McCarney Loving Life to the Max

It’s “Junior Day” at the University of North Texas. Dan McCarney makes the rounds in the shiny year-old football complex.

He confers with his staff, meets early arrivals, matching names with faces, and gets ready to sell his program to the next batch of recruits.

He stops in the hallway to shake hands with a high school lineman and a defensive back from Louisiana. Within the next year, both will be deciding on a college, and he wants them to see the hidden gem a few miles down the road from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

McCarney meets the parents and jokes about the long drive and looks nothing like a man who, only three weeks ago today, was delivered by helicopter to a nearby hospital after suffering a stroke.

Unable to move his left arm and leg, he could see the fear in the eyes of wife Margy and son Shane. He could hear the uncertainty in their voices. That was worse than anything he felt at the time.

But now, though not back to full health, he feels even better about the future than he did before the stroke. If you thought McCarney, who’ll be 59 in July, was passionate, enthusiastic and living life to the fullest before Feb. 12, you should see him now.

“You talk about lucky,” McCarney says. “You talk about blessed. I’ve been unbelievably fortunate. There’s no way I could ever give back what’s been given to me.”

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