Junior Seau

by Jim Trotter

  2

  Success and Shame: One and the Same

  JUNIOR ALWAYS LOVED being the Big Man on Campus in high school. At six feet, three inches, and 215 pounds, his shoulders were broad enough to carry the responsibility that came with it. Or so he thought.

  Midway through his senior year, his knees began to buckle from the weight of being one of the most sought-after high school football players in the country. College head coaches were showing up at his basketball practices and games, and recruiters regularly waited in cars outside his home or called the campus pay phones in search of him. Ohio State coach John Cooper was preparing to lead his Buckeyes onto the field for the Rose Bowl when he stopped and phoned Junior from the locker room. Things were so crazy that Junior spent some nights at an uncle’s place to find peace. Other times he slept at his girlfriend’s house.

  Don Montamble, Oceanside’s first-year basketball coach, realized something was wrong during a midseason practice. Junior was supposed to flash to the high post, catch the ball, then turn and make an entry pass to the low post, where a screen had been set for the center. Instead, Junior took the pass, turned, and launched a 20-foot fadeaway jumper. Montamble blew his whistle. “Do it right,” he said. “Run it again.”

  Junior shot an irritated look at him that was completely out of character. He always had been respectful of his coaches, regardless of how he felt about them. But this was clearly an attempt to show up Montamble. The coach let it slide until Junior flashed to the high post, caught the ball, and shot a What now?! look in Montamble’s direction after putting up another 20-foot fadeaway jumper.

  “I was incredulous,” Montamble said. “I blew my whistle again and was yelling as I walked toward him.”

  Junior didn’t retreat. To the contrary, he began walking toward Montamble, who was only eight years older than him. Everyone in the gym froze in astonishment. Is this really happening? they thought to themselves.

  Separated by inches, Montamble screamed in his star player’s face. Junior said nothing, but his anger was obvious. His nostrils tended to flare when he got mad, and by this time you could fit a basketball up them. Junior tore off his reversible jersey and threw it down. With Montamble still railing, Junior turned and walked toward the exit.

  “If you take one more step through that door, you’re done!” Montamble shouted. “You won’t play another minute of Pirate basketball the rest of your career here, so you better think about that!” He then turned to the team, put a reserve in for Junior, and told the players to run the play correctly. He was watching his players, but his mind was racing with the potential fallout of a 26-year-old first-year coach booting the star player off the team. But he also wanted to remain strong. There had to be boundaries. You know what’s right, he said to himself. No athlete can pull this crap without accepting the consequences.

  Junior stood in the doorway, facing the exit, for at least five minutes—until the team finished its drill and started shooting free throws, which typically signaled the end of practice. Then he turned and walked to the bleachers, where he sat by himself. Montamble knew he had Junior the minute he returned, but he wanted to push a little harder because he viewed it as a teachable moment. He walked over and sat next to him without looking at him. “The next thing that happens is, you don’t get another second of play time until you apologize to this team,” he said. “We’re focused on winning a championship, and you pull this shit? It’s inexcusable, and you’re not going to play until you apologize.”

  Montamble got up and walked away. If he knew Junior as well as he thought he did, he figured the multi-sport star would cool off and address the team at some point—if not that moment, then later. It was the day before a game, which meant mandatory postpractice video study. When everyone arrived in the room just off the gym, Junior was sitting in the front, waiting. He typically was the last player to arrive, so this got everyone’s attention. Montamble began to speak to the team when Junior interrupted and asked to address the squad. When the coaches started to leave, he asked them to stay. Suddenly, tears were rolling down his cheeks. “I sincerely apologize to all of you for what I did,” he said. “It’s something I would never encourage anybody to do. It was wrong. It’s something I know I shouldn’t have done. I need to be punished, and I’m willing to accept anything that Coach wants to levy in terms of punishment. Don’t think bad of Coach; I put him in that situation, and it’s not going to happen again.”

  Montamble broke the meeting and everyone left—except Junior. For the next five minutes, coach and player cried behind the closed door. Junior revealed that the pressures of being recruited were too much for him. He thought the attention and courtships would be fun, but now he wanted to hide. He felt like a grenade whose pin had been pulled, and it was a matter of time before his emotions exploded. Montamble’s heart raced with empathy and anger. He thought: Someone needs to help this kid! Why has no one helped this kid?!

  Junior’s parents had never been through the process and were unaware of the pressure their son was feeling. Montamble figured that since he was spending more after-school time with Junior than anyone, he would take a mentorship role. He and Junior sat in the room and mapped out a plan. First, Junior would use the weekend to narrow his list of five finalists: Colorado, USC, UCLA, Texas, Arizona State. Second, there would be new rules for recruiters: no contact during the day until practice was over, and no contact at all on game days.

  UCLA and Texas were the first to be erased from the list, and Junior immediately felt a sense of relief. Texas was too far away, so eliminating the Longhorns was easy. UCLA was trickier. Almost from the beginning his father had been supportive of the Bruins. They had won five straight postseason games under Terry Donahue, including three Rose Bowls. They also were close to home. But Junior didn’t hit it off with Donahue. He never said what it was, but something didn’t feel right. So he took UCLA off the list without notifying the school. When word trickled back to the Westwood campus, a Bruins recruiter showed up on the Oceanside campus. He was extremely angry, if not belligerent. He told Montamble that he wanted to see Junior.

  Basketball practice was about to start, and Montamble reminded the recruiter of the new rules. Didn’t matter—he wanted to see Junior immediately. “Not going to happen,” Montamble said. Words were exchanged, some not so nice. Montamble turned, walked into the gym, and shut the door. If UCLA needed confirmation that it was off the list, it now had it.

  That left Colorado, Arizona State, and USC—until two Arizona State coaches showed up at Junior’s basketball game at San Pasqual. Whether they knew about the new guidelines prohibiting such contact is unknown. But they thought they were okay because Scaffidi, the football coach, brought them to the game. Junior spotted them and immediately felt anxious and irritated. The weight that had lifted from his shoulders was back.

  “I’m in the gym being interviewed by the media, and my assistant’s in the locker room supervising the kids, like he always did, and Junior comes out of the locker room into an empty gym and starts knocking over chairs and screaming,” Montamble said. “I had to calm him down. Normally the players all ride the bus back to school, but that night I had him go out a back door so his family could drive him home.” Arizona State was definitely off the list now, even though Junior didn’t say so.

  That left Colorado and USC. Colorado was the clear front-runner in Junior’s mind. The Buffaloes had done a great job tilling Oceanside’s fertile soil for Polynesian talent, and Junior loved the idea of reconnecting with his cousin, Sal Aunese, and former Oceanside teammate Okland Salavea, both of whom were already at Colorado, a year ahead of him. In addition to being a star quarterback at Vista High, Aunese had competed with Junior on their church team and at the Boys & Girls Club. Salavea had been a standout linebacker at Oceanside and played center on the basketball team. His girlfriend also was close to Waldrop, Junior’s girlfriend.

  When Junior returned from a recruiting visit to Boulder, he told some friends and family
he was going to attend Colorado. It might have been the worst-kept secret in recruiting, and yet, when National Letter of Intent Day rolled around, he did not sign with the Buffaloes—or with anyone else.

  The long-standing story is that his father stepped in and quashed the idea of him going to Boulder because it was too far away and the family wouldn’t be able to see him play. Not true. Papa Seau actually told Junior that he’d support whatever decision he made, though he stressed that he wanted to be able to see him play (UCLA was his first choice). Mama Seau was the one who cautioned Junior that he’d be far from home without any immediate family. She didn’t tell him he couldn’t go; she just told him to seriously think about what it would mean if he did.

  When news reached the USC offices that Junior was still on the market, the coaches were ecstatic. “I’ll admit, I was nervous as hell going into signing day,” said Gary Bernardi, who was recruiting Junior for the Trojans. The staff worried that his signing with the Buffaloes . . . or someone else . . . was a fait accompli. Junior had not made an official visit to the USC campus, even though several weeks earlier he had promised new coach Larry Smith and Bernardi that he would do so. Deep down, Bernardi kept holding on to the fact that Junior had given him his word he would visit the university. He believed that Junior was a young man of integrity, but he also knew the realities of the recruiting world. USC had lost track of Junior for a two- or three-week period as it transitioned from the fired Ted Tollner to Smith, who was coming over from the University of Arizona with barely a month to go until signing day. Bernardi, who had been recruiting Junior to attend Arizona, suddenly had to switch gears and sell him on the virtues of USC, which had managed only one bowl victory over the previous seven years. The USC staff had every right to believe it was out of the picture.

  But Junior proved to be a man of his word: the day after not signing with anyone, he agreed to make a visit to USC that weekend. “At that point the coaches pretty much got everybody involved,” said future Chicago Bears safety Mark Carrier, one of Junior’s hosts that weekend. “We put a full-court press on him. It was like, ‘If we get this guy on campus, we can’t let him leave.’ When I met him, I remember thinking, Holy smokes. Ain’t nobody on our team who looks like that.”

  Junior needed to make a decision. The process had dragged on long enough. So he agreed to one final home visit from each of the schools on Tuesday and Wednesday. Whether by coincidence or strategy, the Trojans were the last to see him. Junior called his father and told him not to leave the house because Smith and Bernardi were coming by. “Smith told me and Junior, ‘I don’t care what school you go to, I still support you guys and I still love you guys,’” Papa Seau recalled. When the meeting was over, the youngster asked his parents to wait inside while he walked Smith to his car. The gesture got their attention because Junior had not walked any other coach beyond the front door. When he returned, he told his mom and dad he was going to sign with the Trojans. He didn’t tell that to Smith at the car, but he did break the news to him the next day.

  The celebration proved to be short-lived, though, as Junior later failed to achieve the required qualifying score on his college entrance exam to be eligible to compete as a freshman. He fell victim to Proposition 48—NCAA legislation implemented in 1986 that required incoming student-athletes to have at least a 700 (out of a possible 1,600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), or a comparable score on the American College Test (ACT), as well as at least a 2.0 (out of 4.0) grade point average in 11 core high school courses. The legislation was an attempt to improve graduation rates among student-athletes, which among Division I scholarship players in the early 1980s was 33 percent for basketball players and 37.5 percent for football players. Sports Illustrated reported that the graduation rates for black student-athletes in those sports were even lower: 29 percent for the freshman classes of 1984 and ’85, the last classes to be admitted before Prop 48 was enacted.

  Critics panned the legislation because they believed it would negatively impact minorities from disadvantaged backgrounds. They claimed the entrance exams were culturally biased at best, and racist at worst. Junior had the grades, with a 3.6 average, but not the test score. He took the SAT multiple times—even once verbally because Samoan, not English, was considered the first language in his home—but still came up 10 points shy of the required score.

  He was at school when he learned that he had come up short on his final attempt. He called his sister Annette and asked if their parents were at the house. When she said yes, he told her he was going to call right back and asked her to stay by the phone. He wanted her to be there when he broke the bad news to his father.

  “Education was the main thing in this house,” said Annette. “First there was God, then family, then education. Sports came later. When Junior told Dad he didn’t pass the test, Dad was pretty upset. Junior had to calm him down. When he did, Dad said, ‘Do your school and get ready for next year.’”

  Junior felt like a failure, and it weighed on him. He thought he had shamed not only his family name but also his school and his community. People talked as if his 3.6 GPA had been handed to him. He even publicly apologized to the student body during an assembly, and later he went into semi-seclusion.

  “He didn’t want to show his face,” Waldrop said. “The shame, the responsibility that he felt—it broke my heart to watch him go through that. He would hide at my house.”

  If the silence he heard from his father after losses was unnerving, the treatment he received after failing to earn those final 10 points was tragic. The Polynesian community in Oceanside is extremely close. The church serves as ground zero for many events, and First Congregational Christian Church of Oceanside (though located in Vista) is where many husbands and fathers gather to discuss the topics of the day, including their children. For Junior’s father, a proud man whose grandfather was a village chief in Pago Pago, it was difficult to accept that his son had not fulfilled his responsibilities and that friends and outsiders were looking down at him.

  “When my dad realized that people were talking, things got worse,” Annette said. “They were saying things like, ‘Whatever happened to his son? His son was supposed to be the best.’ It got really bad. He had to go to the church and hear the talk in the back of his ear, ‘Oh, how proud of his son is he now?’ It was hard for both of them, but especially him because he’s a deacon and he preaches. He had to keep a straight face and do the work of God and support Junior. But Junior took it really hard.”

  “Nobody stuck up for me—not our relatives, best friends, or neighbors,” Junior later told Sports Illustrated. “There’s a lot of jealousy among Samoans, not wanting others to get ahead in life, and my parents got an earful at church: ‘We told you he was never going to make it.’”

  When he left for USC, the only thing he received from his parents was a hug from his mother. Melissa hosted a barbecue for him and some close friends, but that was it. The two of them sat on the tailgate of his truck, his personal belongings in the back, and said their good-byes through tear-filled eyes.

  Once on campus, he felt isolated and alone because Prop 48 guidelines prohibited him from practicing, attending meetings, training, or eating with the team. He’d call Melissa every day, and she’d sit on the floor in their dining room—her family didn’t have a cordless phone—and talk with him for hours. “When are you coming? When are you going to get here?” he’d ask.

  Melissa was a year behind Junior but planned to graduate a semester early and move to Los Angeles, where they would get a place together. Until then, they had to settle for him returning on the weekends. Sometimes he’d stay at her house without telling his parents he was in town. The pressure and shame he felt was that significant. So was his fear of feeling insignificant. On multiple occasions, before visiting the house, he’d call to see if his dad was home. If he was there, Junior would ask Annette to meet him someplace else so they could visit. Or he’d wait until his father was gone so he could see his mother.


  “My dad was very embarrassed,” said Mary. “He didn’t even talk to Junior. It killed Junior not being addressed. It killed him that other people around him, people that he trusted, didn’t stay in touch with him and believe in him until he started playing. He told me on the phone one day, ‘Forget these people who don’t believe in me.’”

  There was little solace on campus either. Junior’s contact with the players was minimal. “You didn’t really think about him because he wasn’t around,” said outside linebacker Michael Williams, who in 1989 started at outside linebacker and roomed with Junior on the road. “You knew you had this guy who was sitting out and would be a part of the team at some point, but when you’re practicing day in and day out, you’re focused on the guys around you.”

  Typically, Junior left the weight room just as the team entered it. Sometimes a player would mock him—“Look at that dumb jock”—but he never reacted. Not until his patience wore thin one afternoon when someone included a derisive remark about his heritage in the comment. “That’s it,” Junior calmly replied. “Meet me outside.”

  Junior ended the fight fairly quickly, though he broke his hand in the process. Teammates contended that they weren’t sure which player was involved in the fight, but the bread crumbs appeared to lead to linebacker Craig Hartsuyker, who admitted to getting into a scrap with Junior.