I felt a bit off, and I’ve wondered since if the coaches could tell, but I ignored my nagging doubts. After tip-off I was feeling a step slow—not a good thing when you’re covering a basketball game. But thank goodness I had Jay Bilas with me. He was sharp as always, picking up whenever I fell behind, as if he realized his point guard wasn’t on his game, so he took over the offense. He covered the gaps so well that probably no one but us noticed.
With just 0.2 seconds left in the first half, Carolina got the ball out of bounds. The rule here is very clear: if you have 0.3 seconds left, you can catch it and shoot it, but with 0.2 you can only tip it in. I’ve seen the exact same circumstance play out dozens of times. I know this rule, and I know this play like I know my daughters’ names.
While the Carolina players were getting set to inbound the ball Jay said, “The only thing they can do here is an alley-oop.” Of course, he was exactly right. Before I could I formulate my thoughts, Carolina launched the ball toward the hoop, and John Henson jumped up and slammed it in. Two points for Carolina at the buzzer.
Easy call—but I froze. My mouth didn’t move. At that instant—on national TV, no less—it was obvious I was still missing part of my mental library. I couldn’t figure out whether the bucket had counted. To make matters worse, the ref was signaling that the bucket was good, rightly—but for some reason it looked to me like he was waving it off. Finally, I said the exact wrong thing: “They’re waving that off!”
By this time Bilas must have figured out that he might have to cover for me at any moment, and he was ready.
“No, no,” he said, calmly. “I think they’re going to count it.”
He handled it perfectly, cutting off my mistake before it got worse, without embarrassing me. I quickly realized he was right, but I was thinking about my gaffe throughout the second half.
Normally after the game we’d relax and talk about it back at the hotel. But Jay had to drive that night to cover another game, so I went back to the hotel by myself, where I whipped myself over my inexplicable mistake the rest of the night.
This is a disaster, I thought. I’m totally incapable, and I’m not getting better.
It’s hard enough for any closed-head injury patient to recover their mental faculties, but it’s a bit trickier to do it on national TV, with millions watching you screw up. It only magnifies the panic and despair. I just crawled into bed and pulled the covers over me.
I went home the next morning totally discouraged and immediately made an appointment to see Dr. Choudhri—something I wouldn’t have been wise enough to do just a year earlier. After I described what had happened at the game and how I felt about it, he said my improved physical health fooled me into thinking I had fully recovered and was ready to take on all these tasks. But my brain still hadn’t caught up with my body. I was physically rested, but for my brain to start working at full capacity, it had to be re-trained too. I was trying to leap from my mental wheelchair to the Olympic steeplechase, and repeatedly falling down.
That made sense, but I was still in a panic. I all but pleaded with Dr. Choudhri. “You’ve got to tell me this is going to get better. I can’t accept that this is going to be the rest of my life.”
“You’re going to get better,” he reassured me. “But you can’t keep piling on the assignments. You just have to take it slower.”
At his suggestion I scaled back a few assignments but still kept a pretty busy schedule. I had to walk a fine line between overdoing it, which made things worse, and not doing enough for the “drug of work” to kick in.
A month later, on February 21, I flew to Columbia, Missouri, to cover a game with Doug Gottlieb between Kansas State and second-ranked Missouri. I put in my usual preparation for the game, plus a little more, just to be safe. The game was a hot one, going right down to the wire, when Kansas State pulled the upset over the Tigers. Unlike the UNC–Virginia Tech game, I was on top of this contest throughout and felt truly connected to the action. I returned to my hotel room feeling great, allowing myself to think that perhaps the Carolina mistake was just an aberration.
When I got online I saw that I had received some Twitter alerts and clicked on my feed. Although 99 percent of the things people tweet about me are really nice, the 1 percent are ruthless, faceless critics. It seems to me—perhaps because I’m Canadian!—that you shouldn’t say anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t have the guts to say to someone’s face. But that’s what Twitter is. You’ve got to have thick skin to be on it in the first place.
But when I read five or six K-State fans complain that I’d called Angel Rodriguez, their point guard, “Hernandez” a half-dozen times, I was shocked.
“Have you ever watched a KSU game?” one wrote. “Do your homework!”
I went back and looked at the game. I hadn’t called Angel Rodriguez “Hernandez” a half-dozen times, but I had done it a few times—and that was enough to get them tweeting, and make me feel incompetent. Now, even when I felt like I was doing a good job, I wasn’t! That scared me even more.
I sat up in bed the rest of the night, wondering if I should pull myself out of ESPN’s college basketball rotation. I went through a dozen emotions, but the strongest was a sense of loss: feeling that I was being robbed of something I had taken for granted, something that I had prided myself on for so long. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.
My doctors, family, and friends kept telling me I was going to get better, but I could see little evidence of improvement. Six months after I had fallen, the promise that I was going to recover fully was starting to feel like a lie.
Around this time I was talking with Merril Hoge, the former Pittsburgh Steeler and Chicago Bear who is now one of our NFL analysts. He suffered several serious concussions himself, including one that ended his career. After I told him what had happened to me, he shared how hard and long his recovery was, with symptoms just like mine.
“It’s like you’re living in a fog,” he told me. “But one day—I can’t tell you when, I can’t tell you why—that fog is going to lift, and you’ll be amazed.”
I really needed to hear that.
A week later, after a few days of strenuous preparation, I flew down to Chapel Hill to cover Maryland against the Tar Heels. I’d be working with Bilas again and meeting with the coaches during the day, one of my favorite parts of the job.
In fact, if I can say this without tooting my own horn, one of the keys to my career has been simple sincerity. A couple of years ago at Dick Vitale’s charity event Rick Pitino pulled Wanda aside and said, “Your husband, of all the people in this business, is the nicest guy. He’s the one guy I really enjoy talking with.”
That made me feel good. And with few exceptions, the coaches have been great to work with. Sitting down with Roy Williams that day felt like old times. He was funny, and we were having a good visit. I allowed myself to feel that, just maybe, things were getting back to normal.
The game that night wasn’t a great one. Maryland wasn’t that good, but Carolina struggled until late in the game. There wasn’t much ESPN could do about that, of course, but I felt like I’d done a good job, a lot better than I had at Virginia Tech. But when I got back to my hotel room and turned on my Twitter feed, it was buzzing again.
“John Saunders obviously didn’t do his homework tonight.”
“He kept messing up the Maryland players’ names!”
But this time I had a little defiance in me. “Wait a second,” I thought. “I know I didn’t screw up these guys’ names!”
But Twitter kept going, with maybe eight or nine people making the same comments. I’m not used to that. I had to concede that I must have made some mistakes again, which was very, very disturbing to me.
I was totally distraught. Not only had it happened for the second game in a row, but it happened after I made damn sure it wasn’t going to happen again. I just couldn’t believe it. But the people on Twitter had no reason to make it up. At this point I’m thinking,
That’s it. I’m done. I can’t work anymore.
I called Wanda and said, “I am an idiot. I’ve totally lost my mental capacity. And to make matters worse, I don’t even have the ability to recognize it anymore.”
She tried to console me. “Everybody makes mistakes,” she said in her soothing voice. “The difference is that people talk about it now. When you made mistakes years ago, they weren’t on Twitter. You can’t determine where you are in your rehab based on a few strangers’ comments.”
Thinking rationally, she was totally correct, as usual. But when you’re feeling as uncertain about yourself as I was, rational thinking didn’t always work, and there was nothing anyone could say to make me feel better.
I feared the next game.
CHAPTER 34
A Day in the Doldrums
BETWEEN THESE GAMES I HAD STARTED THERAPY WITH Dr. Douglas and cognitive therapy with Dr. Emily D’Antonio, the psychoneurologist, to help get my memory back.
During my first few visits to Dr. Douglas we covered the major events of my life. While I’d confessed a few things to a few people over the years, especially Wanda, Dr, Douglas was the first person I told everything, including my early sexual encounters with my father’s friend’s daughters. I had no idea what Dr. Douglas’s reaction might be, but I was surprised when used the word molested.
Growing up I’d never heard about women molesting boys, so I walled off the confusing memory as just another part of my strange childhood. Dr. Douglas helped me recognize the incidents for what they were—sexual molestation. It was the first time I’d ever thought of it in those terms. She asked me to imagine my own children going through what I had. What would I call that? That was an easy answer!
With Dr. Douglas’s help, I started to understand that being molested played a major role in my sexuality, having taught me that sexual pleasure was something to hide and keep in dark rooms. Sex, I thought, was strictly for physical pleasure and wasn’t connected to love. That meant I had chased casual sex but had difficulty connecting sex with a loving relationship. Looking back, it explained a lot.
In my cognitive therapy sessions with Dr. D’Antonio we started working on simple things, like detecting when a sound is going up and when it’s going down by following a computer-generated slide whistle. The computer would play a sound going up or down, and I was supposed to hit the button if it was going up and not hit the button if it was going down. This was not a hearing test—I could hear the sound just fine—but a cognitive test: Could my brain send the correct signal to my hands to push the button or to not push the button?
I was appalled how often I got it wrong, which isn’t exactly a great shortcoming to have for someone who needs to detect a speaker’s inflection during interviews. This tested another element of impulse control, and if your impulse control is not strong, you can get in a lot of trouble.
But of equal importance was Dr. D’Antonio’s simple question, which started every session: “How are you feeling?” Unlike Dr. Dangerous, Dr. D’Antonio was very concerned about my emotional state—which is saying something when you consider that my emotional state was supposed to be Dr. Dangerous’s domain, not Dr. D’Antonio’s.
We’d spend a lot of our sessions just talking. As a cognitive therapist, part of her mission is to get me to think more logically. Each week I’d tell her more and more about my feelings, and sometimes I’d burst into tears. “I’m just so damn depressed,” I said.
“Okay,” she’d say, “tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t think I’m getting any better. I don’t think I am going to get any better. I don’t think I’m capable of doing my job. And I think I’m going to lose my job.”
She took notes, then asked, “When you break all of those things down, John, do you truly have any evidence that any of that is true? Do you have evidence that you’re not getting better, that you’ll never get better, that you won’t be capable of doing your job, or you’re going to get fired?”
“Quite the contrary,” I had to admit. “All my doctors are telling me to take my time, that I’m going to be fine. The people at ESPN are telling me my job will be there whenever I’m ready, and that’s from the top on down.”
These simple little exchanges were enormously helpful for me, an important start to turning my thinking around. But the sad thing about depression is that the shelf life for that kind of logical reassurance is about an hour. This wasn’t because I was pessimistic. It was because the concussion had limited my ability to think logically and retain those rational conclusions after I’d reached them. Every irrational fear I’d ever had in my life came back to the surface: my fear of abandonment, my fear of being worthless, my fear of losing my kids, my fear of being a bad father.
Just about anything could set off this chain of fears. If I heard Aleah rushing to get to work, I’d start worrying she was going to be late. Then I’d think, I should I have gotten up and helped her. Then I’d go to a bigger issue: As her father, I could have taught her to always be on time, so she wouldn’t be late. Therefore, I’m a bad father.
I told Dr. D’Antonio that this spiral of doubts started the minute I woke up, so she asked me to describe a typical day.
“After indulging every fear I’ve ever had for an hour,” I told her, “I often find myself in bed, sobbing uncontrollably. I can sleep better since we’ve started cutting back the Klonopin, but I wake up in worse shape than when I went to bed.
“The kids are off to school or work, and Wanda works three days a week, so I’m often by myself. I have a lot of self-destructive thoughts. I have a lot of suicidal thoughts. Not to the point of actually fearing that I’m going to do them, but just being obsessed with the idea that I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
Whenever I said this Dr. D’Antonio would follow up with detailed questions. “Do you have any plans to take action? Have you thought about how you would do it?”
As long as I assured her I wasn’t going to do anything, she promised not to admit me into a psych ward.
I continued. “I feel like crap, I’m not working as much as I want to, and even when I do work, I suck at it.
“All these memories are coming up about my father and all these issues that can no longer be addressed with him because he’s gone. Then every single fear and monster that I’ve ever had overtakes me, like a thick fog coming in. I just can’t take this stuff anymore.”
After I described a typical day Dr. D’Antonio said, “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. When you have a moment of clarity, I want you to go back over your day and write down how you felt at each point during the day, giving each point a number on a scale of one to ten, with ten being your highest level of depression.”
I did my homework three days in a row and then presented two copies to her at our next session. She asked me to read it out loud so she could track my emotional response while she read along.
“Woke up this morning. Depression Level 10. Stayed in bed for an hour crying. Sat on the edge of the bed. Depression Level 10. Stayed there for an hour. Got up, went downstairs, and got on my computer. Depression Level 8.”
She stopped me right there.
“Okay, what do we know, right now? Those two things—lying in bed and sitting on the edge of the bed—those don’t work. Getting out of bed will not solve all your problems, but it will help.”
After this session I started getting out of bed as soon as I woke up. This simple act prevented me from starting my day with a depression spiral.
This change shows why several different methods can help address extreme cases of depression. Like a coach who draws up multiple defenses, I had Dr. Douglas handling my medication and the causes of my depression, Dr. Choudhri dealing with the concussion and its neurological effects, and Dr. D’Antonio providing tools to deal with what was happening in the present.
However, few solutions lasted for very long, and Dr. D’Antonio knew we had to work on that, too.
But the brain injury ha
d created basic functioning problems, which, combined with an intensifying depression, would continue to pull me downward if something didn’t give.
CHAPTER 35
Peering Over the Tappan Zee Bridge
IN LATE FEBRUARY OF 2012 I WOKE UP ONE MORNING AS deeply depressed as I’d ever been. That’s when I decided to drive to the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is notorious for suicide attempts.
To prevent this they’ve installed traffic cameras, tall fencing, four emergency phones, and signs on both sides that say things like, “Life is worth living,” and “When it seems like there is no hope, there is help.” They’ve trained the bridge staff in suicide prevention, but even so, several times a year you hear about someone who jumped, or tried to. Since the bridge opened, more than two dozen people have jumped to their deaths. It’s for this reason, not its appearance, that they call the Tappan Zee “The Golden Gate Bridge of the East.”
Every time I’ve driven over the Tappan Zee I’ve looked over the side. If I have a passenger, I look past them, over the edge, through the bars and the metal netting, down to the icy waters below.
When I got up that morning I sat on the end of the bed for an hour—against Dr. D’Antonio’s advice—sobbing. I felt hopeless, dumb, and depressed. I simply could not imagine any way out of this situation. I wasn’t just losing hope that I’d get better any time soon. I had become convinced I would never be whole again.
I felt like I’d waged a war—and lost it, for good. I felt battered and bruised, like one of Mike Tyson’s sparring partners. When you’re deeply depressed, your emotional pain can create physical pain, which doctors call somatic symptoms. I constantly felt nauseated, my chest felt as if an elephant was sitting on it, and my whole body ached. I was done.
My thoughts had turned extremely dark. The desire to end my life was getting harder and harder to suppress.
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