Basketball Player Injured in Brussels Attack Recounts What He Thought About to Survive
Basketball player Sebastian Bellin was injured during the airport attack.
— -- A professional basketball player who was injured during the attack on Brussels Airport Tuesday thought about teaching his young daughter tennis as he struggled to survive.
Sebastien Bellin, a Brazilian-born athlete who played college basketball in New York and Michigan, wasn't sure he was going to make it, he told ABC News.
"I just didn't want my girls to grow up without a dad, you know?" Bellin, 37, who lives in Michigan, said in an emotional moment, speaking of his two daughters.
"It's funny, the things you think of," said Bellin, who plays center for the Gent Hawks, a Belgian professional basketball club. "I started playing tennis with my oldest, my seven year old. She's a hell of a tennis player, and so I was like, 'I got to get through this, you know, because she needs her coach.' And some of the things that go through your head, they seem so trivial but it gets you through those moments."
Bellin, who played college basketball for Marist College in New York and Oakland University in Michigan in the 1990s, was in the airport and witnessed the first explosion.
"I remember seeing a first explosion at the pharmacy at the airport, and I turned my head and I saw all these people running. ... I think I blacked out a little bit," Bellin said
"The whole time I was just trying, I told myself, 'I got to make it, I got to make it, I got to make it,' and I when got in the ambulance I knew I was good," he said.
A picture of Bellin, lying prone on the ground with a severe injury to his leg immediately after the attack, was widely circulated, which meant some of his friends and former colleagues knew quickly that he was injured.
He required a blood transfusion, but his specific injuries are unclear, as is when he will be released.
His former coach at Oakland University, Greg Kampe, tweeted out a request for prayers for "Seb" as Bellin was headed into his second surgery Tuesday after the attack.
His wife is now headed from their home in Michigan to Brussels to be with Bellin.