Hi, my name is Dave. For 6 years I was the webmaster for www.tabletennisthesport.com, and also a close friend of its owner, Scott Preiss, the #1 exhibition table tennis player in the world. I considered myself lucky to have such a nice guy as Scott as my friend. As a certified national table tennis trainer and coach, and someone who'd been educated in China in administering accupressure treatments, he could help me not only with my table tennis game but also if I ever had a stiff back or a crick in my neck.
Dave playing table tennis with Austin
Preiss in the Priess family homeOn October 23, 2003 I commited an act of senseless stupidity while riding my mountain bike, and landed forcefully very ungracefully, and fractured (broke) my clavicle (collarbone) and cracked some ribs:
Oct 30, 2003The doctor examined me and told me to get the broken clavicle x-rayed, but I didn't, since I knew it was broken, knew the 2 halves fit together comfortably, and knew that broken clavicles aren't put in a cast anyway. You just have to keep the fracture from flexing until the 2 parts of the bone (hopefully; there's no guarantee...) finally form a union and the repair heals (gradually regains strength over a period of weeks). (It's difficult to believe that a certified national sports coach and trainer, trained in accupressure, who has experience with broken bones as a patient and as a father, had no sense of this.)
Naturally I told my best friend Scott about this. He came over, and I showed him how I couldn't raise my left arm to the side more than about 20 degrees. (Scott would later say that I'd explained it to him as if I was a doctor.) Given that he regularly manipulates human bodies with his hands and has had alternative medical training, I thought he would probably have some insights or offer some advice, or at least find my injuries interesting, but he didn't say much, other than to verify that I hadn't gotten an x-ray. At the time I couldn't have imagined Scott using this information against his good friend... (Scott's "defense" would later be that since I admitted that the bone had already been broken, and there were no "before" x-rays, it could not be proven that his actions caused any harm at all. In other words, it's as if he deliberately and intentionally used the information -- and his minivan -- to take a free, cheap, debilitating shot at an injured friend whom he'd once said he loved like a brother.)
A few days later, he called to ask if I could help him with his portable P.A. system he used in his table tennis demonstrations. I hesitated, because I only had one usable arm, but figured he could do anything physical that I couldn't, like opening up the cabinet, so I agreed. He brought it over, and when I asked him to demonstrate the problem, the unit worked perfectly, so there was nothing to fix. Thus even though I wasn't feeling fit to do hardware repair, I didn't have to let my friend down by telling him that there was something I couldn't do for him because I'd injured myself. I did briefly wonder about the thinking and timing behind his asking a 1-armed injured friend to work on something bigger than a breadbox, but did not dwell on it. After all, Scott's such a swell guy; it's impossible to think anything bad about him.
But the next time Scott came over, something even stranger happened. We were sitting on the couch and, without a word, he reached over and placed his finger right on my broken clavicle! Being protective of my broken clavicle, I was unable to react (move) anywhere near fast enough to avoid his touch, though I couldn't believe he was doing it even as it was happening. Fortunately he touched it just on the inner, or attached, side of the fracture and so it didn't hurt too much. I was too stunned at the time to ask why he would do such an inappropriate thing, though in a later conversation I did ask, and Scott said, supposedly as an explanation, that he just wanted to feel how warm it was.
On November 8th, there was an elite Colorado sports banquet at the World Arena. I'd agreed to go, weeks earlier, as part of Scott's entourage in order to take still and moving images of Scott's appearance there for his web site, to help promote Scott and table tennis, as I'd been doing, without pay, for years. It was a struggle for me, not just being 1-armed but being unable to move my upper body normally. Even backing the car into a parking space was a real challenge, but it had been 2 weeks and it was good to get out of the house. The video I shot was pretty poor, zoomed in without a 2nd hand to help steady the palmcorder, but I got a some decent still shots, one of which remained on Scott's site's home page until the site was unceremoneously dismantled months later. Curiously, when Scott first saw me there that night, he approached so enthusiastically, at such an accelerated pace, that I felt like he was going to collide with (hug?) me, and so I felt I needed to suddenly sidestep him at the last moment. It was painful to do so, but less painful and risky than allowing myself to be chest bumped with a broken clavicle. I've never asked Scott about that near miss, and only recalled it after his subsequent, ramped-up attempts at subjecting me to more physical force than my injured body could possibly withstand had finally succeeded...
On November 7th Scott had appeared on a local TV station, and I'd agreed to accompany him on the 12th to lunch and to the station with my video gear to pick up a high quality dub of the video of Scott's appearance (again, for the purpose of, without pay, promoting Scott and table tennis on Scott's web site). His minivan rode much more softly and smoothly than driving my own car (which placed the shoulder belt across my broken left side). I gingerly got in his minvan's passenger seat and s-l-o-w-l-y (it took more than 20 seconds) managed the fasten the seat belt (it was the farthest I'd stretched my upper body since the bike accident; Scott offered to help but I said I'd manage, and I did), leaving the shoulder belt across my unbroken clavical. Compared to driving my own car, I was riding in the lap of luxury! We went to the station but the video technician was not there, so we went to lunch. Scott took us to a Chinese restaurant, as usual, but one I'd never been to before. I asked him to bring my camcorder case inside so while we were waiting for our food I could rewind the tape I was going to use when we went back to the station. But I was surprised to find that Scott had taken his 1-armed, injured friend to a buffet-style restaurant!
However, the previous night, the fractured clavicle had finally formed a union and was, for the first time in 20 days, back in 1 piece. I still had cracked/broken ribs and so it hurt to move, but I no longer had to avoid every unnecessary motion for fear of flexing the primary injury -- the broken collarbone -- I was trying to overcome. So instead of berating Scott for having taken a 1-armed friend to a self-serve eatery, I just hooked my left pinkie finger in a belt loop, and so was able to hold a small dessert plate at belt level while I carefully took small amounts of food from the serving line with my right arm and hand, and then slowly carried it back to our table.
Afterwards, we did not go back to the station, but as we turned off the freeway exit ramp to return to my home, Scott suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, began driving faster and more aggressively than I've ever seen him drive. (I'd ridden with him a lot, and typically he's an exceptionally timid driver, one who'll follow slow disoriented drivers for so long I'd encourage him to get around them already.) The g-force loadings in the turns were more than I could handle, and it was acutely painful to try to brace against them, and with an even sharper turn coming up, I said, "Hey, Mario. Knock it off. It's too much. You're hurting me."
A smile immediately crossed Scott's face, like he was beginning to chuckle at the first thing I'd said, but then my request seemed to register and he instantly got out of the throttle and so did not power through that sharp turn which would have been very painful to me. We were about 1.5 miles from home, and Scott was just as suddenly driving very slowly, nearly 10 mph under the 35 mph speed limit, which was on the slow side, but at least he wasn't huring me any more, and the safely of my home was only a few minutes away...
I began thinking that I'd just survived another strange close call with Scott, and I was going to get to keep my healing clavicle, and be able to travel to be with my family for Thanksgiving after all, when suddenly, instead of sailing past the 1st entrance to my street which Scott had never taken with me on board, Scott, without slowing or signalling or changing to the left turn lane, veered at nearly the 35 mph speed limit through a very uneven intersection (it has an exposed storm sewer drainage dip across it, and if you don't approach it properly, the result will be a very bumpy ride).
As soon as he veered to make the turn, I knew I was in trouble. I was adrenalized and terrorized. The instantaneous sideways g-force was much higher and more painful than what I'd just survived and complained about, but at that high rate of speed there would be no way to avoid bottoming out the vehicle's suspension when the minivan, still going downward, would rapidly come upon roadway looming upward, and that it would be an extremely violent sudden change of direction vertically, way more than what the vehicle's springs could handle.
And so it was. I was violently body-slammed downward while strapped into the seat.
How violent was it, you ask?
It was so violent that my freshly-knitting clavicle was instantly re-fractured as my shoulder was still going downward when the road, and the minivan, and the seat, and the trunk of my body was violently shot upward with a very forceful jolt. In that instant, with the sudden reversal of direction and momentum, nearby soft tissue was also pulled downward, where, an instant later, it became trapped between the two freshly-re-broken collarbone halves trying to come back together -- a condition whose effects would leave me suffering with debilitating acute pain for more than 2.5 years, and lingering chronic pain and discomfort which is still very gradually diminishing more than 4 years later.
It was so violent that it caused the minivan's engine to stall!!! (Scott would remember this fact when first interviewed by his auto insurance company on March 18, 2004, but would be "unable to recall" it after having later spoken with his insurance company attorney. But back when he still remembered the engine stalling from what he called hitting a bump in the road, he also remembered that his minivan's engine had never stalled from hitting any other bump on any other road. Yet Scott said he was familiar with this particular intersection, and he was also well-informed of the frail condition of his injured passenger, who'd admonished his suddenly-aggressive driving less than 5 minutes earlier...)
This time I only said one word. All I said was, "SCOTT!!!" (In that same recorded interview, Scott would later say of my response that I was "angry at [him] for driving crazy".)
Scott's immediate response was to act stunned/confused/flustered. He pumped the accelerator pedal a few times demonstrating that the engine was not responding, and said, "the engine stalled", almost as if he was explaining the reason for why we were slowing as we were coasting uphill and no longer going way too fast for conditions! His response seemed highly inappropriate, to say the least.
Scott never asked if I was OK, or injured by his violent driving.
Scott never apologized for his violent driving. (On November 17th, he did, in an email, write "Sorry again [sic] for the reckless driving", but later, in a sworn statement, he disavowed what he'd written, saying he didn't really mean it, that he only said it because it was something he thought I wanted to hear. So Scott has stated that he writes things he does not mean. Can we believe what he says?)
In fact, Scott tried to disavow all his incriminating statements and choices of words (like when he'd used the word "jolt" to describe what it felt like when the minivan violently traversed that uneven intersection at an excessive speed). He said that he was only going 15 mph and he wasn't going too fast to take the intersection safely and smoothly, that maybe the angle of travel (as if maybe he as the driver wasn't also responsible for that) caused the problem. Of course a nice guy like Scott, whom I assume is probably not accustomed to trying to avoid responsibility for bad things he may have done, became more flustered, at one point calling "special" the unexpected route he'd suddenly veered onto that day, after having said earlier that that was the route he commonly took.
I can't tell you if I have the capacity to forgive such irresponsible treacherous aggressive negligent injurious dangerous dubious behavior, because I never had to try, because Scott never asked me to.
And words can only hint at how injurious it was: The clavicle, which had been fractured for 20 days, and knitting for about 12 hours, remained (re-)fractured for another 75+ days. In other words, thanks to Scott's incredibly reckless driving, it was fractured for 95+ days instead of 20. Given the way one's body deteriorates when it can't be used, or stretched, or even moved, over extended periods of time, and the strain on one's other body parts trying to compensate for one's injuries just enough to perform the essentials of life, and the toll taken by the chronic increased pain, and the time and pain and effort it takes to recover from such extended lay-ups, not to mention not being able to get a restful night's sleep for months instead of weeks, 95 is a lot more than 5 times worse than 20 in terms of deterioration of one's health and fitness. And getting nearby soft tissue trapped between the 2 sides of the fractured bone as it was re-fractured by Scott is still, years later, proving to be a much more difficult and painful injury to recover from than the re-broken bone (despite its 2 parts being held apart by the soft tissue, thanks to Scott). (Basically, nearly all my resources had been consumed and reserves had been depleted just getting to the point where the fracture had begun knitting; Scott's ruthless driving then knocked me much much much further away from recovery -- with me in a much weaker state -- than I'd been when I was first injured.) And, of course, even without the soft tissue having gotten trapped between the 2 refractured halves of my collarbone (which made the injury much more painful and debilitating and difficult to recover from), to misuse a large motorized vehicle to re-break someone's freshly/properly knitting bone is a hideously rotten thing to do to someone.
STILL rebroken and displaced, Jan. 2004Yet Scott doesn't even want to believe that his extremely violent driving could have possibly caused any harm at all, much less re-fractured my clavicle. The closest I came to getting an answer on how this could be is that Scott said that breaking a bone is a very painful injury and since I did not loudly cry out in great pain when his violent driving re-broke my freshly-knitting clavicle, it could not (at least by Scott's reckoning) have re-broken then. (Curiously, the weasel from Scott's morally bankrupt insurance company, Nationwide, insisted the exact opposite -- that I could not have felt it refracture at all.) Scott also maintains that since (or if) it was broken before his little driving experiment, and it was broken afterwards, no harm occurred (as if injuries cannot be exacerbated, and perfectly-knitting bones can be violently rebroken without any risk of any harm). Scott also maintained that since I hadn't had an x-ray prior to the accident, maybe it wasn't even broken at all, because "you know pain is funny you know you don't know exactly until you have something x-rayed". (In other words, according to Scott, I can't tell what's going on inside my own body because "pain is funny", yet Scott could tell what was going on inside my body as he used his minivan to re-break my very freshly knitted bone by exposing it to huge g-force loadings, based upon his perception of how much pain his violent driving had caused, based solely upon how loudly his torture victim cried out in pain.)
Oct 30, 2003I still cannot fathom how or why Scott could have even considered doing such an unthinkably horrible thing in the first place, much less doing it and then trying to act as if it was nothing. In fact, I was much more greatly incapacitated for a much longer period of time as a result of the side-effects of the violent re-fracture (soft tissue got painfully trapped in the fracture, which no longer closed/mated cleanly as a result; being forced to keep my shoulder pain-avoiding immobile for a greatly-extended 2nd period of time led to my shoulder becoming frozen; recovery taking pain-filled months/years instead of relaxed weeks/months, and the resulting hole in the soft tissue -- after I'd finally ripped it loose -- is taking years to heal), and Scott used this as the pretext to unilaterally terminate a mutual business agreement in which I had invested much time and effort, which was to be paid for by the share he'd promised me of his future revenues from the fruits of our labors. He did, however, explicitly thank me for being such a good friend and great help over the years, in the same email in which he belatedly informed me that he had also screwed me business-wise.
Scott seriously, at least figuratively, kicked me (his good friend) when I was down (already injured). I can't imagine Scott doing that to a stranger, or even an enemy. Scott's subsequent total failure to accept responsibility for his actions (was it an attack?), and the accompanying business screw job, were the icing on an assault cake that was already over the top.
Scott's never explained his actions, or his reactions to them. While I believe that it is wrong to attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, I don't believe that Scott is that stupid. And what kind of person probes and then tries and finally succeeds in causing harm to someone whom he knows is injured, without ever even saying "I'm sorry."?
I'm left wondering about, and feeling foolish for not having taken seriously, and having become alarmed at, the warning signs that Scott did not take my serious injuries seriously or react appropriately around a seriously injured friend, and that he might violently physically "experiment upon" me in my injured state. (While unthinkable at the time, in hindsight, I probably should have called the police and reported an injury-causing traffic mishap.)
But who in their right mind could ever have imagined such a nice guy as Scott doing something as horrible as using his minivan to more seriously than ever injure an already seriously injured friend -- one whom he was counting on to enable him to use his web site to sell table tennis equipment -- and then denying all responsibly afterward?
I know it's very difficult to believe that which we cannot understand. But this horrible incredible experience did happen to me, and even though I still cannot understand it, I was terrorized and maimed by Scott's uncharacteristically and incredibly violent driving, and forced to live it and experience it, and to endure for years the painful debilitating aftereffects, as well as the loss of my friendship and business relationship with Scott, and so I cannot disbelieve it, no matter how much I still want to.
