by Jim Trotter
16
High Point, Low Moment
ON AUGUST 27, 2011, the Chargers announced plans to make Junior the 35th inductee in their Hall of Fame. It was their way of paying homage to not only one of the game’s all-time greats but also a community icon. The announcement was accompanied by a written statement from team chairman and president Dean Spanos.
“From the day we drafted Junior, we knew he was special,” it read. “He’s such an energized, charismatic person. He attacks life the same way he attacked ball-carriers. It’s that passion that turned him into the Hall of Fame player he is. His athletic ability speaks for itself, but it’s his passion and energy that separate him from the rest of the league. It’s that same passion for life that has made him an icon in San Diego. He is San Diego in so many ways . . . in how he has represented himself on and off the field, and how he has been there to help and support the community when and where it’s needed. Junior is such a unique person, so full of life, and that rubs off on everyone around him, including me. I’m blessed by his friendship.”
The ceremony would take place exactly three months to the day later, at halftime of the team’s sold-out game against the visiting Denver Broncos. Typical of Junior, he acknowledged the honor with humility and humor, thanking the Spanos family but adding: “I think Dean still owes me a dollar from the golf course, but we won’t bring that up.”
“You don’t plan on something like this,” Junior said, in all seriousness, a few days before the ceremony. “You just go through your journey and hope that someday you get a little love back and some respect. But the honor that we’re receiving Sunday is going to be overwhelming. I don’t know how I’m going to react. I really don’t.”
When November 27 arrived, a blanket of sunshine fell over the city. It was a perfect afternoon for a game and a tribute. Junior planned to meet a few family members and friends at his restaurant beforehand, then take a limo to Qualcomm Stadium. He was dressed in a dark-blue suit with faint pinstripes, a white dress shirt, and a patterned lavender tie. He also wore a Samoan money lei around his neck.
It was supposed to be one of the greatest days in his life. It turned out to be one of the worst.
It began with his son Jake refusing to accept an invitation to attend the event. Jake was still angry that his father had failed to reciprocate with the same kind of support and compassion for Gina that she had shown for him after the cliff incident. The backstory: Gina had suffered a serious hamstring injury that required surgery, followed by three months on crutches. She asked Junior to take Jake, the second of their three children—Sydney was the oldest, Hunter the youngest—to a lacrosse tournament while she was rehabbing. He agreed, but failed to show up the morning they were scheduled to leave.
Jake was livid. Another family member took him to the tourney, and the next time he saw his father he confronted him. Jake’s anger was not about the one incident, but an accumulation of occasions when Junior had failed to spend time with the kids.
“It was a combination of things, and me growing up and becoming aware of our relationship—or lack thereof,” Jake said. “It was a moment where I decided I was sick of waiting and I was going to bring it up to him, and I wasn’t going to let him do what he normally did, which was kind of ignore what you were saying. That was a big step in our relationship, me trying to reach out to him and not give him the option of pushing it under the rug.
“He didn’t take it very well, but I wanted him to know that we wanted him around more. I thought we could see him more often and spend more time with him than we were getting. He didn’t like that I called him out on it. I probably didn’t say it very gracefully either; I was pretty angry and pretty aggressive. I doubt that a lot of people had spoken to him like that in a long time.”
By the time the Ring of Honor ceremony rolled around, his emotions from that argument remained raw, which was why Jake decided to stay home.
“I don’t think it would’ve been appropriate for me to go at that time,” Jake said. “I wanted to support him, but at the same time I wanted him to know that what I wanted from our relationship was more than he was giving. That was a way for me to do that.”
Tension between Junior and his kids was nothing new. In their eyes, he often allowed football and socializing to take priority over them. He would promise to do something with them, such as attending one of their athletic events, then arrive late or not at all. Even in serious situations he could not be counted on to be there, such as in September 2010 when Sydney had an appendicitis attack and was taken to the hospital. Gina phoned Junior so he could join them, but he was drunk at the Taste of La Jolla and failed to show.
The strained relationship between him and Tyler—the son he had with his high school and college sweetheart Melissa Waldrop—was the most volatile. Tyler rightfully felt like the forgotten one—or at a minimum, the overlooked one. Media reports often talked about Junior’s three kids, ignoring Tyler’s very existence. If that was not painful enough, there was the fact that Junior, early in his marriage to Gina, had sought a paternity test to confirm that Tyler was his son.
Everyone knew the child was his. He and Melissa had met as teenagers, and she was crazy about him because he was her first love. Teammates at USC used to smile at how he would carry Tyler in one hand, tucking him against his body as if he were a football.
Only Junior knew why he requested the test, but he later told Melissa that he regretted doing it. It caused a strain not only between the two of them but also between him and Tyler when Tyler got older. Tyler often felt as if he was not as important to his father as his other kids; Junior did not regularly visit him on holidays, and when he took his family to the Pro Bowl, Tyler was never included. Junior shrugged it off by saying he didn’t want the “drama” of dealing with Melissa.
In March 2010, Tyler confronted his father about the years of “living in the shadows” of Junior’s family. “I told him, ‘I want you to be part of my life. If you want to be, that’s awesome. If you don’t want to be, it’s okay, but I need to know. I don’t want to wait around to hear from you, and be mad and upset.’ He told me, ‘We’ll never get those early years back.’ I cried, and he cried. But I didn’t feel that emotional connection with him.”
Instead of improving, their relationship continued to fracture. Junior was upset that Tyler had gotten his girlfriend pregnant while at Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississippi. He had spoken to him about not following in his footsteps of being an unwed parent. When Tyler left school before graduating, Junior was furious. He gave him a job at the restaurant, but he rode him hard and showed no favoritism.
Sydney? She was another story.
“The tone of his voice changed when he was talking to Sydney,” said former girlfriend Megan Noderer. “He always ended calls with her by saying, ‘You know I love you, right?’ That was a line reserved for Sydney.”
She had his heart not only because she was his only daughter, but also because she was a virtual replica of him. Her smile could fill a room, just as his could. And her spirit was as bright as her eyes, just as his was. She also possessed that special ability to disarm people with her words and gentle touch, just as her father could.
The two were so close that Sydney often made excuses for Junior when he failed to call or visit. But in late 2011, after not hearing from him for nearly four months, she too confronted him.
“I was used to him taking breaks and then randomly texting me and telling me that he loved me,” she said, “and from there I’d fall right back into it and forgive and forget and do the whole thing over again. But this time was different. He literally fell off the face of the earth and didn’t text me, didn’t call me, didn’t try to reach out to me for four months. It freaked me out.”
In the meantime, Sydney had to write a parent profile for an advanced-placement language class in school. She chose to focus on Junior and listed all her resentments toward him and frustrations with him. When she finally stopped writing, she had
filled 11 pages. Later she used the contents of the profile to write a letter to her father; then she set up a meeting with him so she could deliver it personally.
“I just texted him and told him that I would meet him at his house at a particular time, and I did,” she said.
She hadn’t planned to say much before handing him the letter, but almost immediately she began speaking from the heart.
“If I’m the one girl in your life, why can’t you make time for me?” she said. “All I do is try to be the adult in the situation and find time for you and love you and show you how much I need you in my life, and you just decide to ignore me, and it hurts because all I want to do is make you happy.”
Junior, with tears streaming down his face, sat on a couch and said nothing.
“He just sat there and looked past me at the wall,” Sydney said. “He didn’t come to console me, didn’t touch me, didn’t ask if I was okay. I just spilled everything for 30 to 40 minutes and then asked him what he thought. He looked at me and said, ‘Syd, I don’t know how to love.’”
Sydney was shocked.
“‘What do you mean?’” she said she told him. “‘I love you so much, and I know you love me too. Why is it so hard?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know how to do it anymore.’ He was breaking down. That’s when I knew something was wrong, because he was shutting down as a person. I could tell he wanted to reach out, and he wanted to be the person he was before, but he couldn’t. Physically and emotionally it was becoming too much for him.”
When there were no more words to say, despite the two failing to come to some sort of resolution, Junior told Sydney he wanted to take her to dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant so she could try the gumbo.
“Gumbo? I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’” Sydney said. “Of all things, I just finish crying my eyes out, they’re puffy and red, and he wants to take me for gumbo. I barely touched any of it. Then he made sure I got home safe. Every time I got in the car he had me text him immediately when I got home, and if I didn’t text him he’d call and say, ‘Okay, you know I love you, right?’ And I would say, ‘I love you too. I’m fine. Go to bed.’”
Sydney was always the quickest to forgive her dad, and as the Ring of Honor ceremony approached she sought to have all of her brothers attend. Jake continued to refuse the invitation, though, so only Tyler and Hunter agreed to go in the end. Everyone was supposed to meet at Seau’s The Restaurant and ride to the stadium in the limo, but as was typical of big events in Junior’s life, more people showed up than were invited—and everyone wanted a spot in the limo.
Before long, attitudes flared and tensions escalated. Frustrated and angry, Junior put his family in the limo and had a staff member call him a cab, which he took to the stadium. On the ride over, he phoned Gina.
“Here I am, throwing my own party again—free drinks, free food,” he said. “Are you sure you and Jake aren’t going to come?”
“No, I’m going to support Jake,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I can’t wait to get this fucking day over with,” he said.
No one at the game knew what was going on, but there was an air of uneasiness surrounding Junior. Normally charismatic and preacher-like when holding a microphone, he went through the motions during a speech that lasted just over three minutes. He thanked ownership, the equipment staff, and the team doctors. He prayed for the servicemen and -women around the world. He asked kids to work for today, build for tomorrow, and pray for the rest, the familiar tagline he attached to his public speeches.
But the passion was not there. The speech was more like painting by numbers. It lacked passion and purpose.
“I had no idea what strain he was under because he wouldn’t tell me anything,” Sydney said. “Of course, I could tell something was going on by the way he reacted to people. He wasn’t, like, alive. He was just going through the motions.”
When the ceremony ended, Junior walked off the field, down a dim tunnel, and out to the parking lot. He was accompanied by Megan Noderer, his girlfriend of only two months, Megan’s sister-in-law, and his son Hunter. Unable to locate his limo, he loaded everyone into a cab and headed back to the restaurant. The place was bustling with activity, but he wanted no part of it. He stood along the second-floor railing outside his office and gazed at the people below.
“I am the inductee, I am the one who people are supposed to be celebrating, and everybody is mad at me,” he told James Velasco, the restaurant’s GM. “The city of San Diego is celebrating me, and I have to throw my own party.”
It wasn’t the first time his heart had been filled with equal parts frustration, sadness, and anger because he felt unappreciated by family. Melissa Waldrop, the girlfriend who knew him before the rest of the world did, remembers being with him in the VIP area during a party at his restaurant.
“He looks at me and says, ‘I don’t know a single person in here,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, but you know me.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re the only one that really knows me.’ Then he embraced me and hugged me. There’s always been that burden since early in his career that he felt a responsibility to take care of his family. It was like a ripple effect. It went beyond just taking care of his parents and kids. It was everyone.”
On one of the biggest days of his life, the man with so much life and passion watched, unsmiling, as other people celebrated. Then he slipped out of his restaurant with Noderer and her brother and his wife, got in a car, and drove home. He may have been surrounded by many, but he felt alone.
A week or so later, he and Jake met for breakfast and talked things out. “He apologized and said that I was right,” Jake recalled. “My motive was to spend more time with him, and the way things were, I was spending absolutely no time with him. It was interesting. We moved past it, but I don’t think everything was necessarily fixed. We settled the fight, but nothing really changed.”
Junior and Jake had no contact over the next few weeks, but on Christmas Day 2011 Sydney persuaded Jake to go with her to Junior’s house. Jake didn’t want to go; he was still dealing with his anger and frustration. Junior beamed when the kids arrived. For the rest of the evening they all laughed and hung out with friends who were visiting and had a good time, so much so that Sydney and Jake spent the night.
“We were dancing and singing and listening to music,” Jake said. “It’s one of my best memories with him. It was probably the first time we hung out together where we weren’t at a formal dinner or something. We just had fun.”
17
“I Knew He Was Going to Have a Hard Time with Life After Football”
DURING ONE WEEKEND in April 2012, Hunter Seau spent the weekend at his dad’s beachfront home. Junior was making an effort to be more accessible to his kids, and Hunter, a thoughtful and sensitive 11-year-old, loved when they could just hang out and enjoy the beach or visit the golf course.
On this particular night, when Hunter got out of bed at 3:00 AM to let the dog outside, he noticed a light in his dad’s room. When he peeked inside, he saw Junior sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at a TV that was not even on.
“Dad, are you okay?”
“Yes, son. I’m fine.”
Junior had suffered from insomnia dating back to high school. His condition was particularly acute during his NFL career, when he had trouble shutting off his mind the night before games. He often coped by taking Ambien, the most commonly known brand name for the prescription drug zolpidem.
Zolpidem is not without potentially serious side effects, though. The manufacturer cautions that suicidal thoughts or actions have occurred among people who have taken it, and the accompanying instructions warn that it should not be taken with alcohol.
Junior drank regularly—and sometimes heavily. His alcohol of choice was Belvedere vodka, but later in his life he also took a liking to Jameson Irish Whiskey. When he couldn’t sleep after an all-night bender, he sometimes would pop a sleeping pill to help him rest. The dange
r: depression is one of the potential side effects when mixing Ambien and alcohol.
Mary noticed a difference in her brother earlier in the year and was concerned about him.
“You look tired,” she told him. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Something is going on,” she said.
“You know me too well,” he answered.
The two talked about the family and financial strains he was feeling. It was wearing on Junior, who for years had been stressing to his parents and close family members that they needed to stop looking at him as the highest-paid defensive player in the NFL. He was now retired, with a significantly reduced cash flow.
Annette, his other sister, began realizing something was wrong even before Mary did. The most telling sign came in August 2011, when he allowed her to pick up the check after she and her husband had dined with him and a female friend in Dana Point, California.
“Junior never allows me to buy anything, so when we went out this time I said, ‘Put your wallet away, I’m paying. I’m tired of you paying for everything,’” she said. “When he put his wallet away, my husband said, ‘Something is going on.’ It was weird that he let me pay.”