In order to allow myself to drive to the bridge, I had to promise myself I wasn’t going to jump. I wanted to take a closer look over the side. That’s all, I told myself. I was just going to take a look.
Whatever my intentions, I knew that if I stopped my car on the bridge, within minutes other drivers and the police would try to pull me away from the edge. That alone could make the national news.
So before I left home I had to come up with a plan. I decided to put an orange in the car. If I got stopped by the police, I’d just say, “Hey, I’m a diabetic. I needed to eat this orange, and I didn’t want to try to peel it while I was driving.”
I got in the car and headed out for the bridge.
As I approached it an impulse sparked in the pit of my stomach and started spreading throughout my body and soul. It gained a power I struggled to control, pushing me to do something I knew was wrong for me—the opposite of everything my friends, my family, and my doctors had told me was good and healthy.
I knew better, but whatever this impulse was, it was getting stronger, pulling and pushing me to do what I knew I shouldn’t: go to the bridge and jump off. Right here. Right now.
But I kept driving toward the bridge anyway.
When I got to the Tappan Zee I drove to the apex and stopped. I knew that if I got out of the car and looked over the edge, the voice inside me—telling me to do it, telling me to jump—could get even stronger. I felt like it could physically overtake me, like two strong hands on my back, and push me over the railing.
But my curiosity was too great. I just had to peer over the side of the bridge to see what it looked like, and what it felt like. It was a risk I was willing to take.
Okay, I reminded myself before I opened the car door, if you’re going to take a look over the side, you need to be stronger than the evil thing that’s trying to kill you. I told myself—again—that I just wanted to see what it would feel like to look over the edge. That was all.
Then I realized that if I tried to get out right away, I’d get hit by another car. So I sat in the driver’s seat for a few seconds while traffic whizzed by. But I really, really wanted to look over the side.
Sitting there much longer wasn’t an option either. Soon I’d hear the sirens of police cars headed my way. I waited for a gap in traffic, grabbed the orange, and got out of the car. I walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and acted like I was searching for something. Then I turned to take a look over the edge of the bridge.
From inside the car the water seemed distant, like a scene from a postcard. But standing there, it looked dark and beautiful, almost calling to me.
It was only then that I saw parallel rows of guardrails—the same kind you see on a highway shoulder—between the roadway and the edge of the bridge. A chain link fence spanned them, like netting. Standing at the first guardrail, I couldn’t look directly down to the water, but I could see past both rails to the Hudson beyond. It wasn’t hard to imagine falling off the bridge like someone’s discarded piece of trash, tossed from the window of a passing car.
It wasn’t as simple as I’d thought it would be, but I saw that I could climb through the girders and around the fencing. If I was determined to end my life, those girders wouldn’t stop me.
I got close enough to get a good look at the slate-blue waters, 140 feet down. I was relatively calm, considering how close I was to the spot where others had chosen to end their lives.
I could feel the air whip up from the other side of the bridge, gaining momentum as it swooshed over the edge. I closed my eyes briefly and imagined I was going over the edge of the bridge with the wind. This image was a little too real, and I began to worry that I was losing control and wasn’t going to make it back.
The impulse was still urging me to jump. Perhaps if I’d listened a moment longer, I might have let it give me that final push.
But somehow I gathered enough strength to overcome it. My self-destructive impulse had made me drive to the bridge, get out, and look over the edge. But it couldn’t make me jump. Not today.
I turned around, moving quickly now, and got back in my car.
As I headed home my first thought was this: anyone who thinks people who end their lives are cowards hasn’t looked over the Tappan Zee Bridge. They haven’t seen and felt what I’d just seen and felt. Suicide victims might not be able to face the rest of their lives, but I’d just learned that it took a certain kind of courage to jump.
I also felt, for the first time in months, a sense of accomplishment. I hadn’t just thought about looking over the side of the bridge—I’d actually done it, satisfying my aching curiosity. And I’d been stronger than the compulsion to jump.
I was still alive, but all I had really done was eliminate one option. I still hadn’t figured out how to get out of the trap I was in.
I knew I had to admit what I’d done to my doctors. They all had the same reaction: “John, do you need to be hospitalized?”
To which my response was, “No.”
Each of them had questions and comments, but none were more pointed than Dr. Douglas’s. She is a kind soul, but weeks earlier, knowing how depressed I was, she looked me in the eye and spoke as seriously to me as she ever had: “If you ever feel that you’re in crisis, you must promise me that you’ll call.”
This was hard for me. As strange as it seems, I’ve never called any of my doctors in a crisis, or even if I just need to talk. It goes back to my old worry about being a burden.
When I told her about my trip to the bridge she was even more stern.
“John, you promised me you’d call,” she said. “Why didn’t you call?”
I shrugged. “I’d feel bad spoiling your weekend.”
She was having none of it. “John, which call do you think I’d rather get: the one where you’re feeling bad and you want to talk, or the one from Wanda, saying you’re gone?”
I thought about it. “That makes a lot of sense.”
This marked another crucial time when I was able to admit I was in over my head, and needed to ask for help. It worked.
CHAPTER 36
Back to the Bridge
AFTER MY MEETING WITH DR. DOUGLAS I WENT THROUGH a couple of days when I was beating myself up and feeling terrible. But that following Saturday morning I was in a pretty good mood, so I said to Aleah, “Let’s go to the Palisades Mall.” She needed to get something from the Apple Store, and Wanda wanted to come. I thought we’d all have lunch together.
It started out being a very good day. When Aleah got her shopping done Wanda asked me, “Okay, where do you want to eat lunch?”
This is a running joke in our family. Everyone’s so flexible that no one can make a decision, so we end up saying, “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?” We go around like this at least three times before someone finally picks a place.
But this time, as we were going around and around, I mentioned that my blood sugar was starting to get low. Wanda was annoyed with me because I hadn’t eaten enough for breakfast, and then Aleah snapped at me about something small, though I can’t even remember what. For some reason these little things all seemed to crystallize, and all my insecurities and doubts—already heightened by the results from Dr. D’Antonio’s tests and piqued by a bad week behind the mic—came crashing down on me at once, and I started to lose it. Just like that, in a flash, I was reduced to feeling like my dad’s son—stupid and worthless. I turned and walked away.
“Where are you going?” Wanda asked.
“I’ve just got to get away,” was all I said.
I started walking from one end of the huge mall to the other. I found a bench, sat down, put my head in my hands, and started crying. I kept thinking, I am just so freakin’ stupid. I’m never going to be smart again. I’ve been exposed to the nation as a fraud, and now I’m being exposed to my own family. I’m just… stupid.
My phone rang. “Where are you?” Aleah asked, clearly upset.
“I just need to be my
self,” I said.
“Tell us where you are so we can find you.”
“You guys go get lunch. I’ll walk home.”
Now, it’s about fifteen miles from the mall to our house, and you’d have to go across the Tappan Zee Bridge—and they don’t allow walkers. But I was convinced that if I could just “walk it off,” I’d get better. I had no plan other than to keep walking. Heck, my cloudy brain concluded, I could walk coast to coast like Forrest Gump until this feeling went away.
So I got up, left the mall, and started walking on the highway toward the bridge. I had walked two miles or so when Wanda’s car came up alongside me. She rolled her window down and said, “John, get in.”
At first I attempted to keep going, but it was pointless. Not because my will wasn’t strong enough to keep walking but because I had nowhere else to go. I was getting pretty close to the bridge, about a mile away, where I’d be stuck. I knew I had to get in the car.
When I did I felt even worse because Aleah was hysterical. Wanda was understandably angry too, but she kept calm because she didn’t want to make Aleah any more upset. So now on top of the emotions of feeling stupid, I felt like a terrible person too.
When we got home Aleah went up to her room, so I went up after her, walked in, and sat on her bed.
“Aleah, what I did was wrong, and I apologize for that,” I told her. “But I want you to understand that I’m dealing with something that feels out of control right now. My head injury has me feeling really stupid, and the way you guys reacted to me in the mall—and I’m not blaming you, because it’s all in my head, because of my head—where normally I would have argued back or laughed it off, my insecurities took hold, and I just felt really dumb. And the only thing I felt like I could do was walk away, and that’s what I did.
“I apologize to you again, and just want you to know I love you, and I’m working to get better.”
She told me I didn’t have to apologize and that she forgave me. We hugged.
But I took away something else from that day: I was not in this alone. Obviously I knew that before, but I never felt it so deeply as I did that day. My earlier rationale that those who loved me would understand if I took my life, and might even be relieved of the burden of being with me, was revealed for what it was: a self-serving lie.
Whatever I did would affect the people I loved most, and affect them profoundly.
CHAPTER 37
Crunch Time
NEXT GAME: VILLANOVA AT RUTGERS, MARCH 1, 2012.
This contest was close enough for me to drive about ninety minutes and drive back the same night—a nice break for a man who flies as much as I do.
Villanova won, 77–71, and everything went fine, or so I thought. I had already learned the hard way that the more convinced I was that I’d nailed it, the more likely I was going to get slammed by a few self-appointed critics when I got online.
So after the game I drove home, went into my office, and opened my Twitter feed with all the enthusiasm of a man on death row awaiting his sentence. I was expecting the worst, but at least this time I was ready for it.
I got online, looked at my account, and found… nothing! I was either clean, or no one was watching! But I chose to think I was clean—assuming the best, for once.
There was hope for me yet.
Just when it seemed like I was getting my game back, the biggest test of the year was coming up: NCAA basketball’s Championship Week, when all the conferences host their tournaments, with dozens of games going each day, leading up to Sunday’s conference finals and the NCAA selection show that night. For sportscasters Championship Week is actually harder than the NCAA tournament, because everyone’s playing, almost every day. So you’re constantly updating games, cutting to this finish or that overtime, and continually trying to predict how each result might impact the NCAA brackets. This is air traffic control on speed.
Given my recent progress ESPN had assigned me all five days, Wednesday through Sunday. I still wasn’t operating at full capacity, and nowhere near full confidence, but if I could do this, I knew I could do just about anything ESPN asked of me. And if I couldn’t, I’d have to dwell on it all summer and wonder whether I’d ever be able to do my job again.
When I told my neurologist, Dr. Goldstein, about the upcoming Championship Week, he said, “Is anyone on the set someone you trust a lot?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Don’t ask a bunch of people, but just ask one person you really trust to give you an evaluation after your first day.”
I thought that was a great idea. Before I went on the air the first day I sought out Rob Lemley, my good friend who was the producer on the ABC College Football broadcast when I first fell. He knew more about my situation than most, and I trusted him completely. He agreed to give me an honest assessment of how I was doing.
I thought our first day went pretty well, with no obvious problems. When I asked Lem what he thought, he said, “You’re still not quite yourself, but today was a good start.”
Amazingly I took him at face value, but I was still a little disappointed. I was hoping to get his unqualified, “Two thumbs up!”
The next day I asked Barry Sacks, another trusted pro who’s responsible for all of ESPN’s daytime studio programming, to do the same thing. When we’d finished that day’s work I thought it had gone pretty well, but I was concerned that my give-and-take with our analyst, Adrian Branch, might have felt a little forced.
When I asked Barry, “So how did it go?” he just kind of shrugged and gave me an, “Eh.”
Now I was concerned, so I walked back to the makeup room to find Rob Lemley.
“Rob, I have to ask: how’d I do?”
“Let me call you later.”
Crap. If it was going to be bad news, I knew I couldn’t wait that long. “No,” I said, “you have to tell me now.”
“You were not yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused, because he knew he had to be careful with me, but he also knew anything less than the truth wouldn’t do.
“You were very hesitant,” he finally said. “And when you were doing highlights, you sounded like you were reading them. That’s not the John Saunders who can make it sound like you’re ad-libbing as the clip rolls out. You sounded stiff, not conversational.”
Recently that would have been enough to send me spiraling downward for a week. But not this time. Strangely enough I actually felt a bit of relief because I had been more concerned about my interaction with analyst Adrian Branch. Lem hadn’t mentioned that, so I asked him about it.
“Oh no,” Lem told me, “you were dead-on with that.”
Amazingly, thanks to Dr. D’Antonio beefing up my ability to think rationally, I could handle this. In my mind the things Lem was concerned about weren’t big worries because I knew I could rediscover a flowing delivery with the clips pretty easily. Those problems weren’t based on my mental capacities; they just required a little more practice to get the rust off. What I thought would be the toughest part for me to regain, the repartee, I had down, according to him.
After our conversation I focused on my delivery on the clips for the rest of the week. By the end of the week Lem said I was doing those as well as I ever had. One less thing to worry about.
But on Friday, the third of five straight days of coverage, we had to cover a double-header from the same site. That means we would have almost an hour gap between games—about three times longer than a normal halftime—so we would have to fill in, one of the best tests for a sportscaster.
To increase the “level of difficulty” another notch, that day we had a producer I’d never worked with before. But Lemley, God bless him, was good enough to coach the new guy about working with me. Before we went on the air the new producer came up to me and said, “John, Rob Lemley told me to ask you if there’s anything I can do to make things easier on you.”
It was a nice gesture, from both of them. Learning my lesson about asking
for help, I was 100 percent honest with him: “Do not take for granted, for one second, that I will remember anything you have told me—even if you told me five seconds ago. Do not take for granted that I know where we’re going next. If you want to stay in my ear the entire time to make sure I get it right, you go right ahead.”
He looked at me for a moment. He’d probably never heard that before from any of the pros at ESPN! Then he nodded. “Okay, fine.”
Bill Graff, the old pro, was up in the booth backing the new guy. He does not suffer fools gladly. If I screwed up, he’d probably let me know—straight into my earpiece.
The stage was set for a great success, or a big, public face-plant.
The first halftime went great, and the bulk of the fill between the two games went great, too. But near the end of that hour-long gap the new producer got in my ear to tell me, “Talk about Kendall Marshall.” But he didn’t remind me Marshall played point guard for North Carolina, probably because I’d covered the Tar Heels twice that year, so I’m sure he felt he could take that for granted.
But I couldn’t remember Kendall Marshall. Once again I went blank. Nothing.
Seeing my uncertainty, the producer said, “Kendall Marshall” again, but that’s not the part I’d forgotten! I didn’t know what to do.
Now what? Try to guess and get Marshall’s position and team wrong and then hear about it from my producers and Twitter? Or just sit there, staring at the screen like an idiot—which would be even worse? I knew that whatever I was going to do, I had to do it that second.
I thought quickly and pulled something out of my ass. Although it didn’t have much to do with anything, I started discussing the Big Twelve tournament for a few seconds—though it seemed like an hour, which is always the case when something is going wrong on TV. Kendall Marshall’s position and team still weren’t coming to me, so I moved right on to the next match-up.
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