It was only much later that Jonathan Klinsmann realised quite how close his life came to being irreversibly changed.With only a few minutes of the game left, without fully realising it, he was in considerable peril.It was the final stages of Palermo’s 2-0 home win back in April over Cesena, for whom Klinsmann was playing in goal.At first, when he collided with an opponent’s knee, it felt like the sort of head injury he and his fellow ’keepers learn to expect. Sure, his scalp was cut and his ears were ringing, but he was ready to grit his teeth and see the match out.“I went to the ground and sat there for a second thinking, ‘Ooof. That kind of hurt’,” he recalls. “Then I rolled on my back and felt my neck just really tense up. It was like when you get in a car crash.“So I figured, ‘Maybe I have concussion and whiplash’. My head was bleeding but I never lost consciousness or felt really dizzy. When I got up and the game restarted, my neck felt even tighter. The muscles were obviously going crazy trying to protect me from something.”Jonathan Klinsmann receives treatment for what he initially thought was whiplash and concussion (Gabriele Maricchiolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)As he started to walk gingerly around the six-yard box, it dawned on him that something really wasn’t right.“I told my centre-backs to just keep the ball,” says Klinsmann. “Then I tried to stand as still as I could. I could barely move my neck, couldn’t look down.“If they had passed the ball back to me, I couldn’t have looked down to trap it, so the guys just kept the ball around the back until the whistle went.”What the 29-year-old didn’t know was he had fractured his first cervical vertebra and sustained serious neck ligament damage in that challenge with Palermo midfielder Filippo Ranocchia.If he had done anything beyond standing still in those four minutes before the final whistle, it would almost certainly have left him with even worse injuries.“I’m genuinely not sure I would have walked away from that,” Klinsmann says three months later, discussing for the first time the accident which ended his season, dashed his dreams of making the United States’ World Cup squad and ultimately left him close to paralysis.The injury happened on April 18, as the Serie B season was drawing to a close.Klinsmann is the son of former Germany great Jurgen Klinsmann but chose to represent the United States, the team his father coached from 2011-16.Last August, he had been called up to the USMNT squad by manager Mauricio Pochettino. Although he did not get onto the field for the ensuing September friendlies against South Korea and Japan, being included in the senior roster for the first time boosted his dream of being part of this summer’s largely-home-soil World Cup.Those dreams ended with his injury. He is still unsure about when he can return to football.Klinsmann, though, is grateful he can even walk, after specialists in Germany successfully completed a complicated surgery to repair his neck.The surgery to repair Jonathan Klinsmann’s neck was complicated (Jonathan Klinsmann)Immediately after the game, Klinsmann was taken to hospital by ambulance. It was, he recalls, “the shortest trip ever”, because the local emergency room is right next to Palermo’s Renzo Barbera stadium.“At first, I didn’t fully understand the severity of it,” he says. “The MRI scans weren’t too great and they said, ‘It’s a fracture in your spine. Your World Cup is probably not going to happen, your season is over’. So they were the first thoughts. I was thinking, ‘OK, let’s get through this’.“But it was clearly a lot worse than just a fracture. Luckily, before the game ended my team kept the ball and Palermo were winning 2-0, so they didn’t press.“It’s fortunate. I was really close to a much, much worse scenario if I had done something in those two minutes: like, never playing again, never walking again.“So it was bad — but it could have been an unreal amount worse.”Klinsmann is strapped in for a medical flight from Italy to Germany (Jonathan Klinsmann)There would be time later for philosophical hindsight. In those first few hours, Klinsmann had to contend with searing and what seemed like interminable pain.“I couldn’t use a pillow in the hospital in Palermo because they wanted to keep my spine as straight as possible,” he recalls. “I had the neck brace on from the ambulance, which was a pretty generic brace with very little padding. So my pillow was a thick piece of plastic, and the pressure build-up in the back of my head was from the brace then going down into my neck and the injury.“All I could do was stare at the ceiling. When you have that and not many distractions, you struggle not to focus on the pain. It was constant.”