On Any Given Sunday

It happened one Sunday at dusk. It was Halloween, and a young couple had transformed their Long Beach apartment into a haunted house. Their nieces and nephews and assorted little friends were gathered inside, waiting for the fun to start. Outside, a teen-ager passed by on a bicycle. “What’s happening, Blood?” one of the adults at the party said in casual greeting. This was a mistake. The bicyclist did not belong to the Bloods street gang. The bicyclist was a Crip.

Retribution came within minutes. First, a Volkswagen zipped past, its occupants spraying gunfire at the apartment. Then a sedan roared up. A gunman climbed out, walked behind the apartment and, crouching, aimed toward a window. By now most of the children were huddled in a hallway, deep in the apartment. Not Tashawnda. A 2-year-old, so cute in her Jane of the jungle costume, this little one had wandered in front of the window. Her uncle, a football player at Long Beach State, rushed toward the girl.

“Stay down!” he yelled, wrapping his body around her.

Later, he would remember it like one of those stock slow-motion action scenes from a B movie. Bullets crashing into walls. Screams. The gunman shouting a gang slogan. He never felt the bullet. He awoke in a hospital with one kidney gone and a slug lodged three inches from his heart. Tashawnda was not hurt.

*

Five years later, on a football field in the Sierra foothills and far from the lunacy of L.A. gang turf, a young man reaches out and catches a pass. He makes a darting move past a defender and starts to sprint. This is only a drill, and the receiver can stop at any time. Instead, he keeps running. Twenty yards. Thirty yards. Forty yards. Running with long fluid strides. Running with joy. The man with the ball regards each step as a blessing, a reprieve, and it shows.

“I have learned,” he will say later, “to appreciate everything about life. Knowing that it didn’t have to be. The shooting opened my eyes to the little things in life. Like being able to run. Like being able to eat what I want to eat. Being able to hear the birds chirp and all that, to feel the breeze, hear the wind.”

His name is Mark Seay, No. 83 on the San Francisco 49er summer roster, Uncle Mark to a girl named Tashawnda. The kidney could not be replaced, the bullet could not be removed, but Seay, now 26 years old, is fighting hard for a spot on the 49ers. It has been a long road. He had to sue for permission to play college ball again. No NFL team drafted him--the missing kidney scared them off. He tried out for the 49ers last year as a free agent and was placed on the practice squad. This summer, it’s said that Seay has an excellent shot of making the team outright.

“I’d like to think my chances are pretty good,” he says. “But you never know. I’ve learned anything can happen.”

*

He is, of course, talking more than football here. On any given Sunday, as one sports cliche goes, any NFL team can beat another. And on any given Sunday, across the breadth of the Los Angeles Basin, bullets can come flying. No neighborhood is immune, no setting secure. That’s another lesson Mark Seay learned that Halloween.

“You say those drive-bys can’t happen to you, but they can happen to anyone,” he says. “They are part of society, and we have to deal with it. We can’t keep pretending it is someone else’s problem. I did nothing to cause myself to be shot. I wasn’t hanging out on a street corner or anything. I was shot in my own home.”

He seems a serious young man, reserved. Only when he’s asked about Tashawnda does he brighten. She is now 7 years old. He sees her every day in the off-season. “She is in school,” he says, “doing fabulous, as pretty as can be. And every time I look at her I praise God he gave me the presence of mind to do what I did.”

He says this in a modest way, for Mark Seay does not consider himself a hero. He cannot explain how he stepped up to take his niece’s bullet, anymore than he can explain how a single misdirected comment could turn a children’s party into a firing zone. “It’s like, I’ve made a lot of catches I can’t explain, too,” he says with a shrug. “It’s just pure instinct.” And with that, practice and interview over, No. 83 is off to the showers. Sunday’s hero.