians when he'd be able to get back to playing football.
"You're lucky you're walking," was the reply.
A year later, the episode provides some extraordinary perspective about Dixon.
He missed the rest of spring practice last April and didn't take part in any summer lifting or conditioning — a vital period of growth and readiness — because he was recovering from surgery, the fourth of his college career, to repair a sports hernia.
Dixon said he lost 20 pounds at one point during his recovery and played most of last season around 190 instead of his listed 197.
"I felt very light, very small," he said.
Dixon barely practiced during preseason camp leading up to that LSU game.
"I tried to practice, but sometimes I couldn't," he said.
"I was very tired all the time. I'd get tired very fast. But my coaches did a really good job of working with me."
UW coach Paul Chryst said Dixon "has an unbelievable mindset" and didn't let on that he'd wouldn't be available for the opener.
"He made me think he'd be ready," Chryst said.
Dixon made one of the biggest plays of the season against LSU. The Tigers were driving for the potential go-ahead points late in the fourth quarter when Dixon intercepted a pass by quarterback Brandon Harris with 57 seconds left.
Musso said such a performance by Dixon was "kind of unfathomable" given what his close friend had been through.
A year ago, Leonhard was in his first season as UW secondary coach, so he worked closely with Dixon. He marveled at what his protégé was able to accomplish.
"If you were to ask me in training camp if he was going to play every game of the season, I probably would have put a little money down that he wouldn't," Leonhard said. "But he did. And to play at the level he did is very impressive."
Chryst said Dixon made an even more memorable showing the day after the win over LSU.
It was 6:42 a.m. when Chryst looked out from his office onto the Camp Randall floor and saw Dixon — alone, dressed in workout attire — dragging a tackling dummy onto the field.
Dixon later explained that he thought he'd missed too many tackles and needed to sharpen his technique.
"That says a lot about who D'Cota is," Chryst said.
Memories of last April and all those subsequent challenges fueled Dixon this spring, pushing him through a series of 15 practices that ended Friday with a scrimmage at Camp Randall Stadium that was open to the public.
A man of intense faith, Dixon tells anyone who would listen that life is about opportunities and how we go about seizing them.
That was his quiet message to Eric Burrell, a freshman safety, as the two men knelt and spoke at the end of a practice earlier this week.
The agony Dixon felt that night alone in the hospital was physical, but also emotional.
"I was angry," he said.
Dixon's biological mother battled drugs and mental illness and he hasn't seen her since childhood.
Dixon's older brother is in jail and his father died suddenly of a heart attack in 2010.
Dixon's experienced foster homes, evictions and lived in conditions where a Styrofoam cooler served as a refrigerator.
Dixon laid in bed, wracked with pain, thinking about all those things.
"It was just frustration, man," he said of the tears. "It feels like it's always something. It's always something I've got to worry about.
"It was extremely, extremely frustrating. I was confused."
So Dixon did what comes naturally, comfortably.
He prayed.
"I just trusted that God was going to get me out," Dixon said. "That's what I felt. I prayed it. I believed it. That's all I could do.
"I could have done that or been mad and angry and upset. But I prayed and I prayed and it was the only weapon I had.
"It was almost like God gave me two choices. I just took the right pill.
"I think maybe why — I don't know if God intended it to be this way — but I felt like all of my past trials and struggles, it built character in me."
Dixon said praying empowered him.
"It helped me respond with strength and faith without even knowing it because I'm so determined to not fall," he said.
"Those trials helped me endure and helped me prepare for each moment that comes, good or bad."
Dixon, a rehabilitation psychology major who made the Dean's List last semester, doesn't pray for health or success as it relates to football.
"I pray to be a better man, to be a good man," he said. "Not just to be a football player, but to be a really good man.
"It's like a dream of mine or something to be a really good man. I want to be the best husband and I want to be the best dad ever one day.
"I want to be a perfect person."
Dixon said he arrived at UW with aspirations of being great, of "going to the NFL, making plays and being a superstar."
Not anymore.
"Being great is being a servant," he said.
