Athlete Kent Waldrep, Injury Leading to Advocacy, Dies at 67

In 1982, with growing fame in disability circles after traveling to the Soviet Union and returning to Texas to establish the short-lived International Spinal Cord Research Foundation, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the National Council of the Disabled. Mr. Waldrep eventually became vice-chairman of the council, a federal agency that evaluates laws and programs that affect people with disabilities. (Renamed the National Council for the Disabled in 1988.)

Robert L. Burgdorf Jr., a disability rights expert who is the counsel for the council, recalled Mr Waldrep’s help in reviewing the draft of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and recommending changes. In an email, he said he was Mr. Waldrep, after whom the legislation is named A note from 1985 suggested that all new legislation be brought under a single heading, such as the ‘Americans with Disabilities Act of 1986’.

“This way,” wrote Mr Waldrep, “I feel that the proposed legislative changes can be marketed much more effectively.”

Alvis Kent Waldrep Jr. was born on March 2, 1954 in Austin, Texas. His father was a banker. Her mother was a housewife who worked at an aircraft repair station that later belonged to her husband.

Kent, Texas was one of all district and all-county running in high school in Alvin, and received a TCU scholarship to reserve in 1973 and just recovered as he started his first game of the 1974 season for the Horned Frogs from a bruised sternum before heading to Birmingham to play for Alabama.

Years after the match, he wondered what he could have done to avoid injury.

“Once upon a time, why didn’t I cut it sooner?” I thought. He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989. “Why didn’t I reverse the field?” “There is no way to rationalize it. If you dwell on it, you can drive yourself completely insane.”

He founded the Kent Waldrep National Stroke Foundation in 1985, and in 1994 he co-founded the Kent Waldrep Foundation Nerve Growth and Regeneration Basic Research Center with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. It was funded by Mr. Waldrep’s foundation with a donation of more than $10 million, mainly raised from an annual black tie dinner.