Summer Of Tragedy

Eleven football players, enough to field a full side, are buried in cemetery plots across the country, with a 12th to be laid to rest this week.

The teammates they left behind, in chapel pews and alongside open grave sites, are now consumed with the comforting ritual of game day, where do-or-die is a goal-line stand, not a team of paramedics laboring over a gasping defensive back.

This weekend, the Minnesota Vikings will open a new season, as scheduled, at home to Carolina, as scheduled, but without Korey Stringer, whose 338 pounds were leveled last month by heatstroke. This is not injured reserve. This is not the disabled list. Stringer is gone, gone forever, but the Vikings must play on. As they do, experts wonder what can be done about the gaping hole at right offensive tackle.

This weekend, Northwestern plays at Nevada Las Vegas. Lead-in story lines include: Northwestern attempting to avenge its 1996 Rose Bowl defeat to USC and Coach John Robinson, Northwestern trying to jump-start running back Damien Anderson’s Heisman Trophy campaign, Northwestern plotting legal strategy for the lawsuit filed by the family of deceased defensive back Rashidi Wheeler.

Florida, ranked No. 1 in the nation, has a home game against Louisiana-Monroe, ranked 115th (out of 117 Division I schools) by Sports Illustrated. Once upon a time, college coaches jokingly referred to such mismatches as “body bag games.” Not a funny line this year. On a Gainesville practice field in late July, a Florida freshman fullback named Eraste Autin collapsed, slipped into a coma and died six days later.

Florida State, ranked No. 6 in the nation, has a home game against Alabama-Birmingham. Not a lot of funny lines in Tallahassee this year, either, no matter how many yarns Coach Bobby Bowden home-spins. Florida State lost a linebacker, a freshman named Devaughn Darling, during an off-season conditioning drill and now faces a negligence suit filed by Darling’s parents.

High schools in North Jackson, Ala.; Michigantown, Ind.; Monticello, Ga.; Luling, Texas; Geneva, Ala.; Houston and Salt Lake City will send football teams onto the field and students into the bleachers because that’s what kids are supposed to do, where kids are supposed to meet. They are not supposed to attend memorial services during summer vacation.

The obituary list is sobering, staggering, and it keeps getting longer. Thursday night, 17-year-old Brandon Scott Hutcherson returned a kickoff during Geneva County High’s season opener, was tackled hard and did not get up. Hours later, he died in a nearby hospital.

A dozen football players, dead. All shapes, all sizes, all levels of athletic skill. One as old as 34, with four children of his own; another only 13, so young that he was buried with some of his favorite things--miniature toy motorbikes--resting inside his tiny casket. One was a giant of his profession, a Pro Bowl performer; another only one good senior season away from joining him in the NFL. Some were content to put on the pads and dream the dream; others were happy enough just to put on the pads so they could be part of a team.

Eleven of them died in a span of barely three months, from mid-May to late August. There were so many sad headlines in so rapid a succession, you had to sit back, catch your breath and wonder: Is this a game or a train wreck we’re reading about?

What kind of sport sends so many participants to their graves in such a short time? What sort of activity requires conditioning drills so rigorous that another athlete dies in February, six months before he was to play his first competitive down of college football?

If this happened in boxing, Congress would be mulling legislation to ban the sport. If auto racing produced this rate of casualty, newspaper columnists would be calling for track closures from Talladega to Fontana.

But this is football, the oblong opiate of our masses, and here in the land of billion-dollar television contracts, Internet wagering, fantasy leagues, weekly newspaper special sections and 560-page college media guides, the game waits for no one. The assassination of a president did not stop the NFL from kicking off its regularly scheduled round of games the following Sunday. The outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf did not delay the Super Bowl. Nothing short of the Apocalypse will ever shut down a weekend slate of football, and even if it did, Danny Sheridan would be at the bottom of some darkened bunker, urging his customers to take the human race and the points.

Unlike baseball and its press-pass-carrying bad poets society, football has never tried to pass itself off as a metaphor for life. Football, from the football perspective, is much bigger than that. It is the immovable object, the irresistible force. It views itself as modern-day siege warfare, combat and conquest, run by too many coaches and administrators who have read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” and view themselves as caretakers of a sacred gladiator tradition handed down from the great armies of antiquity.

“The game is very physical,” says Frank Kush, the former Arizona State coach. “It’s not for everybody. It’s very demanding and you have to be able to endure that. If you back off, it’s going to get worse.”

Baseball players don’t die during training-camp workouts. The football response: Baseball players aren’t athletes. Basketball players don’t keel over running line drills during practice. The football response: Basketball is a contact sport, football is a collision sport. Soccer players don’t collapse while running circles around their helmeted and huddled brethren. The football response: Soccer is kickball played by pretty boys in short pants, football is warfare.

The mentality permeates the game on every level, from professional to high school. To quote from the football coaches’ Bible, the gospel according to Vince Lombardi: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

So football training camps resemble Marine boot camp--often conducted in sweltering heat, at the hottest hour of the day, with water breaks treated as rewards, rather than life-preserving necessities, and sometimes withheld as punishment.

These grinders serve two universally accepted purposes: To get the players conditioned for the violence to come and to weed out the weak. When it comes to training men and boys for a season of football, there is nothing new under the blistering sun. The players know what is coming, so they make preparations.

For Korey Stringer, this meant losing 30 pounds fast--perhaps too dangerously fast.

For Rashidi Wheeler and others, this meant ingesting dietary supplements--sold over the counter, promising more endurance and explosiveness during workouts, but also containing a potentially hazardous stimulant known as ephedrine.

On the day Wheeler died after collapsing on a Northwestern practice field, he was not alone. Ten other players collapsed during the same drill, a demanding series of 28 sprints ranging from 100 to 40 yards, to be completed in about 12 minutes. Nothing to be alarmed about--it’s a very tough drill, but that’s football. Wheeler, an asthmatic, had collapsed during practice maybe 30 times during his Northwestern career. Nothing to be alarmed about--that’s Rashidi, he has asthma, we’ve seen this many times before.

It’s all a part of football’s winnowing process: Steeling the strongest for the battles ahead while running off the unfit and the under-equipped ... before they can really get hurt .

Twelve football players are dead, and outside the sport’s insular world, medical experts have called for tougher regulations on supplements and a reexamination of age-old concepts in conditioning. Lawyers have filed negligence lawsuits. The NFL has prohibited players from endorsing companies that manufacture products containing banned substances such as ephedrine and androstenedione.

Everyone agrees that the death of a football player is unacceptable.

But admirable?

Florida State linebacker Michael Boulware offered a chilling glimpse into the culture of football when discussing the death of teammate and roommate Devaughn Darling.

“One thing I will take from him is that he never quit,” Boulware says. “And no matter what comes in my life, I won’t quit until I pass out like he did.

“He gave everything he had. What a way to go.”

Not Part of the Plan

Football is the most regimented of games, with coaches spending hours studying videotape of opponents to eliminate any element of surprise, to ensure there is a contingency plan for every conceivable development.

Except, there is no playbook for sudden death.

What is the proper response when looking down at a teammate’s closed eyes and folded arms inside his casket? What is the acceptable course of action when your starting right tackle is not listed as “questionable” or “doubtful” for this week’s game, but “deceased”?

Florida Coach Steve Spurrier dealt with the death of Eraste Autin as might be expected, which is to say awkwardly.

“As he would say, or any of us would say if we weren’t here, you’ve got to carry on,” Spurrier told reporters on the Gators’ first day of fall practice. “We’ve got to keep moving. I think we’ve had our time [to grieve] and hopefully we’ll be ready to start football.”

Really?

That’s what Autin would have told his teammates if he hadn’t collapsed after a voluntary summer workout three weeks earlier, suffered a massive heart attack and died after spending his final six days in a coma?

Maybe he would have cautioned them about running 150-and 200-yard sprints in 88-degree heat and 72% humidity with a heat index of 102 degrees.

Maybe he would have questioned the mentality that pushes a player to physical extremes the way it pushed Autin, who was spotted jogging spastically back to the locker room July 19 by a concerned passer-by.

Autin ran with the motion of “a puppet on a string,” according to Tim Garvey, a Gainesville dentist who had been driving by the campus and noticed a player in apparent physical distress. Garvey jumped out of his car and stood in the path of the oncoming player, who staggered into Garvey’s arms but kept his legs churning all the while.

“I’ve got to run ... got to run,” Autin mumbled as he gasped for breath.

“No, big guy, let me put you down,” Garvey told the young athlete, as he rolled up Autin’s T-shirt to use as a pillow, laid the player down on the sidewalk and placed a 911 call.

Three weeks later, after Autin had been laid to rest, Spurrier was telling his players it was all right to think about their fallen teammate, but said he hoped it wouldn’t become a distraction to the team.

“The freshman players have handled this about as well as you could expect,” Spurrier said. “Some of them that were pretty close to him took a little bit more time grieving, which is normal.”

Death by Freon, or Big Mac

Across the state, Florida State’s Bowden admitted he didn’t know what to do, how to act, what to think in the aftermath of Darling’s death.

“In the past,” he said, “we coached under Spartan conditions. We always felt we could out-physical and out-condition any other team.

“Now, all of sudden, we are thinking in ways we never thought before. We don’t want another kid to go down. We are looking inward. We are looking at our program. How did this thing slip up on us? We are not doing anything different than we have done for the last 25 years.”

Groping for answers, Bowden wondered if the problem was too much air-conditioning. That’s right. The country has gone soft because of Freon.

Twenty-five, 30, 40 years ago, players in the South lived with the heat. They handled it. They became acclimated to it. Not anymore. Central air is everywhere, except the summer practice field, and if players “come out unprepared and start two-a-days in that hot sun, they can die out there,” Bowden said. So the coach said he began writing his players letters before the start of two-a-days, advising them to “start working out on the hottest time of day, so when they came out here, they’d be OK.

“I don’t even know if I can write that anymore without being sued.”

Or maybe players today were eating too much fast food, Bowden suggested. Too much saturated fat, too much sodium, too much grease. Too much time spent away from the team training table and in the McDonald’s drive-thru lane. Death by Big Mac.

Business as Usual

Bowden could wave a copy of the latest Esquire magazine as evidence. Published days after Stringer’s death Aug. 1, the September edition features a lengthy profile on Stringer, titled “The Enlightened Man,” featuring a belt-level photograph of Stringer’s bulbous belly stretching an already massive purple jersey and a chronicle of nutritional habits somewhat less than enlightened: Chili-and-cheese dogs at the Hot Dog Shoppe. Thick crust at Carmen’s Pizza. Ribs at Eli’s Barbecue. Snack-stand nachos. French fries. Fried chicken wings. A breakfast of grits, eggs and sugar scrambled together at the Empire Diner.

And this was Stringer at 338 pounds, his lightest playing weight in the NFL, down from a high of 388 in 1997.

When the Vikings began training camp in muggy Mankato, 90 miles south of the Twin Cities, Stringer was ill-prepared for the furnace-like conditions: 90 degrees, with a heat index of 110 degrees.

On Monday, July 30, Stringer couldn’t finish the team’s afternoon practice. A photographer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune captured Stringer with his helmet off, doubled over, gasping for breath. The photo appeared in Tuesday’s editions. Newspapers across the country, including this one, ran similar photos.

Stringer took an enormous ribbing from teammates.

“He kind of got a little annoyed by that,” said Mike Tice, Viking offensive line coach. Ignoring advice that night from his wife to ease back, maybe take a day off, Stringer showed up at practice Tuesday determined to erase the memory of that embarrassing photograph.

Stringer pushed himself through another workout, through more brutal heat, vomiting three times before the session was complete. Viking trainers pulled Stringer into a field-side air-conditioned trailer and began treating him for heatstroke. When the player’s condition appeared to worsen, an ambulance was called.

Stringer was unconscious upon arrival at a nearby hospital and never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead early Wednesday morning, Aug. 1.

Randy Moss, the Vikings’ all-pro wide receiver, is typically the picture of arrogant cool on the football field. But Stringer and Moss were extremely close, and in the days immediately following the lineman’s death, Moss was pictured in newspapers and on television, sobbing inconsolably.

At a memorial service held in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina and televised by ESPN, Moss could barely get through his speech, breaking down several times as he held Stringer’s No. 77 jersey and instructed everyone in the room to “touch it, wipe your tears with it. I don’t care what you do with it, as long as you feel this jersey. And we’re going to send it off with Korey, and I’m not leaving this podium until I get this jersey back.”

On sports radio talk shows across the country, Moss’ behavior actually became a topic of debate: Was a professional football player supposed to break down in public that way? Was this conduct becoming a Minnesota Viking, an NFL superstar? Wasn’t he “man enough” to know how to control his emotions?

Meanwhile, on the Internet auction site EBay, Stringer was a hot commodity. On the morning of Aug. 1, before most had heard the news of the player’s death, four pieces of Stringer memorabilia were listed on the site. Five hours later, there were 138.

One man sold a miniature Viking helmet autographed by Stringer for $305, an Ohio State helmet signed by Stringer for $152.50 and an 8-by-10 autographed photo of Stringer for $85.99.

The seller, who spoke with ESPN.com on the condition on anonymity, allowed that his transactions, coming hours after Stringer’s death, could be considered poor taste.

“I’m a fan,” he said, “but also a smart businessman.”

Such is the state of affairs in the summer of 2001.

A football player is criticized for shedding tears at a close friend’s funeral.

But go ahead and make a few bucks off the sudden death of a Pro Bowl offensive tackle. Hey, that’s the American way.

Small-Town Sidebars

When a professional athlete dies of heatstroke, it is national news. When a college athlete dies after collapsing during a workout and Jesse Jackson shows up at the memorial service, it is more national news.

But what about the small towns and suburbs where high school football players die, from a variety of causes, and get swept up as sidebars to The Big Picture?

In Michigantown, Ind., where Clinton Central High junior Travis Stowers died the same day as Stringer, the school and the community reacted by quickly closing ranks. By the time a reporter from Los Angeles arrived at the scene, the football coach wasn’t talking unless the principal gave him permission. And the principal wasn’t granting permission or even coming out of his office, sending word through his secretary that the reporter had best talk to the school superintendent.

School superintendent Gary Gilbert said he had only 10 minutes to talk and in those 10 minutes, proceeded to say not much of anything.

What did Stowers’ father do for a living?

Gilbert said he really didn’t know.

What kind of kid was Stowers?

Gilbert said he was “a good young man.”

Was there someone else available who knew Stowers and could provide some personal insight about the boy?

No, Gilbert said, “I will tell you about him.”

No one wanted to talk on the record about Stowers, but off the record, three people close to the Clinton football program confirmed that Coach George Gilbert, no relation to the superintendent, had denied the players a scheduled water break on the day Stowers collapsed. According to these sources, the coach hadn’t been pleased with the performance of his players during the workout.

That day, with temperatures reaching the mid-90s, Stowers began complaining that his hands were tingling. Coaches called for a golf cart to carry the player back to the locker room, where he was pushed into a cold shower, waiting there for an ambulance to arrive.

As ambulance workers packed Stowers’ body in ice, his body temperature was recorded at 108 degrees. He was driven to the closest hospital, then airlifted by helicopter to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis because Methodist had better facilities and equipment.

But nothing there could save Stowers. At 4 a.m. the next morning, he was pronounced dead.

Could a water break back at Clinton have saved him? That question seems to be the one no one at Clinton is willing to deal with.

*

Sensors were also up in Houston when another reporter from Los Angeles inquired about interviewing the father of Leonard Carter, a 14-year-old sophomore at Lamar High who died Aug. 18, two hours after collapsing during a football scrimmage.

“Can I help you?” asked the man opening the door.

“I need to talk to Leonard Carter,” the reporter said, referring to the boy’s father, after identifying himself and his affiliation.

“Can I see ID?”

The reporter displayed a corporate credit card.

“This doesn’t tell me anything,” said the man at the door.

The reporter fished out a recent sports section and pointed to his byline.

Finally, the man at the door let him inside.

But before any interview could begin, Leonard Carter Sr. laid down some ground rules. This interview will not be taped, he said. Then he changed his mind. You can tape the interview, he said, but you have to mail us the tape.

Inside, three men and two women were watching television. Carter asked the reporter if he had the phone number for Linda Will, Wheeler’s mother. Not handy, no, but a phone call back to the office delivered the number.

Carter excused himself and retreated to another room to give Will a call. No answer; he got her voice mail.

Carter called out to the people watching TV in the living room. “Yeah, I’m supposed to be on MSNBC. Did I come on yet?”

He returned and resumed talking about his son--”Little Leonard” as friends and family called him.

“I lost my wife to breast cancer four years ago, and it’s been just me and him,” Carter said. He hadn’t attended the fateful intrasquad scrimmage, but said people who were there told him that Little Leonard, a running back playing with the fourth-string group, had broken two long runs just before passing out. He said he “heard it was chaos on the field”--echoing a familiar sound bite made by Will during her interviews about Wheeler.

Will is proceeding with legal action against Northwestern. The reporter asked Carter if he planned to file a lawsuit on behalf of his son.

“Hey,” one of his friends interjected, “he hasn’t even buried his son yet.”

*

In the small town of Stevenson, Ala., the parents of Drew Privette and Nick Allen had hoped they were through with the media as they struggled with the task of rebuilding fractured families and lives. Their sons, both football players at North Jackson High, had died in a span of less than a month.

On May 17, Privette, 16, returned home from football practice complaining of a severe headache. Six hours later, he was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

On June 20, Allen, 14, began hyperventilating during a morning workout, complaining to coaches of shortness of breath. Hours later, he too was dead, a victim of a heart arrhythmia known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, compounded by an enlarged heart.

Weeks had passed since they had laid their sons to rest. Two families from the same town, headed by fathers who played football for the North Jackson Chiefs, were grappling with what the counselors call “the healing process,” trying to cope with incalculable loss.

Yet when a reporter from Los Angeles came calling in early August, both families consented to a group interview, the Allens phoning the Privettes and inviting them over to the house.

For nearly two hours, the stories came pouring out.

Don and Ann Privette talked of how Drew filled out an organ donor card on the day he got his driver’s license. He became interested in the program while watching Oprah Winfrey discuss it on one of her talk shows.

A month after burying their son, the Privettes received in the mail a list of people who had received Drew’s organs. The boy’s heart was now beating inside the chest of a 57-year-old man in Washington. Other desperate patients received Drew’s kidneys, his eyes, his liver.

“It helps, you know,” Ann Privette said. “It’s something. Drew’s heart is still alive.”

Tim and Debbie Allen spoke with pride about how much Nick had studied to improve his grades. In June, the mail brought news that Nick had made the National Junior Honor Society as a freshman. The notification letter arrived the day of Nick’s funeral.

North Jackson has a strong football program--the Chiefs are ranked No. 5 in the state in their class in preseason polls. Privette and Allen were only two young faces in the supporting cast. Last season, Privette was credited with three tackles. Allen was a reserve on the freshman team. They weren’t stars. They simply wanted to participate in a game they loved, a game that so captivated Nick that he taped every televised Alabama game while dutifully editing out the commercials.

They were a million miles removed from Korey Stringer’s world.

“I don’t understand why people are trying to tie what happened here with what has happened at those colleges or with the Vikings,” Tim Allen said.

“What happened here was that two boys from the same team died. But it had nothing to do with football. I don’t know what the reasons were, but it wasn’t about football.”

The Men and the Boys

The little boy in the casket was 13 years old. Undersized for his age, he looked even younger. He weighed barely 100 pounds. At Jasper County Middle School in Monticello, Ga., where he had played on the football team as a receiver and a defensive back, his height had been listed as 4 feet 9 inches.

Two footballs had been placed beneath the casket, but anyone who knew Jamarious Derez Bennett knew that he never really identified himself as a football player.

“Football was not his real love,” the boy’s father, Patrick Bennett, said.

Derez was buried with tokens of his real affection. He was dressed in a black, long-sleeved T-shirt bearing a neon green motorcycle logo. Inside the casket, alongside his body, lay a motocross magazine and three unopened packages containing toy mini-bikes.

Toys. The kind of playthings Derez kept inside his bedroom at home in Shady Dale: a big red fire engine, a tin box filled with tiny finger skateboards and Popsicle sticks he was using to build a halfpipe for his finger skateboards.

He was still just a boy. A little kid.

*

Curtis Jones had a son older than Derez Bennett. He had four children in all, the youngest 16 months, the oldest 14 years.

At 34, he was an assistant football coach at Granger High in Salt Lake City, pulling in $14 an hour on his teacher’s aid wages. To help make ends meet, he worked as a security guard at local concerts. And in his spare time, for no money whatsoever, he played football for the Utah Lyonzz of the U.S. Inside Football League, which is to the Arena League what the Arena League is to the NFL. The low minors.

Technically, Jones played for the Lyonzz for $200 in team equity a game. But the Lyonzz play in front of only a few hundred fans a game and were expected to lose between $40,000 and $50,000 this season. What is the worth of equity in a team so financially strapped it had to borrow equipment from Granger High?

But Jones, a three-sport star at San Pedro High during the early 1980s and a tight end at the University of Utah from 1985-88, was addicted to football. Friends said he still held out hope of playing in the NFL, still dreaming the dream that should have flickered out years ago.

So he kept suiting up for the Lyonzz, making the USIFL his personal fantasy league, until he collapsed in the locker room after an Aug. 5 playoff game against the Northwest Fire.

Half an hour later, Jones was pronounced dead. Cause of death: cardiac arrest.

“It’s a fluke thing,” his wife Daria said. “His heart just gave out.”

Or was it? According to Daria, for three months during 1999, Jones used a supplement called Hydroxycut, which contains ephedrine. He stopped taking the supplement in August 1999, mainly because it was too expensive at $20 a bottle, but medical experts say ephedrine can have lasting effects two years after being ingested.

“I think more than anything he did it to make himself more cut and more lean,” Daria said. “It sure did [work]....He liked to be muscular and he liked to be a body builder, but we kept saying, ‘Next check, next check.’ Our family came first.”

And now?

A football player dies, he gets his name in the paper, maybe his picture too, if he’s local or famous. The National Center on Catastrophic Sport Injury, which keeps data on fatalities in sports, gets another number for its morbid scoreboard. Sportswriters get another string to tie together to see if they can fashion a trend.

The funeral is over, the post-mortems and analyses have been written. And left behind is a family with a hole beyond repair, a circle of friends that has been shattered, a community that pretends it can mend with a couple of victories by the neighborhood varsity.

At Granger High in Salt Lake, senior football player Dencel Alquin wondered how he was going to carry on without Jones’ guidance and support.

“He’s the only reason why I’m playing now,” Alquin said. “He spent extra hours with me after summer school.”

In Luling, Texas, a small town of about 5,500 noted mainly for its annual watermelon festival, the death of 15-year-old Luling High player Steven Taylor amounted to emotional overload.

Taylor has been a popular teammate and classmate, a sophomore expected to start at defensive end and tight end for the varsity, a student pulling in As and Bs. At his funeral, held at the town’s 300-seat civic center, more than 500 mourners packed their way into the building.

Members of the football team arrived wearing their numbered jerseys. Teenagers leaned on each other, weeping and wiping away tears. Anguished wailing rang through the building, with concerned friends waving fans at women in the audience consumed by grief. Several members of Taylor’s family, so distraught, had to be carried from the building.

“I loved Steven, really and truly,” one of Taylor’s teammates, Keith White, told the San Antonio Express-News. “He was way different than everyone else. If you said something smart to him, he wouldn’t say anything back. He’d just smile and walk away. If everyone was like him, this would be a better world.”

Taylor died Aug. 17, barely two hours after finishing a light morning workout with the Luling varsity. It had been a 90-minute walk-through, players wearing helmets, shorts and no pads, lasting from 8 to 9:30 a.m. Mid-day temperatures in central Texas, in mid-August, can be scorching; this morning in Luling, temperatures were in the low 80s, with humidity at 83%.

Luling coaches say Taylor did not complain of discomfort or pain during the session, but at 10:09 that morning, Steven’s mother was placing a 911 call after finding her son on the floor of their house, unconscious and not breathing.

Shortly before noon at a nearby hospital, Taylor was pronounced dead.

The following Monday, classes began at Luling High. Many members of the varsity returned to school wearing armbands bearing Taylor’s name. Another arrived on campus with the word “JUNE” shaved into the back of his head.

“June” was Taylor’s nickname.

Back in Shady Dale, a half-built skateboard ramp, a pet project of Derez Bennett’s, is now a pile of junk. Two days after Derez died, his grandfather tore the ramp apart in a fit of anger and uncontrollable grief.

Patrick Bennett has gone back to work, back to the graveyard shift, back to the daily grind of a machinist. He now goes it alone, without “my little helper,” who used to brighten Bennett’s shift by bringing him water and his time sheets.

Derez had a defective heart, according to the doctors. He died shortly after football practice, playing a sport mainly because it was the thing to do in the fall, just as Little League was the thing you did in the spring.

Derez wanted to be like his dad, who was an amateur stock car racer. He was just another kid who liked to ride skateboards and mini-bikes and go-carts. He turned 13 the Monday before he died and for his birthday, he asked everybody just to give him a few dollars, so he could buy some plywood to finish his skateboard ramp.

That ramp is gone now. What good is a skateboard ramp without the skateboarder?

Life, Games Go On

The games go on, because they always have, always will. The teams move on, because they are under coach’s orders. Already, fans are back in the stands, giving no second thought when the chant goes up to kill the quarterback or nail that coffin-corner punt.

As for the players who did not make it to opening kickoff, their memories will fade over time. Some will linger longer than others, their names kept in circulation by ongoing litigation, their numbers embroidered on black patches adorning the jerseys of their former teammates.

Or, in the case of Korey Stringer, they might be remembered as long as video gamers continue to plug “John Madden 2001” into the console.

On the day after Stringer’s funeral, at the Vikings’ training complex in Mankato, the lobby of the players’ dormitory was ringing with laughter. Quarterback Daunte Culpepper was howling. Moss and Cris Carter were exchanging high-fives.

The players had just received an advance copy of the video game--Culpepper is pictured on the cover--and were giving it a test run, watching Virtual Culpepper drop back to pass and overthrow Virtual Carter.

Look closely as Culpepper lines up over center. To his immediate right, hunched over in a hulking three-point stance, is the Vikings’ familiar No. 77.

Korey Stringer, the ghost in the machine.

Initially, a sales rep for the game was hesitant to make the trip to Mankato, considering the circumstances. But Coach Dennis Green insisted.

“You’ve got to come,” Green told her. “It will help take their minds off it.”

That, then, after a summer of sorrow, has become a new role for the sport.

Football as diversion.

Football as pacifier.

Football as an adhesive for heartbreak.

Three days after Clinton Central High’s Stowers died in an Indianapolis hospital, Stowers’ grandfather, Max, was in the bleachers, cheering on the team as it played its first preseason scrimmage against Northwestern High.

On the field below, wearing Travis’ old No. 76, was freshman Jared Stowers, the dead boy’s younger brother and another of Max’s grandsons.

Max said he had to be there.

Reason?

“I still have one to root for.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

ABOUT THIS STORY

After Rashidi Wheeler’s death, The Times decided to dig deeper than the daily dispatches of death, to travel to the scenes of the tragedies and report on the reasons and reactions. Mike Bresnahan reported from Salt Lake City; Alan Abrahamson from Chicago; Lance Pugmire from Chicago and the Inland Empire; Diane Pucin from Indiana and Alabama; Steve Springer from Florida and Sam Farmer from Minnesota, Iowa, Georgia and Texas. Rob Fernas, Chris Dufresne and Mike Penner reported from Los Angeles and Penner wrote the accompanying overview story.

Bill Dwyre, Times Sports Editor