Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  But when Wanda makes up her mind, her mind is made up—and that’s a good thing. She has the right kind of stubbornness. So when she said I had to see a therapist before we had children, that was all I needed to hear.

  Dr. Sandy was in her forties, with an office in midtown Manhattan. I started seeing her in the early 1990s on Fridays before my ABC College Football broadcast. I barely said anything during our first few sessions—this was strange and scary to me—but gradually I warmed up. She really wanted to help, and she was a good listener.

  Eventually we talked more about my childhood than I ever had before. With only a few exceptions I had kept my past to myself, so I didn’t think it was that big a deal. By talking with her, though, I realized that so many things I had taken for granted as normal were far from it. When I opened up enough to tell her my stories, she’d be in tears—and she was a seasoned professional. It was the first time I truly saw how unhealthy my childhood had been. It was cathartic to learn I was not abnormal—as I had always believed. But my childhood was, and I learned that was why I was so incredibly sad so often.

  With Dr. Sandy’s help I started learning how to live in the moment instead of constantly dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. This isn’t easy for me, but it was essential if Wanda and I were going to start a new family. I couldn’t bring all my baggage to a new family and expect things to turn out better for my kids.

  I was making real progress, taking steps I’d never thought I would. Wanda saw this too, and agreed we were ready to have kids. When she became pregnant we were thrilled, but I still didn’t want to have a boy. It would be too easy to fall into my father’s horrible habits if I had a son. I feared I’d find myself pushing and confronting my son the way my father had with me.

  But as silly as it sounds, Wanda promised me she would have a girl, and damned if she didn’t deliver—literally. In the summer of 1989 I held Wanda’s hand while she gave birth naturally, with no epidural for the pain. At that moment I wished the doctor had given me the epidural because Wanda was crushing my hand—but when your wife is giving birth, it’s probably best not to complain about that! I thought I was a pretty tough hockey player, but Wanda showed me something that day. She was amazing.

  I found a deeper love that day for my new daughter, for my wife, and even a little more for myself, than I ever thought possible. I knew I’d need more self-esteem to give all the love I could to this beautiful girl.

  I’d heard the name Aleah only once or twice, and this was before the singer Aaliyah had made the scene. For some reason I absolutely loved that name. I was convinced no other name would have fit her, so in my mind there was never any doubt about our daughter’s name: Aleah. Wanda agreed.

  Aleah Noelle Saunders was six pounds, six ounces of pure angel. As she entered the world, my life changed forever. I was a father, but I was determined not to be the type who thinks his job is done when he pays the bills and puts food on the table. I wanted to be the kind of dad who’d always feel love for his child, even if she angered or disappointed me.

  With Aleah’s arrival, love leaped into the burnt-out hole in my heart. When she was still very small she liked to spend quiet time just lying on my chest. On Sunday mornings I’d place her on my chest, and she’d happily stay there through the afternoon. When the NFL games started, she got excited, as if she could understand what was happening. I think she was more enthralled by the flashing colors than the actual game, but I pretended we were watching the game together.

  Aleah was a quiet baby, but she was very vocal about wanting to be with me. Seeing me walking into a room, she’d squeal and giggle with delight, and that thrilled me. When Aleah was old enough to walk she would reach up for my hand, and when her fingers touched mine, she’d beam. Holding her little hand did more to keep my depression away than anything else could.

  I never imagined that the love I felt for Aleah could be duplicated. I didn’t think I had enough to go around. But when we had Jenna four years later in 1993, it just multiplied. Jenna did almost everything early, and she became my rough-and-tumble little girl, always digging into something for her own amusement. Sometimes I’d just stand outside her room and watch her play and talk gibberish to herself. I wish those early years had lasted forever, but with each milestone reached, I learned to appreciate the present.

  My girls thought I walked on water. Like most dads, I could make them laugh by being silly, like when I’d sing the Spinners’ classic “Rubber Band Man,” with all the pantomime stretching motions. They loved it, and I did too. One time, when Wanda was driving them somewhere, the song came on the car radio and they shouted, “Mommy, they stole Daddy’s song!” When they got home I had some confessing to do.

  The love I have for my children is greater than any I can imagine. That may sound like a given, but for someone who feared he had no love and could never raise children, it’s a bit of a miracle.

  When Aleah was only six we learned she also had diabetes. I blamed myself for passing the disease on to her. I sat by her bedside every night she spent in the hospital and hated myself for it until I realized she’d gotten some of my strength, too. I could see she was scared, but she wasn’t defeated. I saw her withdraw every time the nurse wanted to give her a shot of insulin, but I soon learned that it was partly because she felt her daddy could do it better than anyone else and was confident I’d teach her, which I did. She’s never let it stop her from doing what she wants to do, and that’s something I could only hope for.

  Our daughters have given me a thousand life-changing gifts, but they’ve also given me one new fear. It surfaced years ago, when we spent Aleah’s seventh birthday in Key West, and we both got our ears pierced at the same time. When we were walking back to the hotel, she said, “Daddy, why do you look so sad?”

  “Because,” I said, “you’re growing up so fast.” I should have stopped there, but I couldn’t help but add, “and I don’t want to lose you.”

  Each passing year filled me with both pride and fear. I was proud to see the girls learn to read so well, to compete in sports, and even to pick up lyrics to a song. But each new step forward reminds me they are one step closer to leaving me. Facing this fear has been a constant challenge for me.

  But as they’ve grown older I’ve been relieved to see we’ve not drifted apart but become closer. They’re thick as thieves with their mom, which is not a given in mother-daughter relationships. But they’ve always told me everything, and no topic is off-limits. I was the one they came to when they’d been hurt by a cruel classmate. I was the shoulder they cried on when they first got their periods. Wanda tells me that many girls barely talk to their fathers and don’t even want to be seen with them, but that’s not the case with us.

  A girl’s father is in some ways a daughter’s first boyfriend, the first man to love them, to cherish them, to take them through good times and stand by them during bad times, setting a pattern I hope they will duplicate when they meet someone special down the road. I can’t guarantee that my girls will never do anything wrong, and I can’t prevent bad things from happening to them even if they don’t, but they’ve earned my confidence that they’ll make good decisions.

  Aleah refused to follow the high school crowd that was drinking and partying in the woods. She once confessed to me that she felt left out, but at the same time she had no interest in what they were doing. I told her she’d spend much more of her life as an adult than as a child and that the decisions she made now were ones she’d deal with later. As always, our talk ended in a hug and telling each other “I love you.”

  Jenna recently came home in tears because one of her close friends had begun to drift from her circle. I explained that sometimes life’s most painful disappointments often lead to our most exciting new stages and that her best friends would probably come along a little later in life. She might even reunite with her friend down the road. I held her for a long time, and when we were finished, she was laughing again.

  I am grate
ful beyond words for my daughters—and so glad that, with Wanda’s help, I overcame my fears to take the biggest chance of my life.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Worldwide Leader

  I MIGHT NOT HAVE KNOWN HOW TO SPELL ESPN BEFORE I started working there, but I didn’t need much time to figure out I had arrived at the right spot at exactly the right time. I immediately started hosting SportsCenter, ESPN’s main franchise at the time. The next year ESPN got the rights to cover NFL games, so I joined that studio show. The year after that, 1988, ESPN added Major League Baseball, so I did that too. And in 1990 I became the first on-air talent to cross over from ESPN to ABC to host ABC’s College Football Saturday, which they wanted to restore to its previous luster.

  ESPN in the early days provided the perfect environment to welcome a newcomer. The company was still small enough to have a family feeling, an intimate operation compared to the giant it is now. Most of us were pretty young, just starting families, and learning to behave like sensible adults. I never sensed much jealousy or competitiveness among the staffers. We all just wanted to put out a quality product and prove that we were working for a serious outfit—and that wasn’t a given in the late eighties, when the old guard saw us as little more than a toy store. Our main goal was to make sure ESPN looked as good on the air as the three-letter networks.

  In 1988 ESPN’s executives put me on the Calgary Winter Olympics, ESPN’s first, and we got lucky: Calgary gave us the Jamaican bobsled team and Eddie the Eagle, the ski jumper who seemed to crash as often as he landed safely. Everything we did over those two weeks was new to us, and we shared in each other’s success. It was a great time to be at ESPN.

  I was also forging lifelong friendships. I got to know Bob Ley when we hosted the NCAA basketball tournament together. Chris “Boomer” Berman and I partnered on the NFL studio show and NFL Primetime, and Tom Mees and I worked on the NHL telecasts. All three became close, trusted friends. We lost Tom in a drowning accident in 1996, which I still think about. Bob and Boomer remain two of my best friends to this day.

  I have never been paired with a TV partner I couldn’t work with. I’ve been lucky to have formed some terrific teams in my thirty years at ESPN—Chris Berman on SportsCenter; Barry Melrose on hockey; Dick Vitale on college basketball; Leo Rautins on Toronto Raptors games; Tim Legler, Steven A. Smith, and Greg Anthony in our NBA studio; and Craig James, Jesse Palmer, Mack Brown, and Mark May on college football, to name a few.

  All good friends, but no one was more important to me than James Thomas Valvano. America fell in love with Jimmy V. in 1983 when he led NC State past Houston for the NCAA title, one of the biggest upsets in NCAA history. Then he ran around the court frantically looking for players to hug. On ESPN and ABC he proved to be a natural entertainer and became an instant star.

  He debuted on ABC at the Big Four Classic in Indianapolis in 1990. Before the broadcast had even begun, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. We had the same sense of humor, except he was funnier. I could whisper an observation to Jimmy off the air, and he’d convert it a few seconds later into instant comedy on air. Jimmy just had it.

  After telecasts around the bar or in a restaurant, he’d hold court like Johnny Carson or David Letterman, always the funniest guy in the room. People were drawn to him, and he made them feel like the stars. When we started working together in the studio at ESPN, after every show we’d go to Art Secondo’s Hall of Fame Sports Lounge and talk about politics, the news of the day, or whatever made us laugh. We started taking golf trips together, and during road trips to basketball games on the East Coast we’d drink expensive scotch and tell cheap stories. We’d be back in the studio Wednesday night and then fly out to games on Thursday.

  One Wednesday night we took a limo together for the two-hundred-mile trip from Bristol to Philadelphia. We asked the driver to stock the car with snacks, some club soda, a bottle of scotch, ice, and two whiskey glasses. We had barely pulled out of ESPN’s parking lot when we were on our second drink. By the time we’d reached the highway I had begun to tell Jim stories I hadn’t told anyone: about my father’s beatings, my mother’s transgressions, my drug use, my hospital stays, and, most of all, the recurring depression. Our limo had become a therapy couch on wheels.

  Just by listening, Jim made my stories seem acceptable, almost normal, and that in itself was a huge help, as liberating as the first time I confessed to Anne in Moncton about my dad beating me. Jim didn’t once look as if he were shocked, amazed, or critical. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: this was a guy, after all, who had made his living listening to high school kids, often from tough neighborhoods, tell their stories.

  In an instant, it seemed, I had discovered the father figure I needed—but he was also like a best friend who would never betray me. Then, as if to seal our blood bond, he told me a couple of his secrets, which made me feel as important to him as he had become to me.

  We spent the rest of the ride to Philly laughing harder than I can ever remember. Having already unburdened ourselves, it was pure catharsis. We told jokes, we told stories, we compared our likes and dislikes. Jim loved Sinatra while I loved Public Enemy. Jim loved Martin Scorsese, while I loved Spike Lee. But most importantly we respected whatever the other guy admired. The fact that one of us enjoyed something automatically gave it legitimacy to the other.

  When we arrived at our hotel in Philadelphia, I knew that I was a much richer person than the man who had left Connecticut just three hours earlier.

  Among the many gifts Jim Valvano gave me was the ability to hug. Growing up, I limited my hugs for my Nanny and Aunt Yve, but Jim refused to greet or part without giving me a great big bear hug. When he hugged me the first time, I wasn’t expecting it and probably looked like I was afraid of catching something. But he persisted until I understood that hugging someone is more than a meaningless way to say “howdy.” It’s confirmation that someone actually cares about you and isn’t afraid to show it.

  Jimmy also became a close friend of the family. He started coming to our house when Aleah was just a little girl. She’d always take his hand and haul him around the house, but Jim didn’t just play along. He loved it, laughing and joking with Aleah the whole time.

  Aleah would always pronounce his name as one word. “JimValvano! Come see my room JimValvano! Come watch TV, JimValvano!”

  I had to ask. “Aleah, why do you always call him, JimValvano?”

  “Because, Daddy, on TV you always say, ‘I’m John Saunders, and this is JimValvano.’”

  Well, there you go. That’s how close we were.

  In the early nineties Jim contracted bone cancer, and I was heartbroken. When Jim was in New York for his initial chemotherapy at Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital, Jerry Seinfeld sent over videotapes of his show to cheer him up. Jim and I sat in his room, binging on Seinfeld’s sitcom, laughing as hard as we had in the limo. Even in the throes of a cruel disease, his love of life never left him.

  One morning Jim’s wife, Pam, asked me to stay with him during his ritual recovery from the chemicals designed to kill the tumors that ravaged his body. It’s a rough process, so Pam didn’t want their three girls to see what their dad was going through. I was happy to spare them that, but afterward, when I saw his wife and daughters in the hallway outside his room, I couldn’t help but admire how Nicole, Jamie, and Lee Anne leaned on each other and drew strength from each other. At this time Aleah was still an only child. Seeing Jim’s girls like that really made an impression on me.

  On the way home that night I called Wanda to say I would never want Aleah to have to go through something like that alone, so we should have another baby. Without missing a beat Wanda said, “I’m glad you feel that way, because I’m pregnant.”

  Wanda gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on my birthday, February 2, 1993: Jenna Tiana Vanessa Saunders, named in honor of James Thomas Valvano.

  Just a few months later, on April 28, 1993, Jim left us.

  CHAPTER 21

&nb
sp; Our Sister

  FROM THE START I’VE ALSO BEEN VERY CLOSE TO MY nieces and nephews.

  Bernie has three sons, two of whom became college hockey players, just like their dad. When Gail visited me in Moncton, she told me she wanted to have “a bunch of kids,” and she did. In October of 1991 Gail gave birth to her fifth child, Joshua.

  So now she was raising five children, all under the age of nine, which would be a handful for anyone, but for my sister it became an overwhelming task. After she had Joshua she sank further into depression and began to distance herself from her husband, Paul. Her family time was reduced to sitting on the couch in her pajamas and holding the little ones while her oldest daughter, Stephanie, took over cooking and cleaning for the family. Paul tried everything he could, shuttling her from doctor to doctor while working two jobs to pay the bills for his big family.

  Our father stilled lived in Ohio, so he didn’t know what was happening with Gail. Our mother often presented herself as the sympathetic one, but it seemed to me she was doing more for herself than our sister.

  During this tough time Bernie and I became flat-out scared for Gail and her family. We talked with her on the phone a lot and visited her whenever we could. For me that meant covering as many NBA games in Toronto as possible. I reminded her of fun times we’d had together and spoke of better times to come. Bernie was great with her, as always. We could only hope it would be enough, but we feared the worst.

  My faith in my ability to raise my daughters the right way grew year by year. In 1999, when the girls were ten and six, we moved into our current house in Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York City.