Lately, Bram Kohlhausen spends more weekends at his old college stomping grounds in Fort Worth. 

He’s 32 years old now, but time has only made the myth he created for himself at TCU larger. Two weeks ago, some kids picked up his tab at a restaurant, then walked up to his table and said, ‘Thanks for everything.’ This past Sunday, he attended TCU’s basketball game against Colorado and multiple people stopped to take pictures with him. 

Everyone who loves this University has a story of where they were the night of January 2, 2016, when walk-on quarterback Bram Kohlhausen, in his only career start, led TCU back from a 31-0 halftime deficit to a triple-overtime victory over Oregon in the Alamo Bowl. When they see Kohlhausen around town, they must tell him their memory of it. And, honestly, he loves hearing it.

“It’s good to know there’s that Fort Worth community and support system,” Kohlhausen said.

He’s needed them more and more in the 18 months since his accident - since he moved back in with his mom in Houston, a once-college quarterback relearning how to put his clothes on and shower by himself. Since the hardware in his body made how he physically feels dependent on the temperature it is outside. Since both his legs were amputated from the mid-calf down.

The Alamo Bowl was a miracle. Disney even approached TCU and Kohlhausen about making it into a movie a couple months after the game. But there’s a second miracle Kohlhausen completed when he survived a 75-foot fall from a helicopter during a hunting trip. TCU’s cheers for Kohlhausen’s second act have been just as loud as the first.

Against all odds, he’s a living legend.

Two nights before the Alamo Bowl, the TCU football team went out for some fun at Pat O’Brien’s bar in San Antonio. Kohlhausen and his roommate returned in time for the midnight curfew. But star quarterback Trevone Boykin didn’t want the night to end. He tried and failed to recruit Kohlhausen on his scheme, then snuck back out to the bars with wide receiver Preston Miller. It was only a half-block away. 

At 2:30 a.m., Miller called Kohlhausen in a panic.

“Dude, Treyvone’s getting arrested,” he said.

Boykin had started arguing with employees inside the bar and continued once escorted outside onto the sidewalk, then swung at a responding police officer. The final game of Boykin’s record-breaking career was less than 48 hours away, and he was on the ground in handcuffs. 

Kohlhausen sat in his hotel room until the wee hours of the morning, calling assistant coaches to alert them and fielding text messages from teammates as the news broke. He even called his mom. Somewhere in the frenzy, it dawned on him that he would start the Alamo Bowl. Then he realized he didn’t even know where his play sheet for the week was.

“I wasn’t there to play,” Kohlhausen said. “I was there on a New Year’s vacation, really.”

Now he had one morning run-through and one pregame walkthrough to prepare for his only career start in his final college game.

Kohlhausen started his career at Houston before transferring to Los Angeles Harbor College. An injury in his sole season at the community college left him with no FBS offers, so he chose to walk on at TCU for the 2014 season. He was pegged at fourth-string because of his non-scholarship status. Kohlhausen wasn’t discouraged; he was a competitor. Growing up, he fell in love with the idea of being a winner, besting his friends. He took the same approach as he worked his way up to second-string.

But the moment he’d worked so hard for turned into a nightmare by halftime. TCU went into the locker room down 31-0. The Horned Frogs had punted five times, turned it over on downs once and threw an interception.

Kohlhausen was 100 percent certain he was getting benched.

“It was a devastating first half,” Kohlhausen said. “I thought I was never going to play football again.”

He relaxed once he realized the coaches were rolling with him in the second half, chalking up the abysmal start to penalties that put them behind the chains. And Oregon was vulnerable, albeit with a massive lead. Quarterback Vernon Adams Jr. had exited with an injury close to halftime, and the pairing of the Ducks’ backup quarterback with the backup center had stalled the offense. 

Kohlhausen’s second-half brilliance, combined with TCU head coach Gary Patterson famously changing his shirt from black to purple, allowed the Horned Frogs to storm back for a 47-41 win in triple overtime. Kohlhausen’s game-winning touchdown run was the stamp on a Herculean effort; 351 passing yards, four total touchdowns, and twice returning from hits that temporarily knocked him out of the game. 

As the confetti fell and Alamo Bowl event workers tried to urge him onto the stage, Kohlhausen was still in quarterback mode, buying time, delaying his moment in front of the camera until he found his mother. 

He kept asking to borrow TCU staff members’ phones to text and call his family members in attendance, but their phones were dead after getting blown up with 150 texts and calls while Kohlhausen had the game of his life. Finally, his mother broke through security and embraced her son. Kohlhausen’s brother had slipped someone on the Oregon side $100 to use his field pass. It was worth every buck to celebrate the night as a family two months after they’d lost the patriarch. Bill Kohlhausen had passed on November 7 from melanoma, but Bram knew he was there in that family huddle.

“I’d love for him to be here and watch this happen but I know he’s watching upstairs,” Bram said that night.

All in all, Bram Kohlhausen doesn’t have a reliable memory of two-and-a-half months of his life.

There’s the blackness of the month-and-a-half coma after the May 6, 2023, accident. But even the month before that day is vague. 

He remembers who was on the helicopter with him hunting wild hogs at his friend’s ranch in San Antonio. He doesn’t remember the 75-foot fall from that helicopter that crushed his feet and pelvis and damaged every internal organ in his body except his heart. He remembers he went to the ranch because it was a great opportunity to network and meet people. He doesn’t remember the phone call with his mother as he drove to the ranch, ecstatic about the bonus he’d just received at work. 

By the time he woke up, his life was forever changed. His feet were gone, sacrificed for Kohlhausen landing on them instead of anywhere else on his body that would’ve killed him. His family had moved all his belongings from his home in Austin to his mother’s in Houston so he could complete Occupational Therapy there.

The new comeback story would be Kohlhausen showering by himself, putting clothes on and picking himself up from a fall. But for Kohlhausen, there was no option. He was still the man with the greatest bowl game performance in TCU history. The day he was released from the hospital, he went to the gym in his wheelchair and worked out from his knees. He walked with arm crutches on Labor Day, less than four months after the fall. 

“You could be that guy who lost his feet and got amputated, sit in the corner and mope and not be fun to be around,” Kohlhausen said. “Everyone would understand. Oh, ‘He’s still going through a hard time.’ I think everything in life is just how you respond, whether good or bad.”

Whether you’re thrust into the starting role two days before the season’s biggest game and find yourself down by 31 points or faced with the fact you’ll never have the bottom half of your legs again. 

That’s why he wears a wristband that says, ‘Respond.’ In a way, he’s happy he was the one who suffered the accident. He doesn’t think other people would’ve responded the way he has. Every TCU fan has a story about the Alamo Bow, but the best story for Kohlhausen is how it prepared him to pull off the next miracle.

“Life throws you a lot of curveballs, and this was a huge one,” Kohlhausen said. “I sat back on it and put it over the fence. Opposite field.”