Sports Biblio Digest 8.5.18: Easing the Pain of Crippled High School QB
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Kareem on the GOAT; LeBron’s Promise School; Jarrod Lyle; MLB Ballparks, Illustrated; Minor League Parks in West Virginia; ‘A Jock Taj Mahal’ at Northwestern; John Feinstein on Patriotism; The Miracle Braves; New John McPhee Collection
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Long before American football’s concussion crisis emerged, paralyzing head and neck injuries were giving the sport unflattering and even apocalyptic headlines.
The most prominent among them was Darryl Stingley, a New England Patriots wide receiver who suffered a spinal cord injury in a 1977 game and lived 30 more agonizing years, succumbing to heart disease and pneumonia stemming from his quadriplegia.
While Stingley’s saga became national news, Buddy Miley’s story came to public attention in the final years of his life, and 15 years after his assisted suicide at the hands of Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
Miley was a swaggering quarterback for William Tennent High School in suburban Philadelphia in 1973 when a hard tackle rendered him motionless on the ground.
He let out “an anguished squeal,” journalist Mark Kram Jr. wrote in his 2012 book about Miley, “Like Any Normal Day: A Story of Devotion” (St. Martin’s Press).
Bert Miley, Buddy’s father and a youth football coach in Warminster, Pa., told his wife Rosemarie that “it was a clean hit.”
Rosemarie dropped just about everything in her life to become a full-time caregiver for Buddy, her eldest son, who later called her “Saint Rosemarie.” He lived at home, completely dependent on a family that would never be the same. As one of Buddy’s sisters observed:
“The day Buddy was hurt was the day my father lost his wife, and the other children lost their mother.”
Without Rosemarie, the story of Buddy Miley doesn’t get told. Kram was a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News when an editor handed him a copy of a letter she had published in Sports Illustrated, trying to draw attention to the plight of crippled athletes like her son amid the glorification of the NFL.
During the 1970s, medical experts were as concerned about spinal cord injuries being the ticking time bomb for football as concussions are discussed today.
Kram spoke to Dr. Joseph Torg, an orthopedic surgeon at Temple University, who created a project called the National Football Head and Neck Injury Registry. Torg’s figures were startling: Between 1971-75, 97 young football players died from severe neck injuries. Another 99 players suffered severe cervical fractures that led to permanent quadriplegia.
Miley was one of them, and in 1993, on his 37th birthday, the Daily News published Kram’s profile of Buddy Miley with the headline “19 Years of Hell.”
In that piece and in his book, Kram, the son of the late legendary SI writer Mark Kram, unfolds the agonizing story of Miley and his family with grace and empathy.
The author sensed that Buddy “could not let himself let go of the young man he once was, that an essential piece of him remained anchored in 1973.”
Rosemarie, always matter-of-fact, didn’t mince words in the newspaper article:
"My son broke his neck 19 years ago playing high school football. Since then our home has been hell on earth.”
Buddy’s declining physical health, as well as his psychological well-being, was apparent. His kid brother Jimmy took him to Lourdes, France, seeking a cure in the world-renown spiritual waters there.
But there were no miracles to be found for Buddy, whom Kram writes felt increasingly guilty of the burden he was imposing on his mother. Unlike former New York Jet Dennis Byrd, Buddy would never walk again; he couldn’t even use his hands.
By early 1997, at the age of 41 and nearly 24 years after his injury, he asked his brother for one last favor: To end his pain, by helping facilitate the end of his life. They flew to Detroit, where Kevorkian was based, and checked into a Quality Inn. As the doctor knocked on the motel room door, Jimmy gave his brother a goodbye kiss.
Around a decade later, Kram delicately expanded his story for the book in interviews with family members, knowing Jimmy would be the most sensitive of all. Coming around the time of the Terri Schiavo case, he had plenty of fears that he'd be jailed or disassociated with the Catholic Church if he went public. Once he began talking, however, Jimmy stoically recounted the ordeal that makes the story so compelling, yet heartbreaking:
“He had an awful life. You know, Buddy was somebody who never got what he wanted. I just thought for once in his life that should happen, even if it was just to die the way he wanted.”
How to ease someone’s pain, especially if no better quality of life is possible, is at the heart of an acute moral and ethical dilemma in contemporary society. This is when Kevorkian, derided as “Dr. Death,” stepped into the public eye, and he was unrepentant about the role he was playing. I found his aura as chilling as his grim philosophy.
This is what took me so long to finally read this book, months after Kram sent it to me, and finally to write about it, as another football season is just around the corner.
While Kram never gets in the way of his story as he’s telling it, I was glad that he explained his own thoughts near the end, especially responding to Kevorkian’s assertion that Buddy should have acted toward his own end sooner:
“In his own inability to see life—only death—Kevorkian could not begin to understand the light that Buddy still spreads into the lives of the people who knew him.”
This book hit me like a thunderclap, especially that sentence. I’ve been struggling most of my adult life with religious and spiritual issues, and the deep humanity that’s evident in how Kram approached a very complicated subject came as a welcome dose of clarity.
Light over dark, life over death, love over hate, and especially over indifference. These seem like simple concepts to embrace, but quite often get sabotaged by hubris, pride and self-importance.
“Like Any Other Day” is Kram’s first book, and it won the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He spoke to Alex Belth shortly after publication about how the project came to be:
“It seemed to be the perfect book for me—not a sports book per se, or a Kevorkian book—but one that played out across a large canvas of human experience.”
. . . .
“What I found in the Miley family was precisely what I had been searching for: Ordinary people steeped in extraordinary circumstances. But I did not choose this story as much as it chose me.”
Any reader of this book should feel extraordinarily lucky that it did.
Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a series to lead the newsletter in August called the “Football Bookshelf.” Future subjects include biographies of Brett Favre and Terry Bradshaw, what high school football means in a declining town in western Pennsylvania, and pigskin politics.
A Few Good Reads
Australian golf pro Jarrod Lyle, 36, is undergoing palliative care as he enters the final stages of a fight against acute myeloid leukemia. “He has given everything that he's got to give, and his poor body cannot take anymore,” his wife Briony said in social media postings. Robert Allenby, Lyle’s fellow Aussie pro and playing on the PGA Tour stop in Reno this week, wrote that “he has a huge heart and has touched many, many lives. His character, his charisma, his generosity, his humility and gratitude are beautiful. He embodies everything good about people;"
John Feinstein writes that Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James and other athletes speaking out on social issues should be regarded as patriots;
James is leaving Ohio behind again to continue his NBA career, but not before announcing the creation of an elementary school in his hometown of Akron for at-risk kids. The I Promise school includes a food pantry, and James’ foundation is footing the bill for tuition and other expenses. It’s part of the Akron city school district, and opened this week to 240 students;
The Tweeter-in-Chief caused a firestorm by denouncing James after a CNN interview: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!,” a reference to Michael Jordan. The First Lady has a different view, and may be visiting the school. I look forward to the day when our Long National Twitter Nightmare is over;
Just before James signed with the Lakers, a professor at the College of Wooster published a paper about the religious imagery connected to him;
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is having none of the argument about the NBA’s Greatest of All-Time, which I think unfairly has disregarded him:
“The reason there is no such thing as the GOAT is because every player plays under unique circumstances. We played different positions, under different rules, with different teammates, with different coaches. Every player has to adapt to their circumstances and find a way to excel. This isn’t Highlander. There can be more than one.”
A ‘jock Taj Mahal’ is how the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic describes a new $270 million athletics center and field house at Northwestern University, which typically lags other Big Ten schools in spending and amenities. While admiring the facility’s “structural drama that takes full advantage of its spectacular lakefront site,” Blair Kamin also wrote that “You wonder what goes through the mind of kids struggling to pay off their student loans. Does it make sense to spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars on a facility that only a small fraction of the university’s students will enter on a typical day?”
In this excerpt from his 2015 book “Billion-Dollar Ball,” journalist Gilbert M. Gaul is the latest to excoriate the escalating arms race of college athletics;
As that facility was unveiled, the facade of the Big Ten’s most powerful and lucrative athletic empire was threatening to crumble. Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer was placed on paid administrative leave as the university investigates his handling of domestic abuse allegations involving a recently fired assistant. The story was broken by Brett McMurphy, laid off last year by ESPN and who posted his scoop on his Facebook page, thereby skirting a non-compete clause while he receives severance: “Basically, the way ESPN Legal was operating, they made the suggestion that even if I created BrettMcMurphy.com, that would constitute a third party;”
Can you guess the ballpark? You’ve got 20 seconds to guess on each one of the 30 MLB venues. Cool interactive project here from the Los Angeles Times, with drawings by the minimalist artist S. Preston;
Hardball Talk blogger Craig Calcaterra returns to his native state to pen this minor league baseball travel piece for Visit Southern West Virginia, including his food, drink and lodging recommendations;
Coming to the Baseball Hall of Fame in August: Moe Berg: Big League Spy, an exhibit that explores his double life;
Phil Hersh writes about the retirement of Frank Carroll, 80, longtime figure skating coach who tutored Michelle Kwan, gold medalist Evan Lysacek and nearly a dozen Olympians in a 60-year career.
Now Hear This
More with Brett McMurphy, on Richard Deitsch’s sports media podcast at The Athletic;
Charlie Alexander, author of “The Miracle Braves,” is the latest guest on Good Seats Still Available;
On the Super 70s Sports Podcast, the guest is Todd Radom, sports artist and author of “Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn.”
The In the Past Lane history podcast interviews Lou Moore, author of two new books about black athletes.
Book News
John McPhee's seventh essay collection is coming out in November (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), and contains some of The New Yorker’s legendary writer’s most recent sports pieces. It’s entitled “The Patch,” the same as his 2010 story about fishing chain pickerel in New Hampshire, a tale that was really about his dying father.
Other pieces from The Sporting Scene inventory include another work from the same year, “Linksland and Bottle,” on the 150th anniversary of the British Open, which was played at the Old Course at St. Andrews:
“It is a sequence of holes so hallowed in the game that Amen Corner, at Augusta National, has been compared with it, but while the Loop is far more complex geometrically, as golf goes it is less difficult. Birdies are to be made, just lying there for the taking, unless the wind is blowing hard, which it nearly always is. This prow of the linksland is much like the bow of a ship in the winter North Atlantic.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 134, published Aug. 5, 2018.
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