Bill Reynolds
The Providence Journal
June 27, 2006

SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- It was a day last August when Dan Doyle first heard that his son Matt had been jumped by four kids on a Chicago street and was in a hospital fighting for his life.

"I didn't know if he would live," says Dan Doyle, head of the Institute for International Sport at URI.

So it began.

A young man's struggle.

And a father's, too.

What Dan Doyle also didn't know then was that it supposedly had been done as a gang initiation, his son chosen at random, something called "pick them out, knock them out."

Matt Doyle doesn't remember anything about either the mugging or his first three weeks in the hospital. He was in Chicago to begin law school at Northwestern, after having gone to Duke and graduate school at Stanford and having worked for Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. In Chicago to start a new chapter in his young life, before it all unraveled on a downtown street, complete with doctors having to remove one-third of his skull to release the blood building up on his brain.

"Your whole life changes in five seconds," says Dan Doyle.

In those first weeks, while his son was unconscious, Dan Doyle would sit by his hospital bed and read The New York Times to him. Over and over. Every day. Read the paper, and sing, and talk, anything. Read for hours. Because in those first few weeks, after doctors had decided that Matt Doyle was going to live, the worry was about brain damage.

By early January, things had changed.

Matt Doyle couldn't move his right hand, and had a major limp, but his skull was back in place and he was starting to get his life back.

To the point that he and his father went to the sentencing hearing for the four kids, who had been caught three days after the incident in August. The Doyles both spoke at the hearing, addressing the four kids who essentially were looking at six-month sentences in a training school.

And their message?

If the four kids would change their lives, the Doyles would try to help them do it, even if it meant one day helping them go to college. In short, Matt Doyle offered them forgiveness, so very different than what they had offered him on that Chicago street in August.

That's why Matt Doyle was the main speaker yesterday morning at the World-Scholar Athlete Games in Keaney Gym at URI, the event his father founded in 1993. The limp is gone. The feeling is back in his right hand. He's had four seizures, but he takes medication, and it's been two months since his last one. By all appearances, no one would ever know that just 10 months ago he was fighting for his life in a Chicago hospital.

Then again, his doctor refers to him as "Miracle Man," the subtext being that Matt Doyle has come a long way from the night he first came to the hospital, back when no one was real sure that he was going to live. He told his story to the roughly 2,000 kids from 155 countries, along with the larger message that he's now part of a joint program between the Institute for International Sport and his Northwestern University law school program, one that's an attempt to get at-risk kids to avoid violence, to find other ways to deal with anger and frustration.

Afterward, he stood in a hallway and said that he has little anger toward the four kids who almost took his life.

"I felt badly for them when I saw them for the first time at the hearing," he said. "I was shocked that they were so young."

The obvious question is why he has no anger toward them.

Matt Doyle is not exactly sure.

"I've always been a positive person," he said, "but if anything, I'm more positive now."

Part of that, certainly, is he feels he's gotten a second chance, already has come so very far from that night when everything changed. Part of it, he feels, is that he doesn't remember anything about the mugging, or that some anonymous person found him bleeding on the street and called an ambulance. Maybe it's simply the randomness of it, the realization that "things happen, and this happened to me."

For he knows the sociological implications of the four kids who mugged him. The poverty. No fathers in the courtroom. The lure of a gang, of belonging to something. A stereotype of kids at risk, kids who too often grow up all but wrapped in a cloak of violence. The kind of violence that can strike anybody who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"I hope these kids can come back and make something out of their lives," said Matt Doyle, "and I essentially told them they only have two choices. I want them to have a second chance."

What he now has.