Comeback Kid James Blake

This is a story of a remarkable young tennis player. He is one of the best in the country, one of the best in the world, and he got there despite a series of catastrophes that almost killed him. It is also a classic improbable story about the power of positive thinking.

Correspondent Mike Wallace reports.

He had signed a modeling contract, had a photo spread in G.Q., and one in Teen Vogue. On buses and billboards he appeared larger than life.

Then his life almost ended.

Net posts are made of solid steel. And in Italy early last year, James was racing toward the net to return a drop shot when he lost his balance and slammed head-first into a steel post. The impact broke his neck.

"It didn't move at all. It didn't budge and I did," James remembers.

His coach Brian Barker saw it happen. "He was running full blast. His foot catches and he goes head-first into the net post as hard as you could hit. There's a loud sound. He goes down hard. He's laying on the ground. And my heart sank. I was scared to death. I looked at him. I gave him kind of a dumb question. I said, 'Are you OK?' And he just whispered, 'I can't breathe,' " recalls Barker.

He had knocked the wind out of himself and broken his neck, but to hear James tell it, he was actually quite lucky.

"As soon as I kind of felt myself airborne, I turned my head a little to the side and hit my neck instead of hitting straight on my head," he says. "And I was unbelievably lucky because the doctor said with as hard as I hit it, if it had hit the top of my head, I probably would never be walking again."

What was he thinking, as he lay on the clay in Rome?

"Just every thought went through my mind. Could this be a broken neck? Could I have just ended my tennis career? Have I played my last match? And also, thinking about the scoliosis I have," James says.

Scoliosis is a curvature of the back that James had suffered from. For five years as a teenager, he had to wear a full-length back brace 18 hours a day, though not while playing tennis. In the Italian hospital, because of the scoliosis, doctors thought he might also have broken his back.

Two days after the accident, James was transferred to another hospital for tests, still wearing his tennis clothes because he was too injured for them to be removed. "I was still covered in clay," he says. "I stunk. It was a low point in my life. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I knew I was seriously hurt, but I also knew that I looked ridiculous. So, I decided to laugh.

"I was so fortunate. My coach, Brian Barker was there. He said, 'We got two options. We can laugh about this or we can cry about this.' And I immediately said, 'Let's laugh. Let's just kind of joke about it and hope that everything turns out all right. But if it doesn't, I've got to find a way to still be happy with it.' "

Barker, too, remembers the exchange. "And he said, 'We might as well laugh because you know, it's pretty funny that a tennis player of my level with his coach standing right in front of him could run and go head-first into a net post.' He's like, 'There's got to be something funny about this when we look back.' And he said, 'So right now we'll just kind of suck it up and make the best of it.'"

Against the advice of his Italian doctors, James flew back to his home in Connecticut, near his parents' house.

His neck was in a brace and he was in horrific pain, but leave it to James to find a silver lining.

He once said breaking his neck was the "luckiest thing" that ever happened to him. "It was definitely the best thing that happened to me. It ended up being the last six weeks of my father's life, so I got to be here to spend a lot of time with him."

His dad, Tom Blake, had been a sales manager at 3M, but at age 57 he was losing his life to stomach cancer.

James says he didn't know the extent of his dad's illness. "He's an extremely proud man and that's why I'm so lucky that I did hurt myself the way I did because I'm sure he wouldn't have told me how bad it was becoming and how serious it was," he says. "My plan was to be over in Europe that whole time, and so I might not have made it home at all. And I'm lucky I came home and I learned a lot more about life and just about my dad, and about everything."

His father first got him interested in tennis. Tom and Betty Blake met on a tennis court and later took James and his older brother Thomas with them whenever they played.

"I think they were too cheap to pay for a babysitter so they brought us up to the tennis courts and soon as they were done they would toss us a few balls. We just loved it right away," remembers James.

"James would come out and stand on the service line and I'd stand on the other service line and we'd hit balls back and forth," recalls Betty. "He was a little under 3. And he would never miss. He would just keep going and going and going."

But young James developed a terrible temper and he became notorious for smashing his racket after a bad shot.

He admits he could be difficult growing up. "I was, so when I was on the tennis court, you could really see it. Throwing rackets, whining, temper tantrums."

James says he just may have had the wrong role model. "The No. 1 player in the world was probably John McEnroe at the time," he says, laughing. "And I had a not-so-great example to look up to and use that as my excuse.

"I finally got a sportsmanship award when I was 17. And my mom couldn't believe it. I had two trophies. And she said, 'What's the other one for? You know, I saw that you won,' and I said, 'That's the sportsmanship award.' And she thought I was joking. She said, 'No really. What is it?' And it's a sportsmanship award. I won. And I was nice to everyone!"

It turns out James was growing into a gentleman and out of his clothes. He had been a puny kid, but he grew 9 inches in just one year, his junior year of high school.

"He sprung up 9 inches. And suddenly he wasn't the same player," says Barker. "I mean, his shots were much bigger. His serve was much bigger. The forehand was heavy and, before you know it, he started winning a lot of matches."

In fact, during his last two years of high school he never lost a match. He became the top player in America in the age 18-and-under category. At Harvard during his sophomore year, he became the No. 1 college player in the country. Then he took a leave from Harvard, turned pro, and made it to No. 22 in the national rankings before breaking his neck.

But even that couldn't stop him for long. Just six weeks later, he began hitting tennis balls again.

Then his father's death sent him back to the hospital with yet another health catastrophe. Doctors say losing his father was so tough for James that the stress triggered a severe viral infection, a debilitating case of shingles. It paralyzed half his face, reduced his hearing, blurred his sight, and more.

"It affected my balance, so I would get up and feel real dizzy like I was going to fall over. It affected my hearing. I lost 50 percent of my hearing in my left ear for a while, and my taste," James says. "Everything tasted pretty gross to me at the time. And also, just my whole left side of my face was paralyzed. My eye wasn't blinking so I had to put drops in it. It wasn't really closing. I had only half of my face working."

James remembers how a friend visited him in the hospital and managed to lighten the mood. "He cracked up laughing, and just started dying. He's like, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but you look ridiculous.' And so it was perfect for me, because I just started laughing. I'm like, 'You know what, I'm sure I do. I haven't really looked in a mirror, but I know I look stupid.' "

The facial paralysis could have been permanent, but James finally recovered, got out of the hospital, and back on the court.

He grabbed the national spotlight at this year's U.S. Open when he played a thrilling five-set match in the quarter finals against his idol, Andre Agassi.

James says he told Agassi afterwards, " 'I've never had so much fun losing a tennis match,' just because of the whole atmosphere, the crowd, playing a legend. Someone I looked up to."

And his mother told 60 Minutes that at the peak of the match, during the fifth set tiebreaker, James had a message for his dad. "He looked up and he said, 'I love you dad,' " recalls Betty.

"I was thinking about how much he would've enjoyed being there. I think he would have been proud of the way I played," James says.

Betty says when a key point goes against James in a match, he sometimes thinks of his father.

"If I think of my dad, I realize it's not that big a deal. And it puts it into better perspective, thinking what he went through without complaining. I shouldn't be complaining about one bad point, one shot and missed opportunity," he says.

James Blake's mother is white and British, and his father was black and American.

When he was in junior tennis, the father of another player said to Blake, "I feel sorry for you because of your heritage. Both sides will hate you, blacks and whites."

"And my mom immediately said, 'I choose to look at it the other way. You could be loved by both sides.' And that's what I wanted to think of it, too," says James. "And I had a ton of white friends. I had a ton of black friends. I just thought I had friends."

Many of his opponents are his friends, but not Lleyton Hewitt, who made race an issue during a match with Blake four years ago.

Hewitt complained that James was getting better calls from a linesman because the linesman was also black.

"Yeah, and you know, to me that seemed crazy because for someone, a white player, to complain of racism seemed a little silly to me," says James. "He just got a couple of calls he didn't think went his way. It's unfortunate, but he fought through it and played great."

James just turned the other cheek, as Arthur Ashe might have done, which makes sense because now Ashe is Blake's role model, and in his image James hopes to be a role model for the next generation.

"And I don't want them reading about me in the police blotter. I want them reading about me in the sports pages. And possibly even some humanitarian efforts," says James.

60 Minutes caught up with James in Brussels where he played on the U.S. Davis Cup team that beat Belgium. And his tennis continues to improve. So how good can he get?

Here's what the No. 1 player in the United States thinks, his Davis Cup teammate Andy Roddick: "I think he is top five in the United States right now," says Roddick. "I think James could be one of the top 10 players in the world, no question. … I see no reason why he couldn't be."

James had been known as "the cool dude in the dreadlocks," but he tired of the look and shaved his head. That shocked his agent, who told us that losing the dreadlocks may have cost James $1 million in lost endorsements.

His girlfriend, Jennifer Scholle, likes the bald look. They met last year when his face was still paralyzed.

James laughs when told his mother had said Jennifer was not a long-term girlfriend. "Oh, my mom. She doesn't hear too much about my love life. Not that there is that much to hear. But this one I think might be around for quite a while."

Blake's triumph over tragedy, his reckless abandon on the court, and his resilient attitude have attracted legions of fans. At some tournaments, including this year's U.S. Open, dozens of James' longtime friends sit together in a rooting section they call the "J-block."

"People wonder, how many of those 40 or 50 or 60 people do you know? And, I'll tell you, I can tell you life stories of every one of those people in that J-block," says James.

Asked what he has learned about life, with all the heartbreak and pain he has endured, James says he has learned that there are going to be up and downs. "And you got to learn to roll with them. And when you're down, find a way to make the best of it. And that's what I tried to do last year when I was down and I had the friends to make me do that. And now that I'm having some good times, some ups, my friends are there with me now. And I'm trying to make sure they're having just as much fun as I am."

By Robert Anderson