HE WAS LUCKY TO BE PLAYING, AND THEN . . . : A Football Player’s Last Gift

Jeff Randle El showed a lot of promise as a football player. Although Randle El was not chosen in the 1986 National Football League draft, the Kansas City Chiefs signed the 235-pound linebacker from Northern Arizona University as a free agent. But after the team doctors took a look at RandleEl’s knee, the Chiefs released him.

No one was surprised about that. Disappointed, sure, but not really surprised. Not Randle El, not his parents in West Covina, not his football coach and certainly not his doctor, who knew Randle El’s dream very well. Since the NFL was what Jeffhad wanted to try for, he had given him a leg to stand on, even though part of it was made of plastic.

There aren’t many NFL players out there running around with artificial knee ligaments. In fact, there are none. Randle El thought he would be the first.

Randle El came back from the operation on his left knee and played well in his senior year at Northern Arizona, which gave him hope for the NFL. Even with the plastic ligament stabilizing the knee and holding it together, Jeff figured he still had a chance to play in the pros.

Dr. Roman Lewicky of Flagstaff, Ariz., the surgeon who put the Teflon-like ligament in Randle El’s knee, was not nearly as sure, but he did feel certain of at least one thing later. When a professional football career became impossible for Randle El, Lewicky was confident that Jeff still showed a lot of promise as a human being.

“I thought he was going to be something special,” Lewicky said. “I thought he had an unlimited future.”

Jeff Randle El’s future ended in an alley behind his apartment building in Claremont. In the early morning hours of May 3, he was shot to death as he sat in his car. A passer-by saw Randle El’s body and called police. When they arrived, Jeff’s red 1985 Camaro was missing. So were his wallet and credit cards.

Three days later, police took three suspects into custody. Two were released, but the third, Dennis Demar Edwards of Pomona, has been charged with murder, grand theft auto and armed robbery, according to the sheriff’s department.

Dennis Edwards is 20. Jeff Randle El was 24.

Donna Randle El doesn’t really understand why her son was killed.

“No, it’s a puzzlement to me,” she said. “The only way I’m going to know what happened in that alley is when I see my son again.”

The story of Jeff Randle El could have ended right there, but it did not. That’s because of the plastic ligament he had in his knee. Maybe even what Jeff Randle El went through will help somebody else with a plastic knee play in the NFL someday.

After his death, Randle El’s parents permitted bio-engineers from W. L. Gore Co. of Flagstaff, which made the artificial ligament, to study the implant. Randle El was one of the first college athletes to receive the artificial ligament, which has been implanted in about 1,500 people in the United States. No one, however, had ever examined a ligament and been able to assess how well it had held up. After the autopsy, the ligament in Randle El’s knee was retrieved and returned to Flagstaff for examination.

Lewicky said the study of Randle El’s artificial ligament was valuable for research. Only six months ago, the Food and Drug Administration released the ligament for general orthopedic use, stipulating, however, that it be used only in knees in which previous ligament repairs had failed.

“For at least the short-term situation, the first five years, we think now that the ligament has a good chance of holding up, under even the hardest of use,” said Lewicky, who has performed 30 replacement operations. “Beyond that, we just don’t know yet.”

Donna Randle El said that the decision to allow Jeff’s knee to be studied after his death was not a difficult one because he would have wanted that.

“They’ve gained knowledge from studying his knee,” she said. “His death will not have been in vain or as much of a tragedy.

“That knee will be on an NFL football team one day. They won’t know it’s because of Jeff, but it will be. That’s what keeps me going.”

When he was in high school, Jeff Randle El kept himself going in a lot of directions. He was an All-Southern Section running back at West Covina’s Nogales High School and a good student, too. When Randle El got to Flagstaff, the Northern Arizona coaches immediately moved him to defense.

But his study habits remained the same. Randle El was a three-time academic All-Big Sky Conference selection. In 1985, Randle El won the school’s Golden Eagle award for excellence in both academics and sports.

His major field of study was civil engineering, but football was his major love. Randle El finished his career as a Lumberjack with 231 tackles, which ranks eighth on the school’s all-time list. He also scored three touchdowns, even though he was a defensive player.

But he also kept injuring his left knee, the one he had first hurt in high school.

In November, 1983, Randle El partially tore the anterior cruciate ligament and cartilage. The next October, he reinjured the knee and had arthroscopic surgery to repair the damage. Even so, it didn’t help very much, said Lewicky, who went on to outline to Randle El the experimental surgical procedure in which an artificial ligament could be implanted in the damaged knee. Randle El agreed to the surgery, and Lewicky operated in November of 1984.

“He basically had no choice,” Lewicky said. “His knee was so loose, so unstable, he had no hope of playing without it. His career was over unless we could stabilize his knee with the Gore ligament.”

The surgery was a stunning success. Only two months after the surgery, Randle El was rehabilitating his knee. The recovery time for recipients of the artificial implant is a great deal shorter than natural tissue implants. Before they could attempt to play again, former Laker center-forward Mitch Kupchak and former Clipper forward Michael Brooks were out for nearly two years after getting natural-tissue ligament implants.

“He could run,” said Northern Arizona Coach Larry Kentera. “He didn’t have a bit of a problem. I thought he had a lot of talent and some real ability. It’s just that the pros didn’t want to take a chance on him, that’s all.”

As a senior in 1985, only 10 months after the surgery, Randle El was back at linebacker. He made 80 tackles, forced a fumble, recovered two more and returned a pass interception for a touchdown.

“He had a good range of motion and he was as mobile as he ever was,” Lewicky said.

But when Randle El took a physical with the Chiefs, he failed it. Jeff certainly did not blame the artificial ligament, Donna Randle El said.

“Without that ligament, he knew he had no chance at all to play in the NFL,” she said. “He wanted to play. That was his life’s dream.”

Once that dream was over, Jeff got on with his life. He took a job with Unit Distributing of General Electric in Industry, rented an apartment in Claremont and had registered for classes at Cal Poly Pomona. He would have been there for summer school, had he lived.

Richard Burns III of the district attorney’s office said that eyewitnesses have placed Edwards and Randle El together hours before the shooting. Those witnesses have also said that Edwards was in possession of a firearm at the time, according to Burns.

If Edwards is convicted, he could receive a maximum sentence of life imprisonment without the chance of parole, or possibly the death penalty because of special circumstances involving a firearm, Burns said. A pretrial hearing and a trial setting date are scheduled Aug. 12 in Pomona Superior Court.

Jeff Randle El was buried May 8 at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Fullerton. His mother said that his funeral was a celebration of his life and not a mourning of his death.

“He lived a life that needed to be celebrated,” she said.

But even now, the effect of Randle El’s death is still being felt in Flagstaff by many who knew him, and they’re still mourning.

“Of all people,” Kentera said. “It just couldn’t be him.”

Lewicky said it is difficult to accept what happened to such a bright young man who meant so much to football, to his school, to his teammates and to his friends.

“His death was so tragic,” he said. “He was a unique young man. He was not your stereotypical dumb athlete. He had something upstairs.”

Theirs was a tightly knit family, Donna Randle El said. Jeff knew how she and Joseph, her husband, felt about him, Donna said, so when he was killed, there weren’t any loose ends.

There was no memory of angry words that could never be taken back, no misunderstanding still unsettled, nothing bad between them left hanging. At least she had that much. She could take some comfort in knowing that at the very end, they were close. She had loved her son, and he had known it.

Not long ago, the family went to Disneyland. Theao Woodard Jr., age 1, the son of Jeff’s younger sister, Jennifer, was the inspiration behind the trip. Besides Theao and Jennifer, Jeff’s other sister, Jessalyn, a senior at Nogales, also went along with some friends from Chicago. Donna Randle El led the way.

When they got to the merry-go-round, Mrs. Randle El stopped. Jeff had always thought that was the dullest ride. She turned and began to say something.

“I wanted to say something to Jeff,” she said. “I forgot he’s not here.”

When Jeff Randle El’s parents wrote their son’s obituary, here is what it said:

So loved, so special, so missed. “Very simple words, aren’t they?” his mother asked.