Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  When I told Dr. Gordon that Dr. Choudhri’s target date to return to work was early November—naïvely hoping Dr. Gordon would move things up—he took a different tack. “Just from talking with you for an hour and looking at your chart, I would advise you not to go back for another six months.”

  Six months?!? To hear that was positively sickening. I couldn’t believe it. Well, I thought, good thing I’d seen Dr. Choudhri first and not Dr. Gordon! The fact is that they were both right, and I believe they agreed on this: I needed to get back to work as soon as possible just to keep my depression at bay, but I wouldn’t be able to do everything I could do before my fall for many months.

  But I walked out of that meeting feeling defiant. I was tired of people telling me I wasn’t ready. I felt like I was ready, so I must be!

  Wanda and I met with Dr. Choudhri a few days later, on October 26. When I asked again about going back to The Sports Reporters, he said I could return the first Sunday in November, his original target date.

  I said, rather boldly, “I think I’m ready to go now.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then said, “If you’re feeling up to it, you’ve got my go-head to go back on October 30.”

  I was on top of the world! It was the best news I’d gotten since Dr. Greenwald told me I could go home. Now I felt validated. I was right all along!

  I called Joe Valerio and told him I’d be there on Sunday. He was thrilled for me, too—this time with no hesitation about allowing me to come back. Wanda was happy for me because she knew how miserable I’d been sitting on the sidelines, which I’m sure didn’t make her life any easier, either.

  Now that I was going to return to the show, I was back in the game. Every week Joe sends out subject files to the panelists for that weekend’s show. Because I hadn’t been on the show, I hadn’t been getting the files for a couple of months. But after our call I received Joe’s email file and dug in immediately, studying the subjects even more intensely than usual. I had something to prove to the world, to my doctors, and to myself.

  I was back on the team and ready to go. I called a lot of family, friends, and colleagues at ESPN, telling everyone I was coming back that Sunday. “Alert the media!”

  But that didn’t mean all systems go. Both doctors had made it clear I was a long way from where I was before I hit the floor.

  Then there was the more practical matter of being off the set for two months. Yes, The Sports Reporters is taped, but it’s pretty fast and furious, and our panelists know their stuff. Was my sports knowledge up to the task? Would we have to do endless retakes? True, you don’t see the outtakes, but when you have to repeat a segment, you can never duplicate the same energy and spontaneity. That’s why we do the show “live to tape,” which means we tape it as if it was live and accept the interruptions and everything that goes with it. To keep stopping the show and starting over would affect the feel—not to mention the mood of our guests, who usually have to catch a plane right afterward. But now I feared I’d get in front of that camera, introduce myself, then freeze and just stare blankly at Mitch Albom. Not good!

  Still, worrying about that Sunday’s show was a luxury. When I went to bed Saturday night I was anxious, but thrilled to go back the next morning.

  Wouldn’t you know it, Sunday morning brought a huge ice storm, the kind that coats the trees in crystal. That was beautiful, but the roads weren’t. Some highways were closed. To get to Bristol we had to take a series of back streets, which got me in about forty-five minutes later than my usual 6 A.M. arrival.

  When I walked into the green room Joe Valerio was already pacing around. Not because I was a few minutes late, as I first thought, but because Mike Lupica couldn’t get out of his driveway. The ice storm knocked out the power at his house, so the electronic gate at the end of his driveway wouldn’t move. He had called a car service, but he would be late, and we had no idea just how late.

  Well, there wasn’t much I could do about that, and it didn’t throw me off that much. Just walking into the building again was a huge high for me. Then seeing the staffers I’ve worked with for years giving me hugs and well wishes, telling me, “It’s great to have you back!” was a tonic no doctor could prescribe.

  But when people asked, “How are you doing?” it created a dilemma for me. I wanted to tell them I was feeling great—and that was what they want to hear. But even though I was feeling better, I still had the nonstop migraine from the fall, and I was trying to recover from one of the deepest depressions of my life. I ended up telling them, “Thanks! I feel a lot better, and it feels great to be back.”

  With Lupica trying to get to the studio, we taped our “Parting Shots” first, even though they’re the last thing you see on the show.

  I wrote mine the day before. Often I debate writing about this topic or that, but this time there was no question what I’d be writing about, and it came to me clean. We only get 170 words to make our points—about half a page—so you need to be pretty economical. After I finished typing it came to 170 words exactly. Guess I hadn’t completely lost it, after all.

  I’d done the show depressed more times than I could count. That never stopped me, and it wasn’t going to this time either. However, I’d spent the last two months learning what I had lost mentally, from the day I wrote my first incomprehensible emails to the time I struggled to see the items on a Starbucks menu. But when I sat in my chair on the set with my “Parting Shot” on a teleprompter in front of me, I was ready.

  “Spending almost two months unable to be here taught me a lot,” I said. “How great the people are that I share this set with each week. You find out who your friends are, and I am lucky to have many here at ESPN, and among you as well. And I was reminded how lucky we all are to have a friend in this world of sports.

  “We just watched a glorious World Series, football and hockey seasons flourish, and even an NBA lockout gives us something new to obsess about. Even in tough times we can always turn on ‘the game.’ Cheering for our team can make the world’s problems temporarily disappear. Your boss may be mad at you, your car might be out of gas, and your spouse could be telling you to take the trash out. But who cares when it’s fourth-and-goal or you’re one strike from winning the World Series?

  “Sports doesn’t solve our problems, but boy, does it make it easier to put them aside. And that’s a medicine you can’t bottle.”

  I felt that I’d delivered it okay, but I didn’t know for sure. Before my fall I’d have had full confidence in my ability to judge objectively whether I had done a good job. But after overestimating my abilities for the past two months, it would no longer shock me if someone said, “Geez, John, you should’ve taken another week off.”

  I didn’t have time to ask anyone, though, because just as I was finishing my “Parting Shot,” Lupica came through the door. Once the show started I felt like I’d never missed one. It went smoothly, with an easy back-and-forth among the panelists, just like old times.

  It felt great to do the show again, but once more I didn’t trust my own barometer. My insecurities didn’t creep in until we headed upstairs to the makeup room to take off all the powder and cream.

  I pulled Valerio into a side room, without closing the door, and asked him point-blank: “How’d I do?”

  He didn’t blink. “John, you were great. Based on your performance, I never would have known you had been out.”

  Joe’s a very nice man, as I’ve said, but he’s no bullshitter. Besides, he cares too much about his show to allow anyone, even a close friend, to bring the standards down. More than that, he would protect me if I wasn’t ready yet by gently suggesting I should take some more time off. So when he said that, I was inclined to believe him.

  When Lupica walked by he stopped to chime in. He guessed what I had asked Joe and, more importantly, he knew why.

  “John, if you have any doubts about how you did today,” he said, “throw them away. You were fantastic. If I didn’t know you’d just come back,
I couldn’t tell.”

  Then he showed a side that few get to see. “I was stuck in my driveway this morning,” he told us. “It was impossible to get out or go anywhere. Under any other circumstances I’d have called Joe and said, ‘I just can’t make it. You’ll have to grab someone.’ But there was just no way I wasn’t going to be here on your first day back.”

  That warmed my heart. I was feeling great about the show. I was one-for-one on my comeback. No, it didn’t solve all my problems, but what if Dr. Gordon had been right and I simply couldn’t write or deliver a coherent essay or handle the panel’s back-and-forth? Even Joe would have hesitated to bring me back for weeks, and it would have set back my psychological recovery more than I’d like to imagine.

  On the ride home my phone was flooded with texts and calls from friends congratulating me. All this made me incredibly happy—what a relief! But it also forced me to remember I still had a long way to go—even if I had no idea how far.

  I was about to find out.

  CHAPTER 30

  Testing, Testing

  THE WEEK AFTER THE SHOW MY DOCTORS HAD SCHEDULED two consecutive days for cognitive testing.

  I had just taped a nationally televised show without missing a beat. What could they possibly throw at me? How hard could it be? I didn’t give it a second thought.

  On Monday I took the train to see Dr. Emily D’Antonio, who’s probably in her midthirties, in a room in the basement to take these tests. The sooner I got them out of the way, I thought, the sooner I could return to working full time on all my shows.

  Dr. D’Antonio explained the first test: “A letter is going to come up on the screen. It could be any letter, but you only want to press the button when the letter A comes up.”

  I looked at her, mildly insulted by the silliness of this exercise. But when the letters started popping up, I kept pushing the button on almost all the letters—and not many were As. I can’t tell you how many times I pushed the button for W or V or even Q, while sometimes not pushing it for A! I couldn’t believe it—and I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Unlike previous tests, I had no false hope that I was doing anything but bombing this. What was happening to me?

  Dr. D’Antonio explained later that what I was struggling with was one of the side effects of serious brain injuries: a loss of impulse control. You know you shouldn’t say that or do this, but you just can’t seem to stop yourself. This is one reason why some football players end up doing drugs or getting into crazy relationships with strippers or drinking and driving. The mental governors that regulate such behavior are gone. They don’t have any brakes.

  Next Dr. D’Antonio laid out a bunch of blocks on the table. She told me she was going to put a few of them together, then take them apart, and ask me to put them back together in the same manner. I nodded. Again, what could be easier?

  She laid down a puck-shaped block, then put a rectangular block on top of that, then another puck-shaped block on top of that, then added a smaller rectangle block on the side. Then she took it apart and asked me to rebuild it, something my girls could have done in kindergarten.

  I put the rectangular block down, which was my first mistake, then went completely blank. I started guessing, then I’d mumble some false logic, like, “Well, I remember the circle was on the other side of the rectangle,” to make it seem like there was method to my madness, but I certainly wasn’t fooling Dr. D’Antonio. I couldn’t even get started correctly.

  Oh-for-two.

  For my next test Dr. D’Antonio would flash a geometric shape up on the screen—like a circle, square, or triangle—and ask me to draw each on a sheet of paper. I simply couldn’t do it.

  Then she brought out a wooden board with ten holes drilled into it and a bag of ten wooden pegs. My job was to put the ten pegs into the ten holes. If you were working slowly and carefully, you’d need about thirty seconds. It took me six minutes.

  The drubbing went on, test after test, and lasted all day. I was failing miserably. It felt like I was taking the SAT and blowing it so badly that, by the time they announced, “Time’s up!” I knew my dreams of college were dashed.

  When I arrived for the second day I had no illusions. If it was anything like the first day, I knew I was in for another beat-down, and I was right. Test after test I simply could not complete the most basic tasks. What was more remarkable: the doctors felt they had to wait two months just to give me these tests, knowing I wouldn’t even be able to attempt them until then. In other words, since my fall, this was the top of my game.

  I knew I was failing, but I was still surprised just how badly. On many of the tests I finished in the bottom 1 percent—basically dead last. Now, years earlier I’d passed a Mensa test with an IQ score of 154, but on this IQ test I scored a 102. I felt like I was losing the one thing I could always count on, even when everything else was going wrong. Worse, I was convinced I would never get it back—and it might even get worse. My confidence in my intelligence was slipping too.

  After seeing the results from this two-day disaster I was not surprised when Dr. Gordon told me, “You should not be doing live television for a while.” He knew I could embarrass myself badly on national TV, and that could end my career.

  This time I believed him.

  My dramatically revised view of my situation affected how I related to others. Now that I was out and about more, I ran into a lot more people. Invariably, they’d say, “You look great!”

  I wanted to say, “Yes, thank you! But I feel horrible—and I have the test scores to prove it!”

  Of course, they’re whizzing by, like we all are, so you can hardly burden them with such a bombshell. But this is one of the central problems, I think, people with depression have to face: the inability to explain your situation to people you meet who can’t see what you’re dealing with. If I had been in a car accident and left the hospital in a wheel chair, everyone could see the wheelchair, so no one would expect you to join them for a jog.

  With depression no one sees your wheelchair. So they think you’re fine, and if you try to tell them you’re not, you come off as a whiner. So you learn to keep your mouth shut, which probably doesn’t help things, either.

  Even after I failed the cognitive tests Dr. D’Antonio had just given me—or maybe because of my failure, which gave me a greater need to redeem myself—I was determined to dive back into my work. After I returned to The Sports Reporters and all went well, I figured, Hey, I’m back! I can do all the shows I did before.

  So I decided to return to ABC College Football over Thanksgiving, a big weekend with games on both Friday and Saturday, and The Sports Reporters on Sunday. When Bill Graff, who is responsible for my schedule, saw I was doing three dates in a row, he threw up the caution flag. But I ignored his advice, and all three days went great. That convinced me that I was right and the tests were wrong.

  Jesse Palmer was thrilled to have me back. The guys who had filled in for me on ABC College Football, John Anderson and Scott Van Pelt, were terrific, but Jesse and I have the kind of chemistry you develop only after years of working together. We also have a lot of fun, and it all went just like my return to The Sports Reporters did: without a hitch.

  So the next week, figuring I was now completely good to go—or perhaps doubly determined to prove those tests wrong—I booked ABC College Football for Saturday, December 2, The Sports Reporters for Sunday morning, and a basketball game Monday night at the University of Detroit’s old Calihan Hall, where they were going to honor their most famous coach and my good friend, Dick Vitale, by naming the court after him. Then I’d fly back to New York after the game to cover another special event the next night, the Jimmy V. Classic, a college basketball doubleheader at Madison Square Garden. I’d be working with Bob Knight and Digger Phelps, just like the old days.

  I committed to five events in four days because I wanted the word to get out: Saunders is back! But when Graff saw my schedule he got a little tougher, warning me it was a bad idea and urging me
to cut back.

  “No, I’m all right,” I told him, even more confident after Thanksgiving weekend had gone so well. “I can do this!”

  I did okay through Saturday’s College Football, Sunday’s Sports Reporters, and Monday’s basketball game in Detroit, but when I was flying back that night after the game I could tell my batteries were running low. By Tuesday night, when I was covering the Jimmy V. Classic at Madison Square Garden, it all caught up to me. The combination of the nonstop crowd noise, the bright lights on the court, and the even brighter TV lights in my face all conspired to make my nonstop headache much worse. I started to feel dizzy and queasy, almost like I’d turned back the clock to the day I fell backward on the studio floor. It was unbearable.

  I got through the first game, but by the second game’s intermission I was in bad shape. Knight turned to me and said—as only Knight can—“You look like shit. You need to go home.”

  “I can’t,” I protested. “We have a postgame show.”

  He wasn’t hearing it. “No, you have to go home. Now.”

  Digger chimed in: “Yeah, Bob’s right: you gotta go.”

  Knight didn’t wait for another word. He got on the talk-back to the producer, Eric Mosley, and made the call: “John’s gotta go home.” Then he put one hand on my shoulder and said, “John, you gotta start caring about yourself. There was no need for you to even come here tonight.”

  Knight has his critics, but don’t tell me he doesn’t have a heart.

  Hearing this, Mosley came on my headset and asked if I was okay. With Knight glaring at me, I knew I couldn’t lie. “I feel like my head is going to explode.”