Once again the phones started to ring, former San Diego Chargers from
the franchise's lone Super Bowl team calling each other and digesting
the news that another one of them was gone. With word that Junior Seau died Wednesday, the number of Chargers who played in the Super Bowl on Jan. 29, 1995, and are now dead, is eight.
Eight in 18 years; too many in too little time.
The subject is one I discussed, somewhat uncomfortably, with
several of the former Chargers in 2008. This wasn't long after Chris
Mims, their gregarious defensive end, was found dead in his Los Angeles
apartment. Five had died back then. And that seemed like a lot.
I called a professor of actuarial science at the University of
Wisconsin to see if she could put number on five men from a 53-man
roster – all in their 20s and 30s – dying in so short a time. She said
the odds were less than 1 percent.In the resulting story that ran in The Washington Post, many former
players and coaches talked about emotions that ranged from sadness for
former players who were no longer there to a looming sense of unease
about the uncontrollable.
"Is this a curse or something?" center Courtney Hall said then. "I just hope I'm not next."
On Wednesday, Hall sounded drained. Hours of phone calls with
teammates had tired him. And there lingered that sense of confusion
over how so many men who would be in their 40s, who seemed so vibrant,
are no longer alive.
"I'm still kind of processing everything right now," Hall said. "I
had more to say back [in 2008] than I do now. I really am at a loss for
words."
The unsettling thing about the Chargers' deaths is their
randomness. Five months after the Super Bowl, running back David Griggs
died in a car accident on an off-ramp of the Florida Turnpike that was
no more than 10 minutes from where the game had been played at Joe
Robbie Stadium. The next year, running back Rodney Culver and his wife
died on a ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades, also not far from
Miami. In 1998 linebacker Doug Miller was struck twice by lightning
while camping in Colorado. Backup center Curtis Whitley died of a drug
overdose in 2008 only months before Mims died from an enlarged heart
and heart disease. Linebacker Lew Bush and defensive tackle Shawn Lee
had fatal heart attacks last year.
And now Seau. The irony is that as a player he might have been the
liveliest of them all – the first one to laugh, the one with the
biggest smile, the biggest star – and to hear reports he had killed
himself? It didn't make sense.
"The thing I related to everybody is that we are a brotherhood of
those of us who played football," Hall said Wednesday. "We developed
bonds and dealt with the same issues and the same ups and downs. For
me, I've gotten to the point where I wish we as a group of elite
athletes are able to reach out to each other more and are able to talk
about what's going on in our lives."
Back in 2008, Hall talked about looking for some of his Chargers
teammates. He found tight end Deems May on LinkedIn and asked the team
for the phone numbers of other former players. Some of those may have
been the same men he spoke with Wednesday.
Perhaps there's nothing anyone can do about a plane crash or
someone getting hit by lightning twice, but so many of the other deaths
seemed preventable. Tackle Stan Brock wondered in 2008 how Whitley
could die alone in a trailer. "Where were his friends?" he asked. Mims
suffered from weight problems and became depressed before his death.
Lee was reported to have had weight and other health issues when he
died.
Could phone calls have helped? Should they have been calling Seau
and checking on him? Hall wonders. He said several of his teammates did
too.
"In general we talked about getting together and reaching out to
one another," he said. "I woke up this morning in pain [from old
football injuries]. Everyone deals with everything differently."
He seemed to hope this latest bad news would bring them closer together.
Whenever players from the Super Bowl team talk about that season
they always marvel at the magic they felt. They describe the
locker-room camaraderie as the best they were ever around. Players
stayed late at the practice facility. They ordered food. They arrived
at the stadium early on home game days, throwing on their uniform pants
and pads, then sitting in a room just off the stadium locker room
playing Mortal Kombat and Madden NFL until they had to go onto the
field for warmups.
It was a happy time. It was a wonderful time. It was the best time many of them ever had.
Then Wednesday they mourned another of them, the biggest name of them all.
And like with the others, it's too soon.