League of Denial (46 page)

On February 17, 2011, police were summoned to a luxury condo in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a spit of land north of Miami. The condo, Ocean One, towered over the turquoise water. At 2:51
P.M.
, the police entered Unit 603. The tenant hadn’t responded to his fiancée’s calls or the building manager pounding on the door. Once inside, officers found the apartment immaculate, the air tinged with the smell of a cigar. The police announced their presence, but no one responded. The officers made their way through the apartment room by room, arriving finally at the master bedroom, where a large man lay nude on top of the bed, a blanket drawn up to his neck, a chrome Taurus .38 Special by his
side. The man had a single gunshot wound on the left side of his chest, just below the nipple.

Up to that moment, to the extent that Dave Duerson had played a role in the NFL’s concussion crisis, it was as a lightning rod for many retired players, who saw him as a traitor and a fellow traveler with the worst of the league’s deniers. The former Bears safety had been very much a part of the system. As a player rep on the Bert Bell retirement board, he had turned down numerous disability claims from broken men. Records show that Duerson
cast a proxy vote when the board unanimously rejected Webster’s appeal for full benefits in 2003. During the 2007 congressional hearings on the retirement system, Duerson invoked his 84-year-old father’s Alzheimer’s disease as proof that football didn’t cause brain damage.

But that wasn’t the message Duerson was sending now. Before pulling the trigger, he had staged his condo meticulously. On the living room table were assorted clues, “as if someone’s trying to tell you a story in a room,” said Duerson’s son Tregg. There was a
copy of
Sports Illustrated
from three months earlier with a headline on the cover: “CONCUSSIONS.” The word was superimposed over Steelers linebacker James Harrison demolishing a helpless receiver. “THE HITS THAT ARE CHANGING THE GAME … AND THE HITS NO ONE IS NOTICING,” the cover said. Next to the magazine were two identical binders filled with documents from the retirement board’s Traumatic Brain Injury Evaluation Program. There was
a DVD case for
Trapped: Haitian Nights
, a “psychological thriller that delves into the dark world of Voodoo, deception, and the fragility of the mind.” Duerson had laid out all his disability files, as well as documents indicating that he was preparing to file a workers’ compensation claim related to brain trauma. He was scheduled to fly to California the next month to be assessed by four doctors, including a neurologist.

“It was eerie because you almost kind of felt his presence in the place,” said Duerson’s ex-wife, Alicia, the mother of his four children.

Duerson’s family and friends thought it was as if he were trying to explain himself, to make one final plea for understanding. His suicide note ran five typed pages and had the feel of an instruction manual, which some relatives thought fitting, since Duerson was always telling
people what to do. The note contained no salutation and was titled

“REFERENCE TOPICS FOR LATER.” Those topics included notes on his finances and possessions. Only a small portion addressed Duerson’s thoughts on how football had destroyed him. It was the only part of the note in all caps:

On the last page, almost as if he had just remembered something he had forgotten, Duerson provided a handwritten addendum:

A week after Duerson killed himself,
Time
called him “
Football’s First Martyr.” That was a stretch. Webster, after all, had died nine years earlier. Andre Waters also had turned a gun on himself, and Justin Strzelczyk had chosen to go up in flames. But the act was chilling. Duerson had shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for study. The cool preparation and the contrition his death seemed to signal to all the players he had judged harshly spoke to the horror of the disease.

Duerson didn’t seem like a man who had been destined for this, as if anyone were. He had grown up in Muncie, Indiana,
a star scholar-athlete who was scouted by the Dodgers and chose to play football at Notre Dame. His father spent nearly four decades working on an assembly line for General Motors. Awed by the machinery, Duerson as a small
child would tell his dad: “I want to do that.” “No, son, you want to
own
that,” his father would say. Duerson made the National Honor Society, displaying great drive and ambition and a meticulous attention to detail that would later seem in contrast to his savage approach to the game.

Alicia met Duerson during his freshman year at Notre Dame, and it was hard for her to reconcile the smart, reserved young man she had come to love with the beast he became on the field. On Fridays before game day, Duerson liked to read Jack Tatum’s autobiography,
They Call Me Assassin
, in which the former Raiders safety bragged: “I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.” When Alicia went to meet Duerson after the game near the locker room, she was scared of him, wary of coming close. Duerson was irked and confused. “Get over here and give me a hug,” he said. “I was just playing a game,” he assured her. “I’m fine now. It’s out of my system.”

A third-round pick in the 1983 draft, Duerson became one of the hardest hitters on a Chicago Bears team built around one of the best defenses the game had ever seen. One of Duerson’s closest friends on the Bears was linebacker Otis Wilson. When the two men joined forces on a big hit, they hovered over their victims, barking and howling. The defense became known as the Junkyard Dogs. Duerson, like Tatum, viewed the defensive backfield as a free fire zone. “That was Dave’s thinking,” Alicia said in an interview for this book. “Make them remember the hits and they won’t be coming up the middle that much.”

It didn’t seem to matter if Duerson couldn’t remember the hits as long as they had their desired effect. That was part of the job description: headaches, nausea, “dings,” and, at times, huge gaps in his memory.

“He had a lot of concussions,” said Alicia. “But back then, you know, there was nobody pulling you off to the side. It was just, ‘Shake it off, go back in.’ And I think because there was no real free agency—this is just my opinion—I just think everybody probably tried to kill themselves because you don’t want to not play, then you don’t get the money next year.”

Duerson graduated with honors from Notre Dame and earned a degree in economics. He contemplated running for office someday. He and Alicia saw themselves as a power couple, driven to help others. Duerson ended up playing 11 seasons in the NFL, making the Pro Bowl four times. He served as a Bears player rep and played an important role in
the fight for free agency, gaining the trust of Gene Upshaw, the head of the players union. Duerson thought someday he might succeed Upshaw and told people that Upshaw was grooming him for the position.

After Duerson retired in 1993, he started a career in the food industry. He first bought McDonald’s franchises and then purchased a food distribution company called Fair Oaks Farms. He doubled the company’s annual revenues to more than $60 million, according to a story in
Men’s Journal
magazine that chronicled his rise and fall. Stogie in hand, Duerson looked the part of a successful businessman. He and Alicia were living the high life they had always envisioned for themselves. When they vacationed in Paris, they stayed at five-star hotels, rented a BMW, and flew on the Concorde. Duerson bought a 17-room, 8,000-square-foot house with a four-car garage and a swimming pool in the same neighborhood as Michael Jordan.

Duerson was named to the board of trustees at Notre Dame and also served on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. He earned an MBA through Harvard’s executive training program. He had a beautiful wife and four kids.

“We always knew that the next level we were going higher,” Alicia said of Duerson’s life after football. “David never, ever thought the next level would be going lower.”

When Duerson decided he wanted to be bought out of his ownership stake in Fair Oaks Farms, it was to start his own company, Duerson Foods. That made sense; Duerson always thought he could do things better than everyone else and had had great success with Fair Oaks. But Harold Rice, one of his closest friends, thought it was odd that he was complaining so much about his Fair Oaks partner, Shelly Lavin. Duerson sounded irrational. “He thinks I’m some nigger he can control,” Duerson would say of Lavin. “I’m not his boy.” But Rice chalked it up to Duerson’s bluster and need to demonstrate that he was in charge.

The new business buried Duerson financially. He had leveraged all his assets to create what he hoped would be a meat-distribution empire. Rice said Duerson spent $24 million to launch the company, when he probably should have spent $5 million. “He had emptied all the accounts for Duerson Foods, put everything in that one deal,” Alicia said.

The people closest to him began to see him as reckless and occasionally disconnected from reality. They noticed that Duerson seemed less able to control his emotions, more prone to fits of rage. He lost his temper with employees or exploded in anger at business meetings. During one meeting with Marriott to discuss servicing the hotel chain’s restaurants, Duerson became confrontational. “You guys are looking at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. Alicia, who was working with her husband, watched as the room fell silent. “You got to understand, Dave was 6-2, maybe 230, 240 at that time,” she said. “In a room with little bitty white men, you know what I mean? Sometimes when he got mad, he would have that glare in his eyes. I can’t explain it. It’s like you’re dealing with somebody that’s not rational.”

In February 2005, Duerson traveled to South Bend for a Notre Dame board of trustees meeting. Alicia went with him. They had a nice dinner together and then returned to the hotel, the Morris Inn, where they went to the bar for a drink. Alicia was tired, and so she headed upstairs while Dave stayed to hang out with friends. Shortly afterward, Dave shook her awake. Alicia was certain he wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t himself. Duerson had grown paranoid that she was having an affair, and now he wanted to confront her.

“He wanted to discuss something that was in his head that wasn’t real,” she said. “I was trying to walk him through it to show him how it was not real, but his mind was just so screwed up. And he didn’t believe me, and one thing led to another.”

Duerson had that glare in his eyes. Alicia became scared and tried to get away. A witness described seeing the door fly open and then Alicia being pushed out, her body slamming into the wall. Then, just as quickly, Duerson was calm, aghast at what he had done. Alicia was taken to the hospital for cuts to the head and dizziness. Duerson was charged with misdemeanor battery. The incident cost him his spot as a Notre Dame trustee. Later, he described the incident as a “one-time event” in which he lost control for “three seconds” and his “biggest regret.”

By 2006, Duerson’s life was in free fall. He was forced to shutter Duerson Foods, the big house went into foreclosure, and he divorced Alicia. He moved down to Florida, into the ritzy condo he and Alicia had purchased as a winter getaway when their life was going so well.
Gradually, he began to withdraw from family, friends, and former teammates, creating a new life in Florida built around a facade: He was fine, had plenty of money, and was on the verge of resurrecting his career.

Tregg, a private banking analyst, knew his dad was going through a rough time, and he would call him in Florida and ask, “How’s it going, anything I can do?”

“No, things are going fine,” Duerson would say. “I’m looking at this business. I might buy this business with this guy.”

In reality, Duerson was deep in debt. Alicia claimed he owed her $70,000 in child support, one bank was after him for $9 million, and he was behind on his condo fees. Five months before his death, he filed for bankruptcy.

Duerson had maintained his connections with Upshaw, still hoping against all reason that he might someday lead the union. When Upshaw died suddenly in 2008, Duerson’s dream was revealed to be just that—a dream. But he was allowed to keep his appointment as one of the union’s three voting members on the disability board. The position put him in contact with the growing number of retired players who were seeking benefits for cognitive problems stemming from football. He also was familiar with the league’s ongoing attempts to deal with the problem, mostly through rule changes and fines to limit blows to the head.

If there was a point when Duerson became conflicted by his own worsening condition and his disdain, public and private, for the claims that football caused brain damage, he didn’t show it. Nor did he hide his contempt for what he saw as the softening of the game.

Duerson had a radio show,
Double Time with Double D
, that ran on VoiceAmerica. On October 21, 2010, Duerson told his listeners, “I’m pissed today.”

He lamented the NFL’s crackdown on dangerous head-to-head tackles. He read one of his own Facebook postings: “The Big Hit has been told to turn in his pads and jockstrap.” He read several comments from readers ridiculing the league for trying to “sissify” the sport. At one point, Duerson recalled a 1984 playoff game in which his teammate Todd Bell blasted Redskins running back Joe Washington. “He helicoptered this brother,
helicoptered
him,” Duerson said. “It was a wonderful
hit, it was clean, but based upon what the commissioner is talking about today, they would have suspended Todd on the spot.” Later he added, “I have expressed several times, there is nothing like hearing the air rush out of a man’s body.”