McGee’s Mind Back on Game : After Shooting, Transfers, He’s Ready to Play Again

Jon McGee was in Norman, Okla., half a continent removed from where gunfire had inexplicably found him in a place where he had least expected it, when it dawned on him.

He hated football.

“I didn’t like watching it on TV, I didn’t like playing it, I didn’t like playing football video games,” he said. “Just about anything that had to do with football, I didn’t like. I got to that point.”

Ordinarily, of course, such feelings would not be cause for alarm. But they concerned McGee because he excelled at football and had always enjoyed it. At the time, in fact, he was attending the University of Oklahoma on a football scholarship.

Several months earlier, in the fall of 1992, he had been playing for USC, waiting for practice to start at Howard Jones Field, when he was struck by gang-related gunfire about a quarter-mile away.

A stray bullet passed completely through his left arm above the elbow, an injury that surely must rank among the least common--and most traumatic--ever suffered on a football field.

It could have hit Rob Johnson or Willie McGinest or Tony Boselli, any of the Trojans’ stars. Instead, it struck McGee, a promising freshman linebacker who had been a prep All-American a year earlier at Sahuaro High in Tucson but had yet to make his mark at USC.

Two years later, McGee, 20, suffers no physical ill effects from the injury but is still trying to find his way in college football. He has transferred twice, most recently to Arizona in hometown Tucson, where he is a walk-on trying to earn a scholarship as he sits out this season.

Psychologists, he said, have told him that he has suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, a mental disorder sparked by exposure to violent incidents that return as recurrent images, disrupting normal life.

Symptoms include nightmares, insomnia and depression.

In McGee’s case, they also included an aversion to football.

“I think part of it is that it happened on the football field, and he had to go back and look at the football field every day,” said his father, Mike, no relation to former USC Athletic Director Mike McGee. “I guess your mind does funny things to you. . . .

“It’s just like this girl (Monica Seles) who got stabbed on the tennis court. She’s making umpteen millions of dollars a year and she can’t go back. It’s a psychological thing.”

Some won’t understand it, Jon McGee acknowledged.

“People who haven’t gone through it will probably think I’m nuts and it shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did,” he said.

“It was really hard to figure out. I had just a terrible attitude about football. I got to the point where I didn’t want to go lift weights, I didn’t want to work out. I just had a bad outlook on everything. Everything was negative.”

Although he said at a news conference two days after the shooting that he planned to remain at USC, McGee later asked Coach Larry Smith to release him from his scholarship so that he could transfer.

“I thought a change of scenery might help my attitude toward football,” he said.

He transferred to Oklahoma early in 1993 but realized during spring practice a few months later that he still wasn’t enjoying football. His coaches persuaded him to stay, however, and he played in four games last fall before quitting the team and leaving school.

He enrolled at Arizona last spring, determined never to play again.

“I wasn’t going to play football or even think about playing football,” he said.

A few months ago, however, he changed his mind.

“It was like all the clouds parted and I decided I wanted to play again,” he said. “It was like a light switched on or something.”

He made an appointment with Arizona Coach Dick Tomey, who invited him to practice.

“It’s been going really good,” McGee said. “I’ve been having a lot of fun with football now. I’m just excited to get back into it and get going. I’ve got the desire back. I’ve made about a 180-degree turn and I’m positive about everything now.”

After playing so sparingly during the last three years--he sat out four games of his senior year in high school because of an ankle injury and never got into a game at USC--McGee is a little rusty. But he is determined to make an impact next season on a defensive unit that has recently ranked among the best in the nation.

“I see signs of Jon McGee having the potential to be a good college football player, but he’s got quite a ways to go as far as his overall development,” said Larry Mac Duff, Arizona’s defensive coordinator and linebacker coach. “He needs to improve his quickness and some of those things.

“He’s working extremely hard. At one time, he was a guy who was very highly recruited and very highly publicized on a national basis as far as an outstanding prospect, and I think now what he wants to do is get away from all that. He just wants to work hard and improve and make his own way in our program.

“I think he’s taking steps toward doing that, but he’s got a ways to go and he’s going to be in competition with some really good players here. So, time will tell.”

For McGee and his family, it has already been a long wait. But, apparently, their ordeal is over.

“I know how upset he was, and I know how he’s doing now, and he’s his old self,” Mike McGee said of his son. “In talking with the psychiatrists and psychologists, they say it’s just a process your mind has to go through to readjust and it usually takes a year and a half to two years. And they were right. He really is over it.

“He’s missed a lot and he’s got a lot of catching up to do. But he’s doing well. And he’s happy. That’s what I care about, and that’s what he cares about.”