Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  While I’m doing this the new producer is in my ear, trying again to get me to go to Kendall Marshall—but he’s still not giving me Marshall’s team or position—and I don’t blame him, because he was doing his job. With anyone else at ESPN or even with me a year earlier, you wouldn’t need any more information. He was not used to working with rookies, which is about what I was.

  Still, nothing came to me. I could not place Kendall Marshall for my life.

  The producer finally put up a graphic of Kendall Marshall on the screen—and boom, in a flash I knew he was the point guard from North Carolina, and I knew where my producer wanted me to go. I asked Adrian Branch to talk about “the fine point guard from North Carolina, Kendall Marshall!”

  We got past that bump without much damage. No one watching at home probably had any idea I had been completely lost. Then we sailed right through the rest of the fill, then the second halftime too, and everything was great. We didn’t have any other glitches the rest of the night.

  Bill Graff, who usually gives his edicts from the booth right into your ear, made it a point to walk down to the studio to talk to me face to face.

  “John, you’re doing a great job,” he told me. “I know you got lost there a little bit during that fill. But I’ve worked with you for twenty years. I knew you were lost, but I doubt anyone else would know.”

  He was telling me the truth—Bill always does—and that meant the world to me.

  “Bill,” I felt compelled to tell him, “I’m working at about 50 percent brain capacity.”

  What he said next I will probably never forget.

  “John, I’d take you at 50 percent any day of the week.”

  The rest of the weekend our broadcasts moved from ESPN to ABC, which increases the audience. That included the SEC semifinals on Saturday, a doubleheader with a fill, and Sunday’s finals, which I did with Hubert Davis, who used to play for the Toronto Raptors. I hadn’t worked with him much before, but if you want to get a laugh, Hubert’s one of the best audiences you can have, so it was fun to get him going. We finished in fine style.

  When I got home and analyzed as objectively as I could my last big test of the season—really, my last chance for months to prove I could still do this—I concluded that I’d started out a bit rusty on Wednesday, and I’d handled the hiccup on Friday, when I could have very easily spiraled downward. But Bill Graff was right: the rest of the weekend went great.

  During my long recovery, handling Championship Week was one of the best boosts I received. By the end of the weekend I knew two things: I could do my job again, and I could enjoy it too.

  Progress.

  CHAPTER 38

  You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better

  MY WORK DURING CHAMPIONSHIP WEEK MIMICKED THE experience of the athletes we cover: lose to your rival at the end of the season, and you have to stew on it until you play them again next year. But if you beat them, you can savor it all summer. As you can imagine, it was a great relief to have that big victory in my pocket going into the long “off-season.”

  My bosses at ESPN were happy too, and they planned to give me a full schedule for the fall of 2012. Until then, they said, except for The Sports Reporters, they wanted me to take off the rest of April and all of May. On top of that Bill Graff insisted I take at least one Sports Reporters off in April and one in May, which would give me two straight weeks away from the studio to travel, rest, or do whatever I wanted.

  I decided I would spend one of those breaks in early April to see Jenna in Toronto. I told Dr. Douglas and Dr. D’Antonio I was feeling pretty good and looked forward to the trip. They were pleased and told me that when I came back we’d work on rebuilding my memory. That sounded good to me.

  Minutes after I drove across the Canadian border I got a call from Gerry Matalon, one of our former producers who became an executive in the talent office. He’s also one of my closest friends at ESPN, one of the guys, along with Graff, Lemley, and Berman, who kept in close touch with me throughout those rough months. To me, the ESPN family was just that.

  Matalon had lived through a lot of that horrible half-year with me. He’d been at my home one time when I dumped my whole life on him in one visit, and I broke down. Well, he was about to get his reward!

  As I was crossing the border my seven-month-long headache—which had felt like a little man with a jackhammer inside my skull since I’d fallen in September—had finally stopped, cold!

  Merril Hoge was right: “One day—I can’t say when, I can’t say why—the fog is just going to lift. And when it does, it will be amazing.”

  And that’s when Matalon called me.

  “So how are you feeling?” Gerry asked.

  “Gerry, I don’t have a headache!”

  “What?”

  “Gerry, I don’t have a headache!”

  He knew what that meant. I tell you, that guy was as happy as anyone could be—except me, of course!

  “John, that’s fantastic!”

  “I don’t know whether it’s because the headache’s gone,” I said, “or whether I’m in Toronto. But I just feel good.”

  I’d love to tell you that I’ve lived happily ever after. To be honest, that’s what I thought would happen. But that’s not how this illness works.

  It was great to have the headaches gone once and for all—a victory I could keep—but unfortunately my amazing mood lasted only about two days. For the next three weeks, for some reason, something got ahold of me, and I went through a particularly bad depression.

  What the hell was going on? How could I feel so good for a couple of days, then come crashing down so hard? It gripped me even when I was with Jenna. My baby girl was off to college, and I felt I had wasted too much of my life with depression. Yes, it was depression causing depression, a vicious cycle if ever there was one.

  When I met with Dr. Goldstein I described the roller coaster I’d been on. He wasn’t surprised. I think he even expected it, which was a relief in itself.

  “You are going to experience some ‘extreme normalcy,’” he explained, “which to you, having been depressed so long, will feel like you’re feeling fantastic. That’s where you were after the headache finally disappeared. You felt normal, so you felt like you had the world beat.

  “But because of the very traumatic injury your brain suffered, from which it’s still not fully recovered, you are going to go through some extreme low periods. As those parts of your brain recover, they’re going to lead your mind into certain behaviors and thought patterns that are going to bring you down.”

  Further, he said, weaning me from such a high dose of Klonopin, step by step, was going to affect my mood each time we brought it down a notch. Well, that wasn’t great news, but it was good to know that my roller coaster could be explained, and was even expected. When you’ve had a brain injury, you think your downturn is due to the brain injury, which makes you think your whole life is going to fall apart when you’re just going through the normal ups and downs of life. Throw my past issues on top of that, and I was dealing with a double whammy.

  This brought us to a conversation about concussions, a topic that was just starting to get a lot of national attention due to the tragic deaths of former NFL players like the Chicago Bears’ Dave Duerson, who shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for research, and Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, whose brain damage from playing the game was becoming public. And right about this time, on May 2, 2012, NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau also put a gun to his chest and killed himself at age forty-three. The National Institutes of Health studied his brain and concluded that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

  When I asked Dr. Goldstein about this he said, “Concussions are a very hot-button topic right now. We neurologists talk about this all the time. In fact, rather than use the word concussion, we’re more often saying, ‘What you have is a brain injury.’”

  As simple as it was, that resonated with me. It was one thing t
o talk about concussions, a term people threw around without really understanding what it meant. But when you start calling it a brain injury, you look at it a little differently.

  He then explained that brain injuries don’t create depression directly, but the side effects could make you depressed. Combine that depression with a lack of impulse control, which can lead smart people to make foolish investments that cost them millions, get behind the wheel of a car after drinking too many, or forget their wife and kids when an attractive young woman starts flattering them, and it can destroy lives. People who have suffered from brain injuries are more likely to attempt suicide, which doctors believe is often an impulsive decision.

  In other words, what I was experiencing was similar to what the NFL players were experiencing. That was pretty troubling, but it was good to know it wasn’t just me and that there were actions I could take. Unlike Webster and Seau, my doctor and I knew what we were dealing with.

  I came out of that meeting with Dr. Goldstein thinking I still had a ways to go, but I had good reason to be hopeful. I also couldn’t afford to become complacent, so I kept up my regular appointments, visiting every week with Dr. Emily D’Antonio and Dr. Carolyn Douglas and every two weeks with Dr. Goldstein. I also had to stick to my meds, which were finally working the way they should.

  But through all this it was starting to become clear that on most days I was going in the right direction, something I wouldn’t have believed throughout that long, cold winter.

  CHAPTER 39

  Jimmy V, Dickie V, and Cardio V

  I LOVE BEING INVOLVED IN THE V FOUNDATION, WHICH we created for my good friend Jim Valvano. You already know how important the man was to me. But every time I do a function for the V Foundation it reminds me just how much he meant to me, and how much I miss him, so it can be a little tough.

  Given my relationship with Jim, I can’t just sit in the crowd and be happy we’re raising millions for cancer research in his name. I have to get up there and talk, and I can’t do that without telling a little story about him, which can become very personal. I need to bare a bit of my soul in front of everyone, and despite doing my work in a very public sphere, I always have a bit of apprehension about this.

  The funny thing about me is that, for someone who’s in the public eye, I’m not really that outgoing. I have lots of good friends, I can make new friends pretty easily, and I always try to be cordial to fans who come up to me. But I’m really more of a homebody. I wouldn’t even say I’m a people person, which is pretty rare in a business full of extroverts. Heck, compared to a lot of our viewers, I’m not even sure I’m that big of a sports fan! Some of those guys follow the stats, their fantasy teams, and the recruiting business more closely than I do.

  Throw all of that together, and you can see why the V Foundation events always take a little out of me. So I try to be well rested and emotionally up before I fly down, and I give myself a day off, if I can, when I get back.

  In 2012 they held the event on Friday, May 18, so Wanda and I flew down to Sarasota that morning, went to the hotel, and took it easy. When it was time to get ready for the main event that night, I was feeling a little off, but I figured that was due to the mild anxiety I always feel before speaking at the V Foundation. Nothing new there.

  When we went down to the private reception it was loud and noisy, and my head started to hurt. I said to Wanda, “I don’t get it. Normally, once I get around the people who knew Jim, I get up, but I’m not feeling that right now.”

  Wanda said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We did, and that helped a little. When we came back the main event was just starting, so we sat at our table with Lorraine and Dick Vitale, Pam Valvano, Rick Pitino, Jay Wright of Villanova, Lou Holtz, and Gary Williams—an interesting group. Everything seemed fine.

  When I got up to the dais I said, “I couldn’t be here last year because my oldest daughter, Aleah, was graduating from Fordham. During her entire time there I thought she was going to be a lawyer. Now she wants to be a sportscaster. Heck, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have wasted all that money on a good education!”

  It got a good laugh.

  “Jenna has just finished her freshman year at Ryerson, my alma mater, in Toronto. It’s a great school—I love it—but I admit I was kind of interested in seeing her go to a school with a big sports tradition. I wanted her to look at North Carolina, Duke, Notre Dame,” I said, working in the schools of the big-name coaches in the room. And then, looking right at Kentucky’s head coach, John Calipari, whose best players tend to sign up for the “one and done” deal, I added, “I even tried to get her to go to Kentucky—because I knew I’d only have to pay for one year!”

  Well, that brought the house down. My good friend Harry Rhoads, the president of the Washington Speakers Bureau, of which I’m a member, said it was one of my best speeches.

  When I stepped down from the podium I was feeling pretty good again, and the rest of the night we spent socializing. The Foundation had invited the Spinners to perform their hits, including “Rubber Band Man”—the song I used to sing to the girls when they were little.

  I had just gotten through the hardest parts of the weekend in fine style, so I was looking forward to enjoying the rest. But when I got up the next morning I wasn’t feeling bad, as such, but I still wasn’t feeling as up as I thought I should—almost the same sensation I’d felt the night before. Wanda suggested we walk around outside again, but this time I didn’t feel any better. Well, whatever, I thought. You gotta play hurt in this business, and it isn’t that bad. You’ve worked through worse, plenty of times.

  That afternoon we went to a private reception at Vitale’s house. Of course, when you live in a gorgeous mansion and you’ve invited over two hundred people there, it can only be so “private,” but it’s always fun.

  We weren’t there more than fifteen minutes when Dick gathered everyone into his family room and started talking about all the kids the Jimmy V Foundation was helping to get through cancer. He spoke with the kind of energy only Vitale can generate.

  The night before I had met a sweet little child who had successfully battled cancer. At Vitale’s house I met a teenage boy who was a really good pitcher and tennis player until he lost his right arm to cancer—so he taught himself to play tennis left-handed. Man, how could I possibly think I had it bad when I looked at these kids?

  I was in the kitchen, listening to Vitale give his speech, when I heard him say, “Where’s my partner? Get up here, Saunders!”

  When I went up to the front of the room Vitale put me in a headlock.

  “Let me tell you how special this guy is!” Vitale was shouting—because he’s always shouting. “When I thought I had throat cancer, I went to Boston to see the best doctor in the field, the same guy who saved Adele’s voice. My surgery was scheduled for nine in the morning, so I had to get there by seven. I was scared to death!

  “As I was on my way to be prepped for surgery the elevator door opens, and who’s standing there but John Saunders! He came up unannounced just to support me. That’s the type of guy John Saunders is.

  “I was so happy to see him, I had tears in my eyes. I knew after surgery I wouldn’t be able to talk, so I told Big John, ‘Just give me thumbs up or thumbs down to let me know if the surgery went well or not.’

  “Well, after the surgery, when I start to wake up, Big John’s right there. I look up at him, waiting for him to give me the signal. Well, the big guy’s just standing there, with two big thumbs up! I coulda kissed the man!”

  I spoke for a few minutes about how passionate Dick obviously was—not just for his job but for his family, his friends, and all these young children fighting cancer.

  It all felt really good—Friday’s event, all those nice things Dick said about me, getting the chance to reciprocate, and then spending some time with these amazingly courageous kids. I took some pictures with them—one of the kids called me the “Host with the Most” on her Twitter page, whi
ch was very cute—and I was feeling pretty happy.

  When I realized I hadn’t eaten all day, I went back to the kitchen to get a bite and ran into Bill Raftery, one of the funniest guys in our business.

  But then, suddenly, I felt faint. Now, I’ve felt faint a hundred times before, but this was different. I started sweating profusely. I felt dizzy and unable to fake my way through it by just holding onto the table and nodding. But I had no chest pain, so I figured it couldn’t be a heart attack.

  “Bill, I apologize,” I said. “I’ve got to go sit down.”

  When I sat down next to Wanda she said, “You look terrible.” When I admitted I felt dizzy she said, “Let’s go out by the pool and get some fresh air.”

  When I got outside, I felt like I was going to pass out, but I managed to get settled into a chair. Then I saw Vitale charging over with a friend of his. I stood up to shake his hand, but no sooner did I do that than I had to say, “I’ve got to sit down.”

  Vitale didn’t like the sound of that. He went to get his son-in-law, a doctor, who came out, took one look at me, and said, “I think we should call 911.”

  “No!” I said, the hockey player in me coming out again—the same guy who thought he was going to finish his shift on College Football with blood shooting out the back of his head. “I’m fine! Just a little dizzy is all. I’m going to be fine in a second.”

  But before I knew it two other doctors materialized from the crowd, one of them Lou Holtz’s cardiologist. If you’re going to fall suddenly ill, it’s a good idea to do so at a Dick Vitale party.

  “You have to lay down,” the first one said.

  “No!” I said. “I’m not doing that at Dick’s party!”

  But they insisted, so they laid me down on the pool deck. After a little while I said, “I think I feel a little better,” and they helped me to get back in my chair. One grabbed my right wrist, the other grabbed my left.