Riders’ Bennett survived his scariest hit — off the field

Every football player knows that one hit can change his life.

Fred Bennett experienced that on May 1, 2015 — but the hit that altered things for him didn’t occur on a football field. It happened on a highway in South Carolina, where he was rear-ended by an eighteen-wheeler.

“I look at life a little differently now,” says Bennett, a cornerback with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. “I enjoy life more. I enjoyed it before, but I really enjoy it now.”

After playing college football at the University of South Carolina, Bennett was selected by the Houston Texans in the 2007 NFL draft. He went on to have NFL stops with the San Diego Chargers, Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals before joining the Calgary Stampeders in 2012.

But Bennett always wanted to complete the hospitality degree he started at South Carolina, so he returned to the school in the 2014 and 2015 CFL off-seasons.

On May 1 of last year, Bennett had just finished the last exam he needed to write to complete his degree. He got in his Mercedes-Benz CLS 550 and hit the road to join his family for a sister-in-law’s graduation ceremony.

“There was a lot of traffic on the interstate so I was actually going about 55 (miles per hour),” recalls Bennett, 32. “I don’t know what (the truck driver) was doing or what he was looking at. I was just driving and he smacked me out of nowhere.”

For the past 16 months, Bennett has thought about what could have been that day.

“It just happened out of the blue,” he says. “My first thought was, ‘I’m just glad I’m here by myself and my family wasn’t in here.

“My son (Fred Jr., who was two years old at the time) wasn’t back there in his car seat. If he was, it would have been a different outcome. It would have been tragic.”

Bennett was treated at a local hospital after the accident, but he walked out that day. His injuries were relatively minor: A case of whiplash that ultimately forced him to miss the first few days of the Stampeders’ training camp. Bennett remembers going to court to testify after the truck driver was charged, but Bennett doesn’t know what came of those proceedings.

“That accident made me appreciate life more — just being alive, being able to tell my wife I love her, being able to kiss my kids at night, and being able to be around my loved ones. I’m just blessed.”