Courtesy of ESPN The Magazine
Two-Man Street
A Death in the family has Leonard Little trying to make sense of his life. Again
By Seth Wickersham
Tonights honoree is hiding behind a tree. He stands in the chill fall darkness in his best suit.--a beautiful brown suit, a rich man's suit-- atop a hill that eases down to a high school football field. Some of the 3,000 people in the stands are here to watch his No.30 be retired at halftime soon to wach there Asheville (N.C.) High Cougars whip the North Buncombe Black Hawks. The honoree visited with the Cougars before they burst onto the field, telling them about his own life at Asheville, now 12 years gone, about how they could cherish their high school years, about the value of innocence.
Tonights honoree isn't innocent anymore. Each morning and night, he begs and prays for forgiveness. And the forgiveness he seeks has him tucked behind a blue spruce, watching, waiting, wondering. Scared to death.
HE WAS quiet, at first, because he was in shock. It was Oct. 20, 1998. Leonrad Litte was in Harriman, Tenn., at the home of his mother, Wanda, in her windowless basement, the TV sitting cold. It wasn't clear who he was now, not after what happened the night before. He wasn't the boy nicknamed Head, the locla star who had overcome poverty and an absentee dad and the temptation of easy street money. He wasn't the linebacker who, with Peyton Manning, co-captained the Volunteers and then earned a special-teams spot with the St. LOuis Rams. Now he was something ugly. He spent a few days in that basement before someone knocked at the door, a man in his 40s with sandy hair and a warm smile.
John Berble's arrival was a suprise. They'd met at Tennessee years earlier, and Berble was a psychologist and finincial adviser for several former Vols. Everyone around Knoxville knew him as Dr. John, but Little hadn't talked to him in months. They went upstairs to the family oom, and Dr. John asked, "What Happened?"
What happened was this: Little showed up at the Adam's Mark hotel in downtown St. Louis for a suprise party--his. It was Oct. 19, his 24th birthday. Over the next four hours he drank until his blood alchohol level hit .19, nearly twice the legal limit. THen at 10:45 p.m. he hopped into his new Navigator, ran a red light at Memorial and Market and broadsideda blue Thunderbird. The driver, 47-year-old Susan Gutweiler, was headed to pick up her 15-yea-old so, Michael, at a Rob Zombie concert.
Little looked up at Dr. John, his stare empty, his voice low and flat, and said, "Someone died."
LEONARD LITTLE knows death. It's not that he's morbid or scary or deranged. In fact, he's quiet and shy and sincere, with long, baleen eyelashes that shadow a face hardened by the fallout of disgrace.
But Little knows about forgiveness, too. He forives those in St. Louis who boo him and the...
-02-19-2006, 11:56 AM
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