Teammates for a Lifetime

Arnie Futagaki was the kind of football player coaches dream about. His size--he weighed only about 180 pounds--took people off guard, especially when they learned (the hard way) how strong and tough he was.

He was a quiet leader for Golden West College’s first football team in 1966, never boisterous or arrogant but determined just the same. And better yet, Futagaki had a positive attitude that rubbed off on other players, including his opponents.

“He could knock your block right off, and he’d do it with a big ol’ smile on his face,” former teammate Mark Lomas said. “And then he’d reach down and help you get back up.”

When Lomas and two dozen other players from Golden West’s 1966 football squad learned in February that Futagaki--now 51--was crippled by Lou Gehrig’s disease, there was of course no question for them about what they had to do.

Never mind that most of them hadn’t been in touch for 30 years or that time had prevented them from keeping up with such things as marriages and births and, in Futagaki’s case, illness.

To his former teammates, it came down to a simple bond they’d formed long ago, no matter how loose it had become over the years. Futagaki--the grinning lineman who’d extended a hand to them so many times before, usually after he’d hit them with a bruising tackle--needed help. And they weren’t about to let him down.

Their cause began after they learned from Futagaki’s wife, Shirley, that she’d been taking care of him alone since the onset of his disease six years ago. The couple live on Futagaki’s disability payments and the income from her one-day-a-week secretarial job.

The group went to work immediately--first to paint the couple’s Fountain Valley house, fix the fence and make plans to install new carpet and ceiling fans throughout. Next they arranged for at-home nursing assistance and chipped in to help pay for it.

“It’s just something you do, like something your heart tells you needs to be done,” said Lomas, who went on from Golden West to play six years for the New York Jets. “We just started calling each other, networking, and pretty soon we were all back together, standing in his living room, and it was like we never missed a beat.”

Futagaki was overwhelmed when about 30 former players, their original coach and several members of Golden West’s first football cheerleading squad arrived at his home in February.

The disease, whose formal name is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had slowly robbed him of his muscle control, of his ability to walk and write and speak. But for all its relentlessness, the disease does not steal other, more fundamental functions. Futagaki sees and hears and, most important, he feels.

He burst into tears at the sight of his old teammates, towering over his wheelchair and fussing over him. His wife assured the guests that he was crying “happy tears.”

It’s something she’s learned to say when Futagaki--once a popular physical education teacher and football coach at a Montebello high school--lights up with emotion, reaching out of the shell that confines his life to silence and paralysis.

“You can’t believe what a difference all of this has made in him,” Shirley Futagaki said of her husband’s reunion with his teammates. “You can see it on his face and in his eyes. He is living again. We are living again.”

The whole bunch of them plan regular get-togethers and outings with Futagaki now, like baseball games and barbecues and beach parties, where he can sit among his friends and listen to them reminisce and feel connected in a way he likely forgot he could, Shirley Futagaki said.

‘Everybody on This Team Has Cried’

“It’s the camaraderie that he loves so much,” she said. “He is smiling more and more these days, and I can’t help but think how blessed we really are.”

On Saturday afternoon, more than two dozen teammates, coaches and their wives held a barbecue for Futagaki on the beach at Newport Dunes. As the sun fell over the white sails lining the harbor’s mouth, men traded tales of past heroics on the football field, the brutal training sessions they endured and the practical jokes they played on each other after games.

They spoke of the joy they felt in meeting after 30 years, but they also recalled how hard it had been to first see the devastation wrought by the disease on Futagaki, how it had withered his once-muscular body and had robbed him of his speech.

“It really hurt me. Everybody on this team has cried over this, and we’ll probably cry some more,” said Wayne Hall, who played middle guard alongside Futagaki for a year. “When we were 18, 19 years old, we were invincible, bullet-proof. Now we’re in our golden years, so to speak, and we really appreciate life more when we see what Arnie’s going through.”

In the shade of a cabana, Futagaki sat in a wheelchair surrounded by his old friends. Laughing, his teammates flipped through their scrapbooks and held the faded newspaper clippings of Golden West triumphs so he could see them. Occasionally, as he came across a picture of himself crouching in a defensive pose, Futagaki managed a slow smile.

His friends hope to raise enough money over the next few months to help the family make additional home improvements and pay for medical expenses. Because there is no cure for the disease, his wife has sought out alternative medical treatment and physical therapy, neither of which is covered by insurance.

Shirley Futagaki strongly believes her husband’s condition has improved in recent months--in no small part, she said, because of his renewed friendships.

When he was first diagnosed with the illness, doctors gave him three years to live. That was nearly four years ago. And Futagaki has started to move his left arm again, she said, even though it was once atrophied from the disease.

“He is a walking miracle,” Shirley Futagaki said. “And he is so loved.”

“Friends of Futagaki” and Golden West College are hosting a fund-raising dinner on Oct. 2 at the Costa Mesa Community Center. Information: Ray Shackleford at (714) 895-8266.