by Glenn Stout
“Tell those boys to get over to the dorm,” Tim said to Maggie, “and we’ll be waiting on them.”
As Corbin prepared to enter the Towers, he had flashbacks to the early 1990s, his final season as the head coach at Presbyterian. One of his players, Marcus Miller, died in a car accident. He remembers bringing his players into his apartment and telling them the news. That doesn’t help. Experience doesn’t help. There’s no preparation for this. There’s no 10-step guide for Dealing with Devastation. It doesn’t get easier the second time. Not in the slightest.
“It’s so toxic because you don’t know what to do, what to say,” Corbin said. “Because at that point right there, when you share that news with them, they’ve gone somewhere else. They’ve just gone to their emotion.”
Corbin didn’t even need to say a word as he entered the lobby of the Towers. They could tell from his body language.
“Corbs comes in,” Snider said, “and I don’t remember if he even said anything.”
“He knew that we had all kind of heard rumors as to what possibly happened,” Wright said. “He came in and basically said one thing, ‘Yeah,’ and that was pretty much kind of it. And then from there, guys just kind of broke down. There really wasn’t a whole lot of talking. It was more just silence. Because it was still just a disbelief-type thing. We were with him literally six hours earlier in the day, practicing and getting ready for the regional.”
No one wanted to sleep that night. No one wanted to be alone. No one wanted to talk. No one wanted to think about the regional the next day. No one wanted to think about the NCAA tournament. No one wanted to think about the postseason. No one wanted to think about baseball. No one wanted to think about a game.
Finally, at 4 a.m., Corbin told his players to get to their rooms. Try to get some sleep. If some of them wanted to sleep in the same room, they could. Many players did just that. Some didn’t sleep at all.
The next morning, the Commodores boarded a bus and made the 45-minute ride to Clarksville. Teddy and Susan were waiting in their front yard, arms open wide, a Vanderbilt flag displayed proudly in front of their house. Players circled around them, hugged them, cried together, mourned together.
At one point, Teddy and Susan approached the two teammates who were with Donny at the lake—Chandler Day and Ryan Johnson. They embraced them. They didn’t want them to carry an unnecessary burden. They didn’t want them to blame themselves. They knew this was Donny’s decision.
The first words out of Mr. and Mrs. Everett’s mouths:
“This wasn’t your fault.”
“No words can express how I feel for the Everett family,” Chandler Day tweeted at 5:22 p.m. on June 3, 2016.
“I met Donny at Team USA and East Coast Pro. I only knew him as a ballplayer then. When we first came to Vanderbilt, I started to know Donny as a person.
“In the fall we had English together, and we sat next to each other every day. I always hated that class, but you made it go by fast with your attitude and personality.
“In the spring we started a Sunday tradition of going to White Castle. We ordered six cheese sliders, five-piece mozzarella sticks, and a large Big Red creme soda. The best part was you setting your retainer on the counter and the looks you would get. Still had the most affectionate smile without those two teeth. You bet your ass I’m ordering seven whenever I go, and that one will be for you.
“Our fishing trips, hanging out in the dorms, our drives together. Those are the things I will cherish the most. Life was too short for you, but I will live both of ours to the fullest.
“I miss you. I will continue to miss you, and I love you forever, man.
“White Castle Clan out. Rest in peace, my friend.”
The clubhouse was divided—to play or not to play? How could they play? But then, how could they not play? Donny would’ve played. Shouldn’t they play for him?
Corbin called three team leaders—Ro Coleman, Tyler Campbell, and Kyle Smith—into his office on the morning of June 3, 2016. The morning after.
“Fellas,” he said, “we’re going to go on and we’re going to play, because I think at this point the baseball field and the locker room is a safe haven for you guys. If we’re going to mourn, let’s mourn together. If we’re going to grieve, let’s grieve together, but let’s do this.”
Fate intervened. The Nashville skies opened and rain washed away Vanderbilt’s NCAA regional-opening game against Xavier. It was hardly a reprieve. Another sleepless night. Another night of mourning. Saturday, June 4, was just as gray. Saturday, June 4, was just as rainy.
The flags at Hawkins Field flew at half-mast. Donny’s No. 41 jersey hung in the home dugout. The Commodores left a space for Donny down the foul line as they lined up for the national anthem. Every player wrote “DE41” on his hat.
Corbin and his coaching staff did their best to manage their players’ emotions—to lend them some morsel of strength. But it was still all so raw. The tears still flowed freely. There was still that sense of disbelief, that excruciating grapple with reality.
“Hey, listen,” Corbin told them, trying to alleviate at least some of the pressure, “don’t be afraid to smile or laugh. You’re not being disrespectful. There’s a human side to this where your emotions have to play out a little bit. You’re in competition now. So whatever emotions come through competition, let them play out. Don’t be afraid.”
When freshman Ethan Paul singled in Vanderbilt’s first run of the game in the fifth, to tie the score at 1–1, the Commodores ran out of the dugout to celebrate, like he had just hit a walk-off grand slam. At that moment of exultant catharsis, the Commodores bore some resemblance to the Vanderbilt team that had won 43 games in the regular season. But the illusion quickly shattered. Behind ace Jordan Sheffield, Vanderbilt made an uncharacteristic four errors, fueling an explosive 13-run seventh inning. The Musketeers won, 15–1. The shaken Commodores suddenly were staring at an elimination game. Cruelly, they’d have to play for a second time that day.
When Kyle Wright took the mound that night against Washington, he had barely slept, going to bed at 4 a.m. the previous two nights. He was running on pure, unadulterated adrenaline. Through the first three innings, that seemed to be enough to carry him. He kept the Huskies off the board, while Vanderbilt established a 1–0 lead. Then it began to unravel.
“My first three innings, they were really good, and then I found myself drifting back and forth between the game and thinking about Donny,” Wright said. “It was kind of an emotional roller coaster for me. I was very emotional. I was yelling more. I was all over the place more.
“Usually, I’m a very calm pitcher. I don’t let a whole lot of things affect me. But that game, I specifically remember being out of whack, just because I wanted to win so badly for him, but at the same time, the mind-set wasn’t right.”
Down 8–2 in the sixth, the Huskies led a spirited comeback, knocking out Wright in the seventh inning and taking a 9–8 lead in the eighth on a two-run home run by outfielder Jack Meggs.
That score would hold.
Vanderbilt’s season ended. Abruptly. Painfully.
“It sucked, because I think I gave up seven runs,” Wright said. “I didn’t feel great about myself because the hitters gave me a great chance to win the game and I was kind of lost a little bit . . . But at the same time, after the game was lost, we all kind of realized that it’s bigger than baseball, and that kind of helped me get over the fact that I could’ve pitched better.
“All the guys were so great. I specifically remember [reliever] Ben Bowden put his arm around me after the game and told me, ‘It’s not your fault.’ That kind of helped make me feel better about it.”
After that final game ended, no one said a word in the Hawkins Field dugout. The Commodores sat there for an hour, silent, encircling coach Corbin. Snider remembers looking up at the No. 41 jersey hanging on the jacket rack and crying. He had wanted to win with every fiber of his being. They had all wanted to.
&n
bsp; But the truth was—as Corbin later shared with his team—Vanderbilt wasn’t meant to win that day. This was life’s way of saying they needed to direct their attention and love elsewhere—completely and fully toward Donny.
“We were thinking about Donny the entire day. I think the kids are probably saying, ‘Did this really happen? That really happened?’ It’s replay in your mind,” Corbin said. “And we’ve all had dreams and we’ve all had nightmares, and you wake up and you say to yourself, ‘Boy, that dream was so real, and I’m glad it never happened.’ And then you continue to try to wake up from this, and you’re up, or at least you think you’re up because—what is life?
“Life might be one huge dream for all I know, but whatever we’re doing at the time, you wake up and it keeps replaying itself, ‘Yes, this did happen; yes, this did happen; yes, this did happen; but I have an at-bat here. Yes, this did happen; yes, this did happen; yes, this did happen; but I’ve got to throw a pitch here, but yes, this did happen.’ And it just keeps coming.
“People outside go, ‘That must be so difficult to do.’ Difficult is not the word. It’s not doable. The game of baseball was not overpowering. That was not our opponent. Grief was our opponent. And grief just says, ‘I don’t care what you have for me, I will eat you up, I will move you to the side, you can throw anything my way,’ but grief always wins. Grief’s undefeated—unless you don’t have a heartbeat.
“Quite frankly, when grief ate us, it just did the best thing it could’ve done for Vanderbilt baseball at that moment. It just made us stop playing a sport and then turn our attention to Donny, and that’s what we needed to do, and that was healthier than winning two baseball games.”
Three days later, Vanderbilt’s team bus unloaded outside of Faith Outreach Church in Clarksville. The community poured into the church to honor Donny Everett—every person he had ever touched filled its expansive interior. Even Vanderbilt players Donny never played with—Dansby Swanson, Carson Fulmer, Rhett Wiseman—came to offer their condolences. Eight players served as pallbearers, Snider and Wright included. Representing his teammates, Snider made a touching eulogy, describing Donny as the “ultimate VandyBoy.”
“Everything you think about Vanderbilt baseball,” Snider said, “Donny had.”
Tim Corbin made his own eulogy, a moving reflection on Donny’s carefree Midwest American values, his positive life force, and his biting wit.
Corbin still has that eulogy saved in a Word document on his office computer. It’s 10 pages long.
Jim Owczarski
Cincinnati Bengals Great Tim Krumrie’s Brain: A Work in Progress
from The Cincinnati Enquirer
The tan leather of the steering wheel of his Ford F-250 slides through Tim Krumrie’s thick hands. He jokes he’ll break yours if he wants. He wheels the truck down his favorite back way, the less trafficked Howelsen Parkway along the Yampa River to the base of sun-splashed Emerald Mountain. Here, on the eastern side of the Rockies, are hiking and biking trails, a ski slope, and the home of a pro rodeo series.
It’s where he goes to walk. A place to drift into a reverie.
It’s good to daydream, he says.
An hour earlier the smile had faded for a few minutes, the jokes subdued. His eyes intensified. His night visions once weren’t so beautiful.
“Bad dreams. Wrong dreams. Can’t repeat ’em. Wake up and wonder if you did something wrong.”
He set his jaw. Just below his bottom lip, but above his chin, there’s a quiver.
“Ugly.”
Such terrors are symptoms of a damaged frontal lobe, which resulted from a 12-year NFL career with the Cincinnati Bengals, two years of wrestling and four years of football at the University of Wisconsin that put him in the College Football Hall of Fame, and playing linebacker and wrestling in his youth.
He sure as hell doesn’t want any pity.
Instead he wants to talk about it.
“It was just sleeping. Just sitting there. Doing nothing,” he said of his brain. “The blood flow wasn’t getting there. The people have to understand you have to get educated on some of this a little bit. I am not a doctor. All I’m doing is telling you my story. And this s— is true. I don’t know the fancy words or all that other stuff. That’s not my job. My job is to tell the people of the world it’s okay. This stuff happens. Until you come over across the tracks and say hey, I have a problem. I have a problem, I’m screwed up.
“You have to get the correct doctor and find out. So we found out.”
Poster Boy
The eyes say it all.
Well, almost.
Toss in the broken nose, the blood. That says it all.
The color photo is huge, life-sized, if that can be believed.
Now 57, Krumrie is a fit 226 pounds. He’ll steel his gaze and challenge anyone to give him a shot to the oblique. Stone, he says. A few hundred crunches will do that. Voted the third best player in the 50-year history of the franchise and a five-time team leader in tackles, he’s wearing a black Bengals hat, a thin, long-sleeved performance Bengals shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots.
“A bad day at the office,” he laughs, looking at the print of himself in his workout room.
This is where his two Pro Bowl jerseys are framed. There’s a scarred Bengals helmet. The 1988 Super Bowl champion Wheaties Box that never was. The photo faces the treadmill, the bike, and the resistance bands, right around the corner from the rack that holds over a dozen cowboy hats.
It’s where he lost 60 pounds in 100 days. It’s where he rehabbed a double knee replacement in 2013, a surgery where the surgeons tried, and failed, to wrench out the 15-inch titanium rod in his left leg. He returned to coach the East-West Shrine Game nine weeks later.
He never missed a game in his life, from high school through the moment he rode off the turf at Riverfront Stadium on a Harley Davidson gifted from Mike Brown. He is most famous for suffering the worst injury at the worst time: the shattered left tibia, fibula, and ankle on the choppy turf of Super Bowl XXIII at Joe Robbie Stadium in Florida on January 22, 1989.
There are no regrets. He proudly accepts the costs of his life’s work. And he’d do it again.
“In a second. In a second,” he said. “You put me in the Super Bowl you can break my leg—two of ’em! It’s that important.”
He loves football. He loves the National Football League. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger advocate for the sport.
“He is so pro-NFL,” his wife, Cheryl, said. “He talks to [NFL executive vice president] Jeff Miller. He talks to [executive vice president] Troy Vincent. He talks to [commissioner] Roger [Goodell]. He just loves the game and he loves the league. He wears his NFL hat all the time because that’s the shield and [you] always protect the shield. He doesn’t want to play the blame game.
“I would love for him to be the poster boy for this, the poster boy for saying ‘go and take care of yourself, figure out how to live and how not to be mad.’”
A Hard Truth Discovered
Tim Krumrie is into his third year of a new chapter of his life, one he hopes can be an example for those stuck in the early drafts of theirs.
He sets his jaw again. The quiver returns too.
“Do you go to the doctor if you get the flu? Yes. You break your leg? You go to the doctor? Yes. Why can’t you go to the doctor to see if your brain is okay?” he said. “Why can’t you do that? Nothing wrong with it.”
Make no mistake. It took some time for him to come to that realization.
The Krumries say they first noticed symptoms of brain trauma after Tim wasn’t able to find another coaching job after his contract with Kansas City expired after the 2010 season. He had coached the defensive lines in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Kansas City for 15 years. A nearly three-decade career in the NFL was suddenly over.
“That’s when it becomes, really, kind of scary,” he said.
Routines were broken. His brain and body slowed down.
“It all just kind
of hit me,” he said. “When I was always into the football stuff, I always had that brain part working. Now, you’re gone, and then that’s when all that stuff started coming out. It was after the fact.”
The flushes of anger stemmed from his persistent unemployment, they figured. The long-term memory loss? How could he possibly remember the thousands of teammates and plays and over 400 games he played or coached in?
His once otherworldly balance was off-kilter. Ah, that’s due to his deteriorating knees. They also prevented him from working out, so his weight ballooned to 270 pounds—but not the healthy 270 he carried as a player.
As far as he knew he never suffered a concussion—because he was never knocked out. That was the measure then. Was his bell rung? Sure. Ever see stars? Sure, a couple times a game. Whatever.
As they lived through the postcareer years, Cheryl read literature the NFL sent the house about concussions and the potential for long-term brain trauma and its effects. But the dots never quite connected to her, at least initially. She believed his reasons too. And her high school sweetheart wasn’t too interested in knowing what real truths lie beneath his truths.
“He was extremely resistant to anything with people saying . . . the NFL will send you all the information,” Cheryl began. “You can do this, you can go here, you can do that, and I would read it and look at it and he basically said, ‘Why the f— would I want to know if there is anything wrong with me?’ That attitude. ‘Why the f— would I want to know that?’ And I was like ‘Okay, maybe you don’t.’”
The tipping point came in 2015.
“He just stopped working out,” she said, which included no desire to even ride his bicycle. “That was the most dramatic thing. That’s when I was like, ‘Okay, there’s something wrong with him.’”
So Cheryl arranged a “business” meeting with friend and entrepreneur Randall Reed. Reed was on the board of directors of CereScan, a brain scan imaging facility in Littleton, Colorado. The idea was to get Krumrie to acknowledge there might be more to what he was experiencing than surface-level issues like unemployment and knee pain.