BACK to WORK

When Pete Bercich got his long-awaited call from the Minnesota Vikings, he wasn’t sure he could accept the offer.

Just eight days had passed since he buried his baby boy.

Bercich’s wife, Amy, was eight months into her pregnancy when their son’s heart stopped beating. Samuel James Bercich was stillborn Nov. 13.

“The hardest part is, you lose a dream,” Pete Bercich said.

Bercich’s own dream of returning to the NFL became secondary.

The Vikings had given him a heads-up before Samuel’s death that they might need a backup linebacker who could also play on special teams. He knew their system from five seasons in the organization and had spent the past 14 months recovering from a knee injury and preparing to get back to the NFL.

If the Vikings had called immediately after Samuel’s death, Bercich would have turned them down. Eight days after the Nov. 17 funeral, he was faced with a tough decision and little time to make it.

Bercich talked to his wife and was on a plane that day to Minnesota from their home in Granger, Ind., leaving her and their 15-month-old son, Peter, behind.

“Whether it’s the right decision, I still don’t know,” he said. “We talk about it on the phone every night. We came to a decision, and obviously my decision is done. But you always second-guess yourself.”

Former Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien, MVP of the 1992 Super Bowl, approached his own tragedy differently.

He essentially ended his career after his 3-year-old son died of cancer in 1998. Rypien sat out that season and never returned.

While Bercich took the Vikings’ offer, he longs to have his wife and son join him in Minnesota. But he came to the team without any guarantees.

He could be released in a week, when outside linebacker Dwayne Rudd returns from a shoulder injury, or he might hang around until the end of the season.

In the meantime, playing for the Vikings could help him take his mind off the past three weeks.

“Activity can serve as a distraction, but when you sit down at the end of the day, it’s still there,” Bercich said. “You can be busy all day, and it’s still there. You see something that reminds you, and it’s still there.

“That’s when you want to lean on someone like your wife and your family. Unfortunately, they’re all away. The same thing goes for them with me. One can be having a good day and the other a bad day, and that’s when you help each other.”

Bercich is trying not to let those emotions show around the Vikings, a team with Super Bowl aspirations. But he has teammates who remember how he helped them during their careers and they say they want to be there for him.

“We’ve got a great locker room,” said Rudd, noting that Bercich helped teach him the Vikings’ system during his rookie season. “He’s in a good place.”

Cory Withrow, a backup center, said Bercich was among the Vikings who lent support to him in January 1999, when Withrow and his wife lost triplets about an hour after they were born following a difficult pregnancy.

“When it happened, Pete had just had their son,” Withrow said. “He was very supportive. Pete was great about it. He could see it was hurting me. He just said, ‘Hey, think about it, when it does happen, it’ll be the greatest thing.”’

The Withrows now have 2-month-old twins -- and a void that remains unfilled.

“I’ll never be able to replace what I’ve lost,” Withrow said. “I don’t think he will, either. You have all these expectations. You have expectations of what your kids are going to look like and how they’re going to act and interact with each other.

“I think Pete will tell you, you go through something like this and it changes your perspective on life and how you’re supposed to live it. I think when I came back here, it made me more focused on my job and less on what was going to happen to me. No matter what happened to me, there was no way I was going to feel any worse.”

Bercich now relishes his season away from football, because it was the first year of his son Pete’s life. His first month without Samuel is proving much tougher, although Bercich is vowing not to let it affect his days with the Vikings.

“Anything can distract you,” Bercich said. “Financial issues. Personal issues. A dent in your car can distract you. As a professional, you learn to do your job when you’re here.

“But if I told you I’m not thinking about it while I’m here, I’d be lying.”