BOZ to the rescue

[skippy]

Football hero rescues motorist

By BILL KAUFMANN, SUN MEDIA
July 6, 2008

Helping rescue a Calgary woman from a car wreck and cramped crash scene were some of the longest yards endured by ex-NFL star Brian Bosworth.

On Saturday, Bosworth was travelling to Winnipeg airport following a fishing trip at Lake of Woods when he came across a clutch of emergency vehicles stopped at the side of the Trans-Canada Hwy. about 150 km east of the Manitoba capital.

"You could just barely see a car down a 30-40-foot drop -- I thought 'this is not a good thing,' " said Bosworth, a linebacker with the Seattle Seahawks in the late 1980s.

The 39-year-old woman had lost control of her car and slid down an embankment into a swampy area, becoming trapped with non-life-threatening injuries, while a male passenger escaped without injury.

His linebacker physique, said Bosworth, was a welcome sight to the professional rescuers.

"I think that's why they recruited me -- a couple of the paramedics were on in years and she was kind of a large woman," he told the Sun yesterday.

"Her seatbelt looked like it was about to strangle her."

The jaws of life were used to cut the victim from her car and the steering wheel was cut to free her legs.

Then began the struggle to haul her out of the wreck and up a steep embankment.

"We had to figure out a way to carry her taking into consideration where she was hurt," said Bosworth, 43, who's now a real estate agent in Malibu, Calif.

"It took maybe six guys to get her into the ambulance."

But he said there was nothing heroic about his efforts, that he was "lucky to be there and glad she was able to get out of there.

"I hope if that ever happens to me, somebody pays it forward."

Bosworth said he hoped to contact the unidentified woman -- who was taken to Winnipeg's St. Anne hospital -- to check on her condition.

Mounties aren't too interested in the celebrity status of rescuers, said Sgt. Line Karpish of Winnipeg RCMP.

"All we care is that we get those people out of there and to a hospital," said Karpish.

"But it sounds like Mr. Bosworth stepped right in and kudos to him to get down and dirty."

Bosworth's on-again-off-again film career recently included a role in the 2005 remake of the prison/football movie The Longest Yard.