Playing Hurt
Copyright
Note: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. This book is intended only as an informative guide for those wishing to know more about health issues. In no way is this book intended to replace, countermand, or conflict with the advice given to you by your own physician. The ultimate decision concerning care should be made between you and your doctor. We strongly recommend you follow his or her advice. Information in this book is general and is offered with no guarantees on the part of the authors or Da Capo Press. The authors and publisher disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
Copyright © 2017 by John Saunders
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Da Capo Press
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
www.dacapopress.com
@DaCapoPress
First Edition: August 2017
Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
PRINT BOOK INTERIOR DESIGN BY JANE RAESE
Set in 12.5-point Whitman
Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Editorial Production Services, www.marrathoneditorial.org
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-306-82473-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-306-82474-6 (ebook)
LSC-C
E3-20170616-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword, Mitch Albom
Author’s Note, John U. Bacon
Preface: Looking Over the Edge
Introduction
PART ONE
GROWING UP THE HARD WAY
1 An Oasis of Love
2 An Indecent Proposal
3 Playing with Fire
4 He Ain’t Heavy
5 The Salvation of Sports
6 Looking for a Little Relief
7 My Two Selves
8 The Drug Business
9 Hurting Myself
PART TWO
TRYING TO BUILD A BETTER LIFE
10 Moving Out, Moving On, Moving Back
11 Falling in Love
12 Go West
13 Getting Married
14 Country John Saunders
15 Chasing a New Dream
16 Making It in Moncton
17 Bright Lights, Big City
18 Big Man in Baltimore
19 A Family of My Own
20 The Worldwide Leader
21 Our Sister
22 Livin’ in America
PART THREE
THE FAÇADE CRACKS
23 The Psych Ward
24 Dr. Dangerous
25 Falling Backward
26 Scaling Mt. Sinai
27 Learning to Walk
28 A High-Stakes Stroll in the Park
29 Ready for Prime Time?
30 Testing, Testing
PART FOUR
COLLISION COURSE
31 The Damage of Doctor Dangerous Revealed
32 Let the Bad Times Roll
33 Stumbling Toward Unhappiness
34 A Day in the Doldrums
35 Peering Over the Tappan Zee Bridge
36 Back to the Bridge
37 Crunch Time
38 You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better
39 Jimmy V, Dickie V, and Cardio V
40 Learning the Best Lesson
Photos
Afterword, John U. Bacon
Acknowledgments, John U. Bacon
To the memory of John Saunders, a great brother, husband, father, friend
FOREWORD
A famous writer once said first impressions are always unreliable. That proved true for John Saunders and me. Our first encounter was in 2001 on the set of ESPN’s The Sports Reporters, which back then was filmed early Sunday mornings on the second floor of a Times Square bar and restaurant. I greeted John, our new “temporary” host, who was filling in for the beloved Dick Schaap, laid up in the hospital.
Strong, I thought, upon shaking John’s hand.
Must’ve been an athlete.
Nice guy.
Good voice.
Probably grateful for this chance.
Should be a decent sub until Dick comes back.
Those first impressions were as deep as a tissue—and about as significant. True, John had been an athlete (hockey player) and had a great, deep voice and a strong handshake, but (1) he wasn’t crazy about doing the show, (2) he told his wife we were all egomaniacs, (3) he quickly went from sub to permanent because Schaap never returned, passing away tragically a few months later, and (4) he was far more than decent—he was exceptional.
Also, “nice guy” didn’t begin to explain John Saunders.
It’s like calling the Mona Lisa a “nice painting.”
The book you hold in your hands is revelatory. That’s not a word I’d normally use for sports-related autobiographies. Such books often recount famous games, locker room friendships, off-camera moments. They end with a “My Way” final chapter: Regrets, I’ve had a few, but through it all, it’s been a towering life that I wouldn’t change.
John was never going to write a book like that. John didn’t live a life like that. Unbeknownst to many of us, including athletes, fans, and those who called him a good friend, John battled a raging demon most of his life.
This is a book about that.
Which makes it so much more than an autobiography.
To sit by John away from the cameras or to chat in a restaurant or on an airplane going somewhere, you would never know the depth of his challenges. You would never know that his sleep was haunted, that he bunked in with pain, that his life was a series of emotional hurdles and physical abuses, or that his subconscious often took him to dark places.
Instead, you would think, Here is the most affable guy, devoid of an ego, engaged with your conversation, a guy who loves his family, talks constantly about his wife and daughters, adores hockey and college football, and stands up for athletes other people criticize.
He was all that. He was a joy. A loyal friend. A terrific storyteller. The kind of guy who was never too busy to do something charitable.
But he was more. And that “more” was like an anvil tied to his frame.
For one thing, John was in pain. Constantly. His banging career in hockey left him paying a lifelong price. A series of adult mishaps tortured his body even more. Diabetes tethered him to insulin shots. There were Sunday mornings when you’d have thought John played an overtime NHL game the night before. His voice was groggy, his beefy frame sagged, his shoulders were killing him, and his hands shook. His energy level was barely enough to get an insulin needle into his skin.
Yet by the time the cameras rolled, he’d somehow inflated, his full-strength baritone filled the room, and he arrested the lens with a welcoming smile and complete command of the set.
The turnaround was astonishing.
But, as John tells us in these pages, it was a double life. He’d grown used to sucking it up and
toughing it out, to hoisting a smile and keeping the chatter going. Professionally it wasn’t an act. John truly loved broadcasting and his front-row seat to major sporting milestones. He truly enjoyed the coaches and fellow broadcasters he called his friends.
But you cannot lose your shadow, no matter how they adjust the lights. And John’s shadow of early abuse and teenaged depression dogged him as an adult. His attempts at treatment remained largely a secret, as did certain hospital stays and dark battles with suicidal thoughts. But this was who John Saunders was—along with his much-admired professional reputation.
And not long ago he decided to come clean. To tell his story, demons and all.
So he worked with John Bacon and wrote this book.
And then he died.
When we got the news that John was gone at the too-early age of sixty-one, we were stunned. We just saw him. He seemed fine. He seemed happy. After finding our footing, the panelists on The Sports Reporters—and its longtime producer, Joe Valerio—all agreed. The entire Sunday show would be about John. That’s pretty rare, to dedicate a full show to a host. But The Sports Reporters was a kind of family. And we all felt that strongly about the man.
Still, I can tell you that, even as we prepared our topics, we didn’t know exactly how John died. It was shrouded in a certain mystery, the way, it turns out, much of his life had been. Our tributes to him were laudatory, highlighting his gifts, his talent, his patience, his wisdom, his loyalty, his friendship, his big voice and even bigger heart.
But we barely mentioned his depression. We didn’t talk about the battle of his life. That is a story only John could tell. And as it turned out, he had just finished telling it—to the written page.
And so you have it here. I could spend endless words talking about John the conversationalist, John the funny storyteller, John the loyal Canadian arguing for more hockey topics, John the father who got teary eyed when he spoke about his daughters’ accomplishments.
But only John can tell his real story because so much of it was inside his mind, a wrestling match between the majesty of living life and the tempting peace of ending its pain. It took him to the brink, to hospitals, to a bridge over troubled waters. He almost jumped.
But he brought himself back home.
Remember this: John planned on living. Which means he fully intended to discuss this book, to speak openly about his revelations, to take them with him for the rest of his years every time he sat behind a microphone and in front of a camera. To live openly with what he termed the mental illness that had plagued him.
That, friends, is an incredible act of courage.
As it turns out, it was his last—and his most important. This book is not just the journey of a man, his loves, his talents, his road to success; it is also a cautionary tale to others with John’s problems and an open embrace to those battling their own demons, a way of saying, “You are not alone.”
You never felt alone with John. He lifted you up. Made you feel good. Made you happy about this thing we call the human race because he was the most human of us, the most decent, and, as it turns out, most brave.
I said this book was revelatory. The biggest revelation is that, come the final page, you have even more admiration for John Saunders than you had coming in. That, for those of us who knew and loved him, is a pretty amazing feat.
Mitch Albom
Author, journalist, longtime panelist ESPN’s The Sports Reporters
AUTHOR’S NOTE
After John Saunders passed away in August of 2016, I continued to work on the manuscript with the help of his family, friends, and physicians. But in the end this is John’s story, told from his point of view, based primarily on his recollections. Of course, memories can differ. Also, while the events depicted here are true, some names and identifying details have been changed, and some dialogue has been reconstructed.
John U. Bacon
PREFACE
Looking Over the Edge
It was mid-February 2012, the time of year when we northerners become convinced that winter will never end. For me the winter of 2012 was already the longest of my entire life.
I was driving to the Tappan Zee Bridge, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. The bridge is just a few miles from our home in Westchester County, where we’ve lived since 1999.
My wife, Wanda, and I raised our two girls here. Our oldest, Aleah, had just graduated from Fordham University. Her little sister, Jenna, was finishing her freshman year at my alma mater, Ryerson University in Toronto.
Maybe a dozen times a year we take I-87 to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge to visit the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, New York. We also use the bridge on our way to Canada, my “home and native land,” as the anthem says. When they built the Tappan Zee in 1955 it was supposed to last about half a century, and it’s already surpassed that. Engineers have deemed it one of the most decrepit bridges in the country, and it looks like they constructed it from an erector set. There’s nothing pretty about that bridge.
But when you’re on it, you have to admire the view. The Hudson River is one of our nation’s great jewels, and if you take your eyes off the road long enough to follow the river south, you can see the faint skyline of New York City on the horizon.
But on this day I wasn’t driving toward the bridge to go to the mall or visit Jenna in Canada or admire the Hudson. I wasn’t even planning to drive to the other side.
On this particular day I was a beaten man. On top of a lifelong battle with depression, I had still not fully recovered from a brain injury I’d suffered on September 10, 2011, on the set of ABC College Football. After a break in the Alabama–Penn State game, I stood up too fast, blacked out, and fell backward onto the tile floor, with my head taking the impact. I endured six months of grueling therapy just to relearn how to walk and talk and read and write.
Six months later the lingering effects of the injury were evident whenever I made a mistake during our broadcasts by mixing up names or getting the score wrong—the kind of simple errors that guys who’ve been on TV for a few decades aren’t supposed to make. Each time I screwed something up, a few anonymous critics on Twitter would hammer me. That’s part of the business, of course, but after a few months of this I concluded that the one skill I could always count on, the thing that had saved me so many times, my ability to talk on TV, was slipping away from me.
To mitigate my depression I had undergone years of therapy and medication from a battery of doctors—some great, some not. But on this morning I woke up as deeply depressed as I’d ever been. That was when I decided to drive to the Tappan Zee Bridge.
I told myself I wasn’t going there to jump off the bridge. I was only going to take a look over the side. When I got to the bridge I drove to the highest point and stopped, just as I’d planned. Suddenly I felt a great urgency. With cars whizzing past and the police sure to show up at any minute, I realized if I was going to peer over the edge to see what it looked like, I’d have to do it now.
But after I got out of my car and walked to the side I encountered girders and fences designed to keep people from jumping. I realized that killing myself this way would take more effort than I had anticipated.
I made my way through the first layer of obstructions and got close enough to see the river below. Once I finally looked over the edge, I saw a drop of about 140 feet, equivalent to a fourteen-story skyscraper. The river’s rough gray surface looked more like concrete than water.
I stood there motionless, taking it all in.
When I realized I could do it, that I could jump from the bridge, I got scared. I turned around, got back in my car, and drove off, heading for home.
On my way back I decided that whatever I was going to do, it wasn’t going to be that.
But what was I going to do?
INTRODUCTION
This decade two active professional athletes have announced that they were gay. This was a first for the NBA, the NFL, or any major American professional league. Commentators freq
uently declared that those announcements broke the last taboo in the macho culture of American sports.
But there remains another: the taboo that tells men they must never confess that they suffer from mental illness, which is why men are far less likely to seek help than women.
In this book I openly discuss my lifelong battle with depression and how it nearly cost me my life. Playing Hurt is not an autobiography of a sports celebrity but a memoir of a man facing his own mental illness, and emerging better off for the effort. I will take you into the heart of my struggle with depression, including insights into some of its causes, its consequences, and its treatments.
My story unfolds like most of our lives do, among family, friends, and colleagues. But I will also take you places we don’t usually visit: the therapists’ offices, the hospitals, and the psychiatric wards where the real work of recovery is performed.
I invite you behind the façade of my apparently “perfect” life as a sportscaster, with a wonderful wife and two healthy, happy adult daughters. I have a lot to be thankful for. Trust me, I know it, and I am truly grateful. But as my trip to the Tappan Zee Bridge shows, none of those things can protect me or anyone else from the disease of depression and its potentially lethal effects.
People only see what’s on the outside. When you’re depressed, as Robin Williams was, the pain and darkness you feel on the inside can eclipse everything you have going for you on the outside. When Williams ended his own life, everyone asked, “How could he do that? He had so much to live for!” But given the pain he must have been experiencing, instead they should have asked, “How did he manage to live that long?”
Mine is a rare story: that of a black man in the sports industry openly grappling with depression. I will share the good, the bad, and the ugly, including the lengths I’ve gone to to conceal my private life from the public.
So why write a book now, one that will compromise the very privacy I’ve worked so hard to protect?
Because, once and for all, I want to end the pain and heartache that comes from leading a double life. I also want to reach out to the millions of people, especially men, who think they’re alone and can’t ask for help.