Duerson’s death recalls ‘Boys of Autumn’
Myriad thoughts flashed through the mind Saturday afternoon after hearing that Dave Duerson’s death was ruled a suicide.
About Duerson: He was intelligent, articulate, personable, ambitions and among his former Bears teammates perhaps most likely to succeed beyond football.
About the 1980s Bears: Now that they are men of a certain age, someone should start writing “The Boys of Autumn.”
An Amazon.com review said of “The Boys of Summer,” a masterpiece about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, author Roger Kahn “recounts how so many of those dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.”
It’s both interesting and frightening to learn how the 1985 Bears’ dreams evolved after football ended for them.
The players had to go from kid nicknames like Double-D, Sweetness, Danimal, Samurai, Fridge, Mongo and Colonel into the adult world of Dave, Walter, Dan, Mike, William, Steve and Richard.
Those Bears might have been the most indestructible sports team in history as they shuffled all the way to victory in Super Bowl XX. It’s hard to recall any of them being carried off the field even when they were injured.
Was Leslie Frazier after blowing out a knee in the Super Bowl? To be honest I don’t recall for sure, but my mind’s eye says no because the great thing about memories is they tend to be what we want them to be.
But today “The Boys of Autumn,” at least the survivors now that Duerson is dead at 50 and Walter Payton died at 45 in 1999, are as vulnerable and fragile as any middle-aged men approaching the winter of their lives.
In a way Duerson, with all his surges, his setbacks and ultimately his suicide, reflected a composite of the post-football ups and downs of the Super Bowl roster.
Duerson did it all: Married, had children, ramped up a successful business, ramped down a failed second business, sat on Notre Dame’s board of trustees, committed misdemeanor domestic battery, departed ND’s board of trustees, divorced, had a home foreclosed on, hosted a radio show, reportedly was planning to wed again and lived a full life despite dying young.
Other Bears enjoyed business successes similar to Duerson’s and still others endured failures similar to his.
Count Jim Covert, Matt Suhey, Emery Moorehead and Gary Fencik among the successes in other fields, not to mention Frazier, Mike Singletary and Ron Rivera becoming NFL head coaches, plus Hampton, Tom Thayer and Jay Hilgenberg being popular football analysts.
Ah, but then there’s the recent national story portraying William Perry as a 400-pound alcoholic who won’t go anywhere but the refrigerator or liquor store.
Hampton had a couple of DUIs. Mike Richardson served prison time for repeated narcotics offenses. Jim McMahon says football damaged his memory. Wilber Marshall is permanently disabled from football.
As Moorehead said Saturday on the Score, “We’re all getting older, things happen, we’re not as healthy as we used to be. We all are human.”
Being an ex-NFL player is challenging — partly because of football’s residual physical damage and partly because of emotional wounds inflicted by such an early retirement.
Where have “The Boys of Autumn” gone? Just about anywhere and everywhere.
For better or, in Dave Duerson’s case, for worst.
mimrem@dailyherald.com