Finally, Marla hears Caroline calling: “Momma, I can’t wake up Daddy.” Scott is passed out drunk. Now he is as much of an ex-football player as anybody could fear becoming. David signs the cards: XO 44. They all did. Matt takes David to various doctors. His stomach grows distended. He works all day building up his insurance business, but he also loves blowing up Pepsi bottles in his backyard. The Trojans saw Alan every day but didn’t really know him well, and so he makes a smooth transition from man to memory. Scott is now like a little kid, grateful to live with his parents, telling them all the time that he loves them. David and Leslie decide instead that Leslie will raise the boys. A good dad. Minutes. London made a game-winning 21-yard TD grab with 1:20 to play in … He has been prideful for so long, solving problems himself and keeping conversations light, that he knows no other way. Sports Illustrated Cover story: 1989 USC had 12 LB's..5 dead now. Only a quarter of the football players who entered USC in 1984 had graduated by 1989. David is always fine. Say hi to my girlfriend, Laura! Matt Gee always says that “Junior does what Junior wants,” and what Junior Seau wants on this day is to die. Discussion in 'GarryP's Trojan Huddle' started by Area51Trojan, Oct 3, 2020. . A decade passes, and then Junior puts that gun to his chest, and among the linebackers, that’s two dead. He has a congenital vascular disorder called Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, which at birth left him with a port-wine stain along the left side of his body, and this only exacerbates his growing medical problems. It was common to see him get in fights at parties and unusual to see him lose. But without football, he would not have met Alana, would not have had three kids, would not have built lifelong friendships, would not have enjoyed most of what made his life so great. She loves him that much. Matt joked that Junior got this otherworldly athleticism from eating so much pineapple. If March Madness started today, here's how the top four seed lines would shake out. What those Trojans did not see: Alan’s laughing with his family, or taking his kid brothers to Lakers and Dodgers games, or buying flowers for his mom every year on Mother’s Day. gunshot wound to the chest . He was a successful salesman, first for Hilti and then for 3M, flashing his charm and his Rose Bowl ring to close deals. Hufanga also led USC with 4 interceptions (coming in four straight games) and 2 forced fumbles, and he ranked second with 3 sacks and 5.5 tackles for loss. Drug tests were easy to beat. Laura Lee Fitzgerald will never be able to fully explain why she takes Scott into her home in Paso Robles, Calif. Love is a woefully insufficient answer. When a police officer opens the side gate at Marshall and Janie’s house and finds them in the backyard, Marshall is prepared for what’s coming. Webb (44) attacking Cal quarterback David Barr in 1992. Brian Tuliau? Matt has already learned about Junior’s death over breakfast, on the news; Alan’s by word of mouth; and Scott’s on a phone call. He drinks too much. Try driving the 80 miles from Simi Valley to Orange County when there’s traffic (and there is almost always traffic). When Turner returned as … SI Gambling analyst Roy Larking focuses on two matchups from the NHL North Division on his Saturday hockey betting card. The demons: They are what stand between the person he wants to be and the person he has become. Michael Williams takes a shot to the head tackling a running back in one game and he is slow to get up, but he stays on the field, even as his brain fogs up for the next few plays. He grabs his mother by the arms and screams, “It’s all your fault! Five will die by age 50, their lives stamped forever with an early expiration date. The 2-year (1988-89) Trojan letterman earned All-American first team and Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year laurels in 1989. After several games he meets his parents outside the home locker room and can’t remember whether his team won or lost. It was shocking and terribly depressing even for this Bruin. He says his memory is intact. Alana and Matt, in their dating days, circa 1989. Matt buys cards that David can prepare for the boys on their 18th birthdays, on their high school graduation days, on their wedding days—all the milestones he will clearly miss. Well, it has to be something. Jägermeister, beer, rubbing alcohol, Listerine—what’s the difference? I can think of three of them, Matt Gee, Junior Seau and Scott Ross. Junior was a Samoan from San Diego. He was not nearly as gifted as Junior, but he too was an All-America, a missile seeking contact and reveling in it. He bought groceries and grilled dinner and played with his son (Zachary, from one marriage) and daughter (Caroline, from a second). I played one more year of football after that, had a serious concussion during my first game, and knew that was it for me. Matt wonders whether Scott killed himself. I want doughnuts!” He has the strength of a man, the exuberance of a boy and the brain of a troubled and lost soul. 43 years old. Five died before turning 50. . This is an SI piece by Michael Rosenberg (yes, that Michael Rosenberg) on the linebackers from USC's 1989 team. ... and how he had headaches. So many of them were wild boys; maybe the game killed them, but maybe it domesticated them first. Meanwhile, his body starts failing. He carries around a Saint Christopher pendant and a dirty rabbit’s foot, for “protection.” He breaks double-pane windows in Laura’s house. . Garry Paskwietz was a pioneer in bringing team-specific sports coverage to the internet. Former USC and San Diego Chargers star linebacker Junior Seau died Wednesday from a self-inflicted gunshot that police said was an apparent suicide. USC’s Tragic Linebacking Corps of 1989. It would be easy to say the game was a mistake—for Matt, for David, for Scott, for Alan, even for Junior. But he has waited too long. The next day, Mother’s Day, Alan does not call his mom or send her flowers, and so his father goes to check on him. J.R. Chesley missed his last college season with shoulder injuries; now he works for State Farm insurance in Washington, D.C., and he feels sharp. When Matt starts to feel down again, he combats it by staying busy, trying to distract himself. The team posted a 13-3 record and won the AFC West for the third time under Marty. He has a whiteboard, though, and on it he writes to Matt: Matt offers to adopt Luke and Joshua, but Alana is uneasy about it. He has a steady job in pharmaceutical marketing, in D.C. None of them died on the field, but for each former Trojan, football was inextricably tied to mortality. Alan Wilson is not close to Matt, but he is not that close to anybody. Notre Dame won, 28-24. Alana hires a sober life coach to be with Matt, take him to meetings, get him back on track. He struggles to go up and down stairs. The Trojans had 12 linebackers on its 1989 depth chart, each leaning into what seemed to be the limitless future football could provide. You did this to me!” And then: “Why did you let me play football?”. Nobody can figure out how to help him. Scott Ross was as much a football player—mentally and physically—as anybody you could meet. He goes to a treatment facility in Pasadena, comes home, relapses, goes to a detox center and works with a doctor—another former USC alum—and comes home again. Craig Hartsuyker is the heady technician. Anybody looking for him was wise to start at the beach. He smacks a Lenox candy dish over his head, spurting blood all over the walls like a lawn sprinkler. Coliseum spinning around him; he tries to stay in but falls to a knee and gets pulled. Five of the 12 … Robert calls their mom. The longer answer is that a coroner found three times the legal limit of alcohol in Matt’s blood; he also suffered from hypertension, ascites, cardiovascular disease, anomalous small coronary arteries, complications of hepatic cirrhosis and obstructive sleep apnea. College did this: It introduced Matt Gee, the Kansas country boy, to David Webb, the surfer from Irvine, and let the friendship jell. Anything to feel fearless and reckless, wild and free. Twelve dreams. www.si.com. After one spring practice, Turner had a change of heart and decided to return to USC. I don’t care. Nothing stings quite like dropping on the depth chart, which looks at the beginning of the 1989 season like this: Twelve college students. Delmar, though, doesn’t appear to be struggling. That his white undershirts were old and discolored. He frequently loses track of his thoughts and stops talking midsentence. Sometimes Scott sleeps on a friend’s couch, and sometimes he sleeps on the streets. Michigan played them in the 1990 Rose Bowl, which was Bo's last game. Seau is the most talented. A doctor diagnoses Scott as bipolar, with frontal-lobe dementia—an offshoot, he strongly suspects, of the pounding Scott’s brain took playing football. “Ohhh,” he says calmly, in a voice you might use if you forgot to buy orange juice at the grocery store, and he hits the gas again. He is a master at hiding the dots that mark his descent. We’ll pay for it. With four linebackers gone, and the remaining scattered across the country, Matt continues running a commercial insurance firm, but he is thinking about changing careers. Scott scared people, but he did not scare Matt. . A-Dub did not attend parties or play practical jokes on teammates; he conversed but rarely started conversations. https://www.si.com/college/2020/10/07/usc-and-its-dying-linebackers He remembers birthdays but forgets words. He stops his car, inexplicably, in the middle of an intersection and Laura, in the passenger seat, screams, “Scott, what are you doing?!”. A fixer by nature, Matt is in denial. He turns on the water, and Robert leaves for his janitorial job. In a dream home, in America’s paradise, Alana Gee tells herself that her husband lived a great life, not just half of one. From being a pit reporter to a cameo in “Fantastic Four," Little has done it all. Even among the boys at USC, Scott Ross was a wild one. He has completed three full Ironman triathlons and six half-Ironmans. Back in Texas, Scott rents a little house on a lake, then moves into a friend’s trailer. USC's dying linebackers: In 1989, USC had a depth chart of a dozen linebackers. He was 43. USC was ready and jumped out to a 17-7 lead. He does not slur words, and he rarely stumbles, but now Alana is on to him, and she confronts him. Eventually, David can’t even speak. Matt played fullback, too—every snap, on both sides of the ball. By now, the U.S. has learned about head trauma and football. She just can’t find him anymore. The bridge from age 20 to age 50 looks a lot shorter after you cross it. His brain.” (Seau would play pro football for seven more years.) As an attorney for Farmers Insurance, Craig Hartsuyker studies mortality rates as part of his job these days, and he knows an outlier when he sees one. . Five Have Died, Each Before Age 50 : CFB. They used to finish each other’s sentences, but now, in the middle of routine conversations, Matt puts both his hands in the air, palms up, as if Alana is speaking a foreign language. . If you were looking to make the best, most humane case against the existence of football, this profile of the 1989 USC LBs — featuring Junior Seau — would be the one. They were freshman roommates. Always generous with his time, knowledge, and compassion, he touched the lives of countless USC and high school football fans. They fear that if they push him too much, he might snap, maybe cut off the relationship entirely. David’s father, Charlie, thinks he is “punch drunk.” His mother, Carolyn, says he is “regressing.” His brother, Greg, sees David every week, and he can tell something is wrong—seriously wrong, like early-Alzheimer’s wrong. Matt had swiped it as a gag, years ago, and he has kept it all this time as a souvenir of their friendship. Scott tries to hang himself in the attic. He puts his mother in a headlock, and a doctor tells his parents they have to kick him out. Alana wishes she’d known this when Matt was alive. He blows up his life. Once, the two went swimming in the Pacific, and Junior swam up to a dolphin and grabbed its fin. USC linebacker Junior Seau … Scott was a good husband, once. He barely thinks, though, about his concussions, which number at least a half-dozen. . Twelve players, all trying to impress men like linebackers coach Tom (Rogge) Roggeman, who served as a Marine in Korea. He was ahead of Matt Gee on the depth chart in 1989, but he and Scott Ross helped groom Matt for a starting job. Twelve names. Notre Dame had the best teams of the Lou Holtz era in 1988-89 and the Irish were ranked #1 in the country. Per Sports Reference, USC has had 26 linebackers drafted since 1966 who had a career approximate value of 24 or better. If he would just sober up. Yes, Hartsuyker is still alive. He suffered concussions in college, but he feels good. © 2021 ABG-SI LLC. Usually. One Halloween he drives drunk again, hits another car, flees and then takes his daughter trick-or-treating. Leslie will always wonder whether the damage that football did to David’s brain made him more vulnerable when the cancer came. Somebody sets him on the floor in front of a television, like a toddler. and now it has led him to look at his childhood friend and say it, the worst sentence in football: “Maybe I’m dealing with this CTE.”. The Not So Obvious: Clay (6-2, 235) came to USC as a Parade High School All-American from New Tier (Ill.) East HS. Sometimes Alana wakes up in the dark and finds him standing over her, yelling, because he called her phone from the other room and she didn’t answer. There’s no ammunition in the gun, but she hides it anyway. Not all of the old Trojans feel this way, but Delmar felt it back at school. In 1989, USC Had a Depth Chart of a Dozen Linebackers. She asks what he’s doing, and he tells her, “I was going to send that back to Mitch.” She doesn’t believe him. After one episode of public drunkenness, he tries to flee police on a tractor, wearing only his boxer shorts. definite suicide . Lawrence will have labrum surgery on his left shoulder on Tuesday. Marla changes the locks, then sells their house in Montgomery, Texas. Chesley collides with a teammate and feels the L.A. He is not going to let David die without him. He picks up Tanner from a high school lacrosse game, then pushes his son up against a car and scolds him: “I can’t believe you were drinking!” When Alana asks what happened, though, Tanner says, “Mom, he picked me up drunk.”. They do not see him become depressed and balloon to 100 pounds over his playing weight. Scott did kill himself, whether he meant to or not. He cannot win. Matt figures David is fine, just kind of out of touch, because David is never out of control as Scott Ross was. She and Scott share custody of their daughter, but one time Marla goes to pick up Caroline and nobody answers the door. When he died, he had paperwork on his desk for a concussion lawsuit against the NCAA. Matt wishes he could have saved his friend, but nobody could have saved him. Hey, Matt! USC linebacker Junior Seau walks the field before a game against Notre Dame on Oct. 21, 1989 in South Bend, Ind. Even his own wife misses them at first. Five Have Died, Each Before Age 50 - Sports Illustrated In 1989, the Trojans had a depth chart of a dozen linebackers. Scott gets nuclear drunk, runs naked in the streets, trashes the place and gets kicked out of there, too. On the day of the service, Matt is in the hospital for a medical procedure of his own, so some USC teammates come by and shoot a video. He starts buying knives on Amazon for no clear reason. Matt feels guilty. Vaughns had 406 receiving yards (12.3 average), while soph London had a USC-best 502 receiving yards (15.2 avg). Link to tweet In 1989, USC Had a Depth Chart of a Dozen Linebackers. 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