Rome Odunze Went on Huskies' Longest Drive of the Season

With the kind of season Rome Odunze has had for the University of Washington football team, the first-team All-America wide receiver many times over should be flying first class from here on out.

It definitely beats the 23-hour, 1,500-mile car ride that took him from Tucson, Arizona, back to Seattle.

On Wednesday, Odunze filled in the details of an early season ordeal that forced him to take an overland route home from the UW-Arizona football game on Sept. 30, won by the Huskies 31-24.

Late in that contest, he recovered an onside kick but suffered a punctured lung and a broken rib in the process when hit on the ground by other players chasing after the football.

This sent Odunze to a Tucson hospital emergency room and prevented him from flying back with his coaches and teammates to the Northwest.

For parts of the next two days, Odunze rode in a rental car driven by his mother Necia Bunnell and later by UW medical trainers Daren Nystrom and Mike Dillon, hustling to transport him back and prepare for the Oregon game following a bye week.

"They all helped me get home," Odunze said. "They all did a leg."

With the Arizona outing ending in the evening, the junior wide receiver spent several hours overnight in the emergency room having X-rays taken.

Around 5 a.m., Odunze was cleared to go and he and the others made an immediate pit stop.

"We got some McDonald's on the way out," he said. "I'm a Sausage Egg McMuffin type of guy or McGriddle. I've got to have the orange juice with the hashbrowns, a McDonald's breakfast. It will hurt your stomach, but it's undefeated."

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His mom next drove everyone over the next 6-7 hours to the Odunze home in Las Vegas.

"She was right by my side, as she always is," Odunze said.

After a two-hour stop, in which the injured Husky got his hair braided and said goodbye to his mother, it was back on the road for the football player with the pair of trainers serving as escorts. .

Odunze seemed to come out of it OK of his not so excellent adventure even making a game-winning catch in the next game against Oregon in Husky Stadium.

Ten weeks later, he still carries a little physical reminder of what happened in the desert while he gets rewarded for a season that went uninterrupted but challenged him some with the Interstate travail.

"I definitely feel it a little bit," Odunze said. "There's a little a callus built up where the rib was broken. It's mostly comfortable now, nothing too crazy."

Crazy is your All-America receiver practically riding from border to border up the West Coast.

Not long after he was in the Tucson emergency room, a writer — me — on the trip covering this Husky team entered a Phoenix ER to have his ailing ear checked, fearful he couldn't fly either. He contemplated keeping his rental car and driving all the way from Arizona to Seattle, as well. In the end, he got on his flight.

"We would have had you," Odunze said. "We had room."

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