When Junior Seau retired from the NFL in January 2010, he had high hopes and lofty dreams for the next phase of his life. He was looking forward to living in his Oceanside beachfront home, surfing, running on the beach, spending time with his four children, playing golf with his friends and mastering the ukulele. He was planning to improve Seau’s, his Mission Valley restaurant, and to bolster his Junior Seau Foundation. He also thought he might try broadcasting or coaching.
“If anyone was well prepared for the transition, I thought it was Junior Seau,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon, a member of his foundation board. “He had a great foundation that had been in place for years. He had a business that at one time had been successful. I thought he was in pretty good shape.”
But he wasn’t in good shape. In the months to come, Seau’s trademark smile would mask a man rapidly unraveling. Outside of the NFL’s spotlight, what emerged was a life marked by depression, drinking, prescription drugs, gambling, financial woes, sexual escapades and strained relationships.
Seau’s partner in retirement was his girlfriend, Mary Nolan. He’d met her in Boston in 2007, when he was a New England Patriots linebacker and team captain during their undefeated regular season, and they’d developed a close friendship.
When he introduced himself to her, Nolan was just 22, and she had no idea who he was because she didn’t watch football. Over the next two years, their relationship grew into something deeper, and he asked her to live with him in Boston during the 2009 season, and then move into his home in Oceanside. They had talked about getting married and having children. They had plans to renovate his house.
In Nolan’s heart, Seau was the love of her life. Tall and athletic, she was smart, independent, down to earth and family oriented.
They did stand-up paddle boarding together in the mornings, and at dusk every night, they watched the sunset from his balcony as he strummed the ukulele and sang.
“Mary just wanted to be happy,” said Seau’s friend, songwriter Jamie Paulin. “She wanted him to be happy.”
Seau had a favorite pet name for Nolan: He called her Bear because she was such a sound sleeper. He was always telling her how much he adored her Bear hugs.
Seau’s transition from the NFL into the real world proved to be difficult. For his entire life, beginning with his childhood on Oceanside’s Zeiss Street, where he and his brothers shared a bedroom in a converted one-car garage, Seau had a singular focus: being a great football player.
For more than two decades, first at USC and then in the NFL, he had lived a highly structured and emotionally charged football player’s life. His days, his weeks, his months and his years all revolved around football. Every moment, every task, every decision was choreographed for him by his coaches — training, games, meetings, playbooks, film study, medical treatments, meals, bus rides, plane flights, curfews and sleep. Every game, every training session, represented instant gratification — he immediately knew if he had succeeded or failed.
He adored the camaraderie, and forged deep bonds with his coaches and teammates. The adulation and the euphoria he felt from playing in packed college and NFL stadiums, from walking out of the locker room and hearing the click of his cleats on the cement hallways to blasting out of the end zone tunnel and breathlessly racing to the 50-yard line, was beyond compare. The money he made — which allowed him, and all of those he supported, to have wonderful lifestyles — was off the charts.
Seau was completely unprepared for retirement’s physical, psychological, emotional and financial toll. Instead of having open-ended days in which he could just relax and enjoy life, he started to question his identity; his purpose in life; his shortcomings as a husband, a boyfriend and a father, and his worth as a man.
The lack of structure in his life — in particular, the absence of career obligations and responsibilities — increased his depression, and gave him more time to dwell on it.
The diminished offseason physical training, as well as no longer having to devote hours each week to practices and games, meant he generated less adrenaline and fewer endorphins, which act as antidepressants.
Once Seau retired, it didn’t take long for his life to start coming apart. It happened fast, and it came at him from all angles. And it never seemed to stop.
The inability to land a high-profile broadcasting job, after hosting a 10-episode television reality series on Versus, left him disconnected from football, detached from the NFL, and on the outside of sports looking in.
The struggling Seau’s restaurants in Mission Valley and, for a brief time, in Temecula, coupled with a costly failed Ruby Tuesday franchise deal, resulted in financial woes and eventually became a huge drain on his savings.
The roller-coaster relationships with his four children, caused, in large part, by his all-consuming NFL career, the hours he’d spent trying to build a restaurant empire and the focus he’d put into creating one of the most successful foundations in the sports world, didn’t allow him to easily parachute back into their lives.
The pressures of being everyone’s buddy (or as he spelled it “Buddee”), the life of the party, as well as the pressures of being Superman in cleats, the hometown hero, had left him worn out.
“He was tired,” said his friend, John Lynch Jr., himself a Pro Bowl player. “He was tired in so many ways. He got called every day by someone asking him for something. A lot of people have five good friends. He had thousands. It was exhausting being him.
“Junior was a lonely person. People who knew him, knew that side. If you’re friends with that many people, you think, ‘What’s he trying to make up for?’ ”
As retirement set in, Seau’s depression increased. And so did his drinking.
“The drinking was heavy, really heavy,” Moon said. “And there were lots of fights. He got very violent when he drank.”
“The way I drank and the way Junior drank was not normal,” said Aaron Taylor, former NFL offensive guard and Seau’s Chargers ex-teammate, who battled alcohol and self-esteem issues before becoming sober in 2002. “Chances are he was predisposed to drug and alcohol addiction and depression, and football served as an antidote. Alcohol is the symptom of the issue. Sadness, depression and anger are the causes. Alcoholics don’t drink because of the way it makes us feel. We drink because it numbs the feeling. When we’re partying, we’re looking for a distraction. It distracts our hurting hearts and souls.”
As his depression deepened and his drinking accelerated, Seau’s chronic insomnia got worse — he seldom slept more than three hours a night. His anxiety increased. He stopped working out with same intensity. He ate fast food and gradually gained 25 pounds.
Because Seau always played the role of leader, as the community business and philanthropic figure, as the captain of his various NFL teams or as the breadwinner for his extended family, he was too proud to share his feelings and fears, his struggles and failures. But if he had confided in those around him, especially former NFL players who were among his dearest friends — Hall of Famers Moon, Ronnie Lott and Marcus Allen — Seau would have discovered that all had undergone psychological counseling during and/or after their NFL careers.
Perhaps Seau would’ve found comfort in knowing that he wasn’t alone in the difficult challenges he was facing transitioning from the NFL into the real world.
“I went through tough times after I retired from football, it really started to hit me in my second year out,” Moon said. “The first year was OK. I’d had enough. I got divorced. I made a clean break, and I started over. The second year, I missed the game, the Sunday afternoons, the competition, the guys. I didn’t have a family structure. No wife. No kids. And I didn’t have the structure of football. You feel really lonely out there.”
Added Lott: “How does one transition into being anything else, when you’ve given so much to be an expert at that particular field? To me, you’ve been in a tunnel, (you’ve) had tunnel vision for so long. It’s really hard to acclimate, to take off the blinders and assimilate into society and a new career. To learn something new, you’re taking baby steps. You’ve got to be so dynamic to be successful in the next phase of your life, it’s almost impossible to do.”
Former NFL linebacker Gary Plummer, Seau’s ex-Chargers teammate and on-field mentor, criticized the NFL for not helping players deal with the many issues that arise after retirement.
“There should be an intense, hands-on, one-on-one exit strategy in the NFL,” Plummer said. “I’ve seen the NFL say, since Junior’s passing, ‘We have an exit strategy. We have counseling.’ Oh, really? Do former players actually use it? The truth is, when you retire from the NFL, the league drops you like a bad habit.”
In July, the league launched the NFL Life Line for members of the NFL family — current and former NFL players, coaches, team and league staff, and their family members who may be in crisis. It’s a free, confidential and independently operated resource, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that connects callers with trained counselors who can help individuals through any personal or emotional crisis.
But would Seau have asked for help, if the NFL Life Line had been there when he needed it most? Would Seau have called? His friends and family all said no.
“He didn’t want people to tell him how to live his life because he built his life, all by himself,” said his son Tyler, 23. “If you tried to tell him what to do, he’d say, ‘Who are you to tell me how to live my life? I’ve done this and this and this. What have you accomplished?’ ”
To Seau’s four children, life after the NFL represented an opportunity for something they longed for.
In interviews, each of his children told stories of emotional conversations with their father, where they begged him to become more involved in their lives, and he made tearful promises to reconnect.
First, in March 2010, just two months into retirement, Seau was forced to face his oldest son Tyler’s heartbreak over their lack of a close relationship. Seau and Melissa Waldrop, his high school sweetheart and Tyler’s mother, broke up when Tyler was only 13 months old.
After years of what Tyler called living “in the shadows” of Seau’s family life, he could no longer contain his disappointment in his on-again, off-again father. He had been on the receiving end of his father’s sudden verbal rages and violent physical outbursts, and he felt it was time to resolve all of the lingering issues between the two of them.
“I told him, ‘I want you to be part of my life,’ ” Tyler recalled. “ ‘If you want to be, that’s awesome. If you don’t want to be, it’s OK, but I need to know. I don’t want to wait around to hear from you, and be mad and upset.’ ”
“He told me, ‘We’ll never get those early years back.’ I cried, and he cried. But I didn’t feel that emotional connection with him.”
In the coming months, he would become estranged from his daughter, Sydney, 19. In Nov., 2011, she finally expressed her feelings.
“I told him, ‘You don’t have the reins to me anymore. You can’t run away from me. I am sick of waiting for you. I am sick of feeling like a victim,’ ” Sydney said.
“I was so confident, so direct about how I felt in that moment. I had so much pent-up anger. I told him exactly how I felt.
“He was sitting there, crying. He didn’t console me. He just looked confused. He kept telling me he loved me, and he said that he had never meant to hurt me the way he had.”
Son Jake, 17, said his father seemed tormented by their relationships. “I think that he loved us, but he didn’t know how. He wanted to be a dad, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t have the tools. He did other things well, but this he just couldn’t figure out. He felt as if he failed.”
Beyond his interpersonal strife, Seau was petrified he’d run out of money. Throughout his career, he’d always opened up his wallet to help his family. In retirement, his parents, siblings and extended family still leaned on him to be the major breadwinner despite a severely diminished annual income, and their continued financial expectations became a tremendous burden.
“It was fun when he first started playing in the NFL and he bought his parents a house,” his ex-wife, Gina, said. “This is how it is with players, that’s their first big financial goal. But he was always feeling obligated to be an ATM for his family. It was a constant drain. He had a hard time saying no.”
“I don’t think my father ever had a real childhood,” Sydney said. “He was a paycheck. While everyone in his family was working, he was training, because he was going to be the child who was going to make it. That’s a lot of pressure on a kid. They worked multiple jobs and sacrificed their lives for him to be a better athlete, and when he did make it, he had to make it up to everybody who helped him along the way.”
After retirement, the financial strains only mounted. His once multimillion-dollar NFL bank account was depleted. One of his original financial advisers and business partners had swindled him and 25 other sports stars out of more than $11 million in the ’90s. (John W. Gillette Jr. pleaded guilty to 38 counts of grand theft and forgery and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998.) And Seau’s divorce from Gina was also costly.
The couple separated on Nov. 23, 2001, after almost 10 years of marriage.
In 2004, at the height of his support payments, Seau briefly was paying $87,500 a month in spousal support and $40,000 a month in child support. (Gina’s spousal support payments ended after 2006. In 2009, his monthly child support payments were reduced from $17,500 a month to $7,974.)
Still, in 2006, according to Seau’s pleadings in the divorce, he had a stock portfolio of $7,699,000, and monthly expenses of $34,063, or about $400,000 a year. According to court filings, he still had nearly $5 million in investments a few years later. Not much for a superstar whose NFL contracts alone may have been worth more than $57 million, but still a comfortable cushion.
Being Junior Seau was expensive, though. He had to fund his lifestyle, support his parents and his children, and contribute to his extended family.
Friends estimated that a bad investment in Ruby Tuesday franchises was costing him $60,000 to $70,000 a month after his retirement.
In court documents, Seau stated he initially invested more than $300,000 in the project, purchasing the rights to launch 15 Ruby Tuesdays in Southern California over a five-year period. Two opened, the economy crashed, the restaurants cratered. According to Ted Davenport, Seau’s business partner in the venture, they eventually were able to get out of their franchise deal with Ruby Tuesday, but remained on the hook for leases.
Seau’s own restaurant in Mission Valley was hurting.
“Seau’s really struggled the past two years because the Chargers didn’t have very good seasons. Their home games were blacked out. All of that impacted business,” said Bette Hoffman, the former longtime executive director of the Junior Seau Foundation.
And in Aug. 2011, Seau’s faced competition from a new sports-theme restaurant that opened in the shopping center, The Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery.
In order to keep pace, Hoffman said, she and Seau knew that the restaurant would have to undergo an extensive renovation, which would cost at least $200,000. Seau’s lease would be up for renewal in January 2013, and Hoffman told Seau that he was facing a difficult decision — to remain in business or to close.
“Ruby Tuesday was failing, Seau’s was failing,” Hoffman said. “He didn’t want to close any of his restaurants because they were such a sense of pride to him. We were fighting to get everything turned around; we were struggling to stay afloat.”
In 2011, Seau took a $1.2 million loan against the value of his Oceanside house, which he had purchased for $3.2 million in cash in 2005.
Amid all of his mounting financial pressures, Seau began gambling heavily using lines of credit, or “markers,” at Las Vegas casinos, including Bellagio and Caesars Palace.
“I hold my annual foundation bowling tournament in Vegas at the Cosmopolitan,” said Moon. “Junior was a guy that the Cosmopolitan specifically asked me to invite because they knew how much he gambled. They wanted to have him in the building. Most guys who gamble are like that — they aren’t winning.”
Moon said he was told Seau had a $1 million line of credit at the Cosmopolitan.
According to a source with MGM International, owner of Bellagio, over the course of his gambling lifetime, Seau had a net buy-in of $6.8 million for all of the MGM International properties — $4.1 million of which came from markers. The MGM International source said that by the end of November 2010, Seau owed $1.3 million in markers to Bellagio ($500,000) and Caesars Palace ($800,000). His average bet at Bellagio was $38,800.
“You can’t gamble to make money,” that source said. “You need to be super smart, and even those people can’t always beat the system. Anybody who said Junior didn’t have a gambling problem, that he was gambling to make money, is out of their minds. He was borrowing money — hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then he was owing it to the casino.”
Nolan was the only person who saw Seau at his most vulnerable in Las Vegas, where losing streaks would cause him to crumble into tears and despair. She’d accompany him to Las Vegas so that he wouldn’t be alone.
“I’ve got to go to work,” he’d tell her, before heading off to the blackjack tables.
She never was sure exactly where he went, knowing that he gambled at any casino in Las Vegas that would extend him a large line of credit. He’d run up a debt at one casino, then head off to another in the hopes of scoring big to pay it off. When he’d return to their hotel room at dawn, exhausted and upset after having gambled all night, telling her the results, punctuated with outrageous sums of money — that he was up $600,000 or down $4 million — all she could do was hold him and let him cry. Just the thought of failure was heart wrenching to him.
On Oct. 3, 2010, Seau lost $191,276 at Bellagio, and with that losing trip, he was $600,000 in the hole with casino markers, according to the MGM International source.
Two weeks later, on Oct. 17, Seau’s life unraveled some more, but this time, his personal problems were on display for the entire world to see. After what she thought was an exclusive, 3½-year relationship, Nolan discovered Seau had been unfaithful to her. Completely crushed, she told Seau the relationship was over, that she was packing up and moving home to Nashville. Seau apologized profusely for his indiscretions, blaming his insecurities and telling her that he loved her, but that he didn’t love himself. He encouraged her to stay so that they could work through his mistake.
For the next five days, Seau was extremely attentive and remorseful, but Nolan was so hurt that she barely ate and couldn’t get out of bed. When he discovered her in the kitchen making banana bread on Sunday morning, he coaxed her into going to the Breakwater Brewing Company, nearby on Coast Highway. After a nice afternoon of watching NFL games, eating appetizers and drinking beers, on the way home, Seau inexplicably made a backhanded reference to the infidelity, which triggered a fight with Nolan.
And their relationship came to a disastrous fork in the road.
According to a police report, Oceanside police responded to a call at 10:10 p.m. from Nolan, who referenced a domestic violence incident that had occurred five days earlier on Oct. 12 at a Solana Beach restaurant. Jose Munoz, one of the three responding officers, reported that Nolan was “crying hysterically” and said she was “scared to death.” He said he “detected the odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting” from her. He said Nolan told him she had been involved in a “verbal and physical altercation with her live-in boyfriend of one year, Junior Seau,” and that on Oct. 12, “Seau grabbed her hand with such force during an argument, it forced her hand to swell and bruise.”
Then, Munoz went on to detail her version of what had occurred on Oct. 17 between 9 and 9:30 p.m. He said that Nolan had told him “she and Seau were involved in another domestic violence incident tonight, where Seau grabbed her by her arm and shoved her into the wall/dresser in their bedroom. She said she sustained injuries as a result of the shove and knocked over a fishbowl that shattered.” The officer said Nolan “complained of pain to her head and right hand/arm,” and he wrote that he observed “a small red abrasion on her right forearm,” that he “felt a raised bump on the right side of her head,” and that when he touched it, she “flinched and pulled away in discomfort.” He also reported that her “shirt was ripped in the front,” and that he “observed dark bruising on her right hand,” which she said was the result of the Oct. 12 altercation. He also wrote that Nolan said “her back was hurting,” and that he “noticed an abrasion on the upper left side of her back.”
According to the police report, while Munoz and the two other officers were on the scene, Seau called Nolan’s cellphone, and Munoz answered it with Nolan’s permission. Munoz said Seau told him “he had been involved in a verbal argument only” over relationship issues, and that Nolan “did not physically harm him in any way,” and that he “did not physically assault her in any way.” Seau asked the officers to “stand by” so he could return to his home to retrieve some personal items, and arrived shortly thereafter, driven by Hoffman. Shortly after midnight, Seau was placed under arrest and was handcuffed. Munoz wrote that he “detected an odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from his person and noticed his eyes were bloodshot and watery.” Seau was transported to the Oceanside Police Department, where he was booked at 2 a.m., and later transported to the Vista Detention Facility. Hoffman posted the $25,000 bail for him about 90 minutes later.
Within hours, Nolan moved out of Seau’s house and left town. She never filed a complaint.
About 6:30 a.m. the next day, Gina said that Seau called her cellphone, but she didn’t pick up. He left her a tearful message.
“He said that the kids and I probably would be hearing media reports that he had been arrested for domestic violence, that he had been put in jail,” Gina said. “He was crying. He said that he was so sorry to have embarrassed the family.”
It was their son Jake’s 15th birthday.
A few hours later, Seau drove his SUV over a cliff at Carlsbad Boulevard and Solamar Drive. Carlsbad police estimated Seau was going 60 mph once he went airborne. His Cadillac Escalade sailed through the air, landing 100 feet down on the beach.
“I was waiting for him at the Coffee Bean (on Via de la Valle in Del Mar) because we’d scheduled a meeting. My phone rang and I thought it was him,” Hoffman recalled. “It was one of his friends saying he’d driven off a cliff. I said, ‘What?’
“That was the beginning of the slippery slope. Prior to that, he’d always been so idolized. That was when he started to withdraw.”
After he spent a day at Scripps La Jolla hospital, Gina suggested he convalesce at her home in Rancho Pacifica, near Rancho Santa Fe. Hoffman said he suffered a concussion in the accident.
“He said he couldn’t sleep, so I brought him home, where we could take care of him,” Gina said. “He was extremely depressed. I asked him to stay with us through the holidays. I didn’t want him to go home to Oceanside and be alone.”
During the time Seau was staying with her and the kids, Gina purposely kept the atmosphere family-focused.
“I wanted him to see what normal family time was,” Gina said. “The kids came home from school, dumped their backpacks on the kitchen counter and said, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I’d ask them how their days were. They’d bicker at the dinner table, and then they’d be joking around. I hoped a light bulb would go off, that he’d say to himself, ‘I’ve been missing this.’ … He’d been detached from it for so long.”
On consecutive nights, Seau and Gina stayed up until almost dawn, talking about good times and bad times, their lives and their children’s lives, their failed marriage and their futures.
“He was crying like a child. He said, ‘I have never felt love from anybody.’ I said, ‘June, it’s well past 3 a.m., you’re my ex-husband, and I’m up talking with you and sharing my love. You’ve just driven off a cliff and gone to jail. I’ve brought you to my house. Please, receive my love. I want you to be whole.’
“And then, after I’d poured out my heart to him, I said, ‘Tell me you didn’t do this on purpose, June. There are three kids here who need you around to be their dad.’ He got deep in thought, and he got really quiet, and he really, really teared up. He said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ ”
Eventually, Gina said, Seau asked her for some Ambien, and she told him that the only sleep aid she had was melatonin. So, he phoned a friend to come pick him up, and he left her house.
Shortly after that, he flew to Las Vegas. According to an MGM International source, he lost about $310,000 on his two November trips to Bellagio — $41,145 on Nov. 1-2 and $277,726 on Nov. 6-11.
With rumors swirling, locally and nationally, that his plunge was actually a suicide attempt, most of Seau’s closest friends, family and business associates quizzed him about the accident. All of those interviewed said he convinced them that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
“Less than a week after the accident, my wife, Holly, and I asked him over to the house to talk about it,” said John Carney, the former Chargers kicker. “He still had bandages on his hands. He said that the day after the accident, he felt better than he did most Mondays after big games. He was very frustrated about the crash, he said he’d fallen asleep and that he was more upset than concerned or worried.
“In true Samoan fashion — Samoans are hard to break — he said, ‘I’m cool. Everything is OK. I don’t want you to worry about me. Everybody wants to make something big out of it, but it’s not.’ We prayed with him. He was moving on. He said it had been a long night.”
Said Rodney Peete, his former USC teammate: “I called him after his car went off the cliff, and I said, ‘June Bug, are you all right?’ And he said, ‘I’m good.’ I talked to 10 guys at his funeral who’d had the same conversation with him. He’d convinced us that it was a freak thing, that he fell asleep. He laughed it off. That was a scary part, too.
“Everyone accepted that Junior was in control, whether he made a mistake or not. You always believed he was on top of it because that’s what he portrayed. ‘I’m going to be good. I’m Junior.’ He never had that look in his eye.
“It turns out it was a big warning that something was wrong. Should we have known something? Should we have figured something out? We’ve all done stupid things in our lives that don’t portray something later. I never felt: We need to do a full-on intervention with this guy.”
Given Seau’s inability to bare his soul for fear that he’d look less than Superman, an intervention likely wouldn’t have dredged up any revelations. As it turns out, there was one person in whom Seau confided about his Carlsbad plunge: Nolan.
A month after the domestic violence episode and the cliff incident, they started talking and quietly rekindled their relationship. In mid-January 2011, a day after his birthday, Seau and Nolan saw each other for the first time since she walked out. He asked her to move back to Oceanside, but she said no, not unless he corrected the issues in his life — his drinking, gambling and infidelity.
“Junior trusted her with a lot of things he didn’t trust anybody else with,” said his friend Jamie Paulin, the songwriter.
One of those things was the fact that his Carlsbad plunge was a suicide attempt.
Today, in hindsight, the most bedeviling aspect of Seau’s tragic demise is how, other than Nolan, the friends and family around him accepted his explanation that he drove off the Carlsbad cliff because he fell asleep at the wheel, and didn’t force him to get help.
Even back then, Seau’s excuse wasn’t completely plausible. There was a crash witness named “Moose” Lea, who told reporters that he had heard the vehicle’s engine rev before it went over the cliff.
Those closest to Seau also knew that he was still distraught about the suicide of 1996 Olympic silver medalist beach volleyball player Mike Whitmarsh, 46, a member of his posse, his “inner circle.” Whitmarsh died from inhalation of carbon monoxide from car exhaust on Feb. 17, 2009, leaving behind two young daughters. He was found dead in the Solana Beach garage of Seau’s friend Jim Kelly.
After Whitmarsh committed suicide, Seau and his best male friends were so shocked by the act, and so devastated in the aftermath, that they made a pact: “None of us will ever pull a Whitmarsh,” they swore to one another. “If we have problems, we will talk about them to each other.”
After their deeply personal conversations following the accident, Gina didn’t hear from Seau again for two or three months.
“He was home in the dark,” she said. “I texted him, ‘Do you need help?’ He wasn’t even returning my texts.
“Finally, when he did, he texted, ‘G, I’m so dark not even my surfboard or jumping in the water puts a smile on my face right now.’
“I texted back, ‘Come on. Get out of your house. I’ll give you things to do. Pull your boots on and get moving.’ And he replied, ‘I can’t. Don’t want to.’ ”
Other friends and family also said that Seau went “underground” for several months after his Carlsbad plunge. Like Gina, they all assumed he was depressed, which he was. But, also, Seau had made one of the most important decisions of his life: He was attempting to stop drinking and get sober. He called his friend Aaron Taylor, who’d gotten sober in 2002, and asked for his help.
“Junior was broken and at rock bottom,” Taylor said. “He said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m miserable. I’m letting my kids down. I’m alone, and I’m isolated.’
“He talked to me about the tremendous guilt he had because he’d promised to drive his son Jake to his lacrosse tournament, and he’d overslept. He’d gotten drunk, he’d passed out, and his son missed his lacrosse tournament.
“He shared the angst he felt about the hours he wasn’t present for his kids. He wasn’t around. I know who Junior was in his heart. It was such a disconnect. He bought into his own BS. Football validates who we are, but that is not the real world.”
To admit that he had a problem, and that he was powerless over alcohol, were major steps for Seau. Nolan had encouraged Seau to get help at various points during their relationship, before and after his plunge, and he’d gone so far as to call The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage to ask for information on its treatment programs. Hoffman also had called Betty Ford on his behalf.
“He felt terrible,” Hoffman said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be this way.’ ”
However, he never followed through with his promises to enroll in a program at Betty Ford because he was too ashamed to admit his personal failures. He also worried that as a high-profile figure, he’d never be able to keep his alcoholism and subsequent treatment a secret.
According to Taylor, Seau attended three 12-step meetings with him.
“Junior told me, ‘I’m an alcoholic and an addict,’ ” Taylor said. “He didn’t clarify what kind of addict, and I didn’t ask him. He shared with me, ‘I can’t keep doing this. I’ve tried to quit but I can’t. I’m ready for the pain to stop. I’ve had enough.’ ”
Hoffman said Seau felt “uncomfortable” in the 12-step meetings, and so he joined a Tuesday morning breakfast meeting, where a group of successful, local men discussed their lives and their challenges. He also attended Bible studies. Seau did not tell his inner circle he was attempting to get sober. Taylor, Nolan, Hoffman and his high school sweetheart, Melissa Waldrop, may have been the only people who knew Seau was trying to stop drinking. One night during his attempt at sobriety, in a very raw, soul-baring moment, Seau confided in Waldrop, “I wish I could go back to just being ‘June’ and that I didn’t have to continue to be ‘55.’ ”
By late August of 2011, more than 10 months after he had driven over the Carlsbad cliff, Gina said that Seau outwardly seemed to be emerging from his funk. He appeared to be a bit more communicative with her. Behind the smiling façade, however, he was still wracked by financial pressures, gambling debts and guilt over imperfect relationships with his four children. He had failed at his attempt at sobriety after only a handful of months. He was lost. He was bored. “He told me, ‘I had no idea there were so many hours in a day,’ ” Gina said.
He was becoming more depressed, and he was having greater difficulty sleeping.
On Nov. 27 at Qualcomm Stadium, Seau was to be inducted into the Chargers Ring of Honor at halftime. He and Nolan had broken up a month before but remained close. Megan Noederer, a new girlfriend, was on his arm. His four children were so hurt by their on-again, off-again relationships with him that they were ambivalent about attending the ceremony. Sydney, the strong, vocal, ringleader of the group, decided to take the high road, putting aside her frustration to be supportive for her father. She forced Tyler to attend and finally convinced Hunter to join them, only an hour before the ceremony started. But Jake refused to go.
In the months that followed the Ring of Honor ceremony, Tyler and Sydney both say they made some nice memories with their father. Tyler spent time learning the restaurant business, working side by side with his father at Seau’s, and he cherishes those moments. Especially the evening a year ago when his daughter Kale’a was born, and his father interrupted a Polynesian concert at Seau’s to announce that he was a grandfather, then led the restaurant in prayer and played his ukulele.
Looking back, Seau’s friends and family said they’re discovering he had left clues that he was planning his demise, that he knew his life was coming to a close, and that he was just waiting for the right moment to end it all.
In mid-March, Seau hosted his foundation’s largest annual fundraiser: The Junior Seau Celebrity Golf Classic. It was the 20th anniversary of the event, and this year, instead of honoring a “Legend” for his commitment to family, community and sportsmanship as he had done in all the years past, Seau instead chose to pay tribute to his parents. Now, his friends think, that was Seau’s way of putting his final stamp on the foundation.
In early April, Hunter, then 11, was spending the weekend at his dad’s house in Oceanside, when he got up at 3 a.m. to let out the dog and noticed his father’s bedroom light on. He peeked in and saw his dad sitting up in bed, staring at the TV, which was off. “Are you OK, Dad?” Hunter asked. “I’m fine, Son,” Seau replied. “Go back to bed.” But Hunter didn’t believe him. He returned to his room and began studying all of the pictures on the wall of his father with him and his siblings, and told himself, ‘Something is very, very wrong with Dad. This is the last time I’ll be sleeping here. I’m never coming back.’ ”
In late April, Seau went to Nashville for Paulin’s birthday celebration, as well as to spend time with Nolan. When Seau kissed her goodbye at the end of the trip, he asked her to promise him that she’d move on to a loving relationship, and that she’d get married and have lots of babies. He said that she deserved to be happy and that it was important for him to know that she would be happy.
On April 24, his friend and former Chargers teammate Mark Walczak drove over to Oceanside from Phoenix to celebrate his 50th birthday. Seau spent five days with Walczak, eating, drinking, reminiscing and hanging out — Walczak playing his guitar and Seau his ukulele. They promised they’d take care of each other in their old age.
Said Walczak: “Junior told me, ‘There’s nothing insurmountable. As long as you’re here, you’ll always be loved. As long as you’re here, you’ll never be broke.’ ”
Unknown to Walczak, it was during that visit that the Bellagio casino called a $400,000 marker that Seau had owed for nearly a year and a half. The marker was submitted against Seau’s personal account on Thursday, April 26 or Friday, April 27. It was returned to the casino due to insufficient funds.
That Monday morning, Seau was up early to drive north on I-5 to Dana Point, where he played in a celebrity golf tournament co-hosted by former NFL star receiver Tim Brown. Everybody who saw him at the event, including his playing partner Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice, described Seau as happy, lively and having a blast bombing his drives.
Later that day, Seau phoned Paulin, who didn’t pick up his cellphone. When the voice mail came on, Seau exclaimed into the recorder, “Buddee!” Then, he launched into his favorite country song, “Who I Ain’t.”
… Cuz I broke the hearts of angels, cursed my fellow man
Turned from the Bible with a bottle in my hand.
My only hope for forgiveness when the good Lord calls my name
Is that he knows who I am and who I ain’t …
On Tuesday, he sent a group text to Gina, Tyler, Sydney, Jake and Hunter with the words “I LOVE YOU.”
“I never knew he knew how to mass text,” Sydney said. “He’s horrible at technology. I thought he was drunk or just getting back to me from an earlier text. I didn’t respond.”
Gina said she received another text from him during this time: “ONE OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES I EVER MADE WAS NOT FIGHTING FOR YOU.”
On Tuesday evening, he and Noederer, who was in town visiting, hung out together at his house, having dinner and watching the Los Angeles Lakers playoff game.
And on Wednesday morning, he committed suicide. He left the lyrics to “Who I Ain’t” on his kitchen counter.
Noederer told police that when she left for the gym about 7:45 a.m., Seau was still in bed in the master bedroom and that he gave no indication that anything was wrong. At 9:15 a.m., she left the gym, tried phoning Seau four or five times, but he never answered. So, she drove by the gym where he often worked out but did not see him or his car. When she got to Seau’s house, she entered through the garage, and she immediately was struck by how unusually quiet it was. She found the dog, Rock, in the living room; it was odd to see him there. She began frantically searching for Seau. Eventually, she discovered his body in a guest bedroom. She called 911 at 9:36 a.m., and with the help of the Oceanside Police/Fire dispatcher, she tried cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but she was unable to revive him.
“I feel so sorry for what she had to go through that morning,” said Gina, who along with her three children have since developed a close relationship with Noederer. “She has treated me and the children with such love, compassion, sensitivity and kindness.”
Seau was placed on a gurney, and he was removed from his home through his garage, where his friends and family spent quite a bit of time paying their respects, saying prayers, talking to him, and giving him hugs and kisses. It was such a sad irony: The Samoan boy who had grown up in a garage, dreaming of making it big in the world, now was off to the morgue, with his loved ones saying their goodbyes in his garage.
Since that horrible day, Seau’s friends and family have spent a lot of time going over questions in their minds. Where he got the gun remains a mystery — they’ve heard he had it in his possession anywhere between one month to six months before he killed himself. Recently, though, some said he obtained it only the week before from a drug dealer friend, with whom he’d become close in the months leading up to his death.
They’ve all been trying to connect the dots and perhaps make some sense of it.
“It’s surprising at first, but then it’s not surprising,” Moon said. “You start peeling back the layers. Gambling debts, struggling restaurant, financial problems, all the stuff piling up on him. At the time, you’re baffled. Why? Why? Why? Then, you really start thinking, and it all makes sense.”
Gina said the period immediately preceeding his suicide were too much for him to handle, including the $400,000 casino marker being called in. “There were things that happened within 24 to 48 hours before he died, and he knew he needed to check out,” she said. “The gambling debt, the restaurant struggles. He didn’t want to fix anything. Obviously, he was depressed. Obviously, he didn’t want to think of a solution. He just wanted to check out. It’s so sad that that’s a solution.”
Walczak adamantly believes that Seau’s prolonged use of prescription sleeping aids, including zolipdem (Ambien), contributed to his suicide. Walczak recalled seeing Seau take Ambien back in 2005, when he was playing for the Miami Dolphins.
“When I asked him how he felt (in the days before he died), he said he had aches and pains here and there, but nothing to complain about,” Walczak said. “If he was hurting, he wouldn’t show it. He always was ready to go. He never quit in his life. He never gave up. He never gave in. His suicide was completely outside the lines. In my opinion, it was because of his lack of sleep and the anxiety it creates.
“Something took over his brain. … What this drug does is it plants the seed, this impulse, in your brain.”
Seau’s decision to end his life added hurt, insecurity and confusion to his children’s lives. Remarkably, Gina said, all four have handled their father’s suicide, and the very public fishbowl into which they instantly were thrown, with maturity, intelligence and patience. As his heirs, they have spent a lot of time going over their father’s estate, sorting through his assets and liabilities. They’ve participated in the decision to close his restaurant and to sell his Oceanside house. The Seau children also are hopeful they can become the inspiration behind the Junior Seau Foundation. According to Hoffman, the foundation has a $1 million endowment.
Although they understand that stressful issues in their father’s life came together to create a perfect storm on May 2, Tyler and Sydney also were the driving forces behind the decision to donate their father’s brain to The National Institutes of Health for research into long-term brain damage in football players due to concussion-related injuries. They’d like to know if there were any indications of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a progressive degenerative disease that can be caused by concussions. But they realize that if researchers do find CTE in his brain, it might only add another layer to the causes for his suicide.
According to Dr. Barry Jordan, a neurologist who specializes in sports neurology and traumatic brain injury, even if CTE is found in Seau’s brain, it might not be identifiable as the chief reason he killed himself because he had no medical records of chronic brain trauma, concussions, depression or any other mental health problems.
“It depends on the extent of his pathology and the extent of his clinical background,” said Jordan, director of the Brain Injury Program and Memory Evaluation Treatment Service at Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, N.Y., and a member of the NFL Players Association Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee and the NFL Neuro-Cognitive Disability Committee.
A few months ago, Jake drove home from La Jolla along the Pacific Ocean after lacrosse practice, and after much contemplation, arrived at his family’s Rancho Pacifica house later than usual. When he walked in the door to his worried mother, Jake told her that he hoped researchers would find something wrong with his father’s brain because then, he figured, it might explain why his father often was so detached, and why he sometimes acted as if he didn’t love them.
Meanwhile, even if researchers do find CTE in Seau’s brain, Sydney, Jake and Gina said they will not take comfort in that knowledge. In fact, they all said, it will only break their hearts, again.
“It may provide a little relief,” Sydney said. “But at the end of the day, he’s still gone. There’ll never be an answer. We’ll never absolutely know for sure because he’s not here to tell us.”
“Will it give me relief? Not really,” Jake said. “It might give me more of a reason or a cause, but it would be very minimal to all of the other things that impacted my father and led to his death.”
Said Gina: “He was great at managing his emotions. Outwardly, he acted as if he didn’t have a care in the world. But inwardly, he had a lot of conflictions, darkness, depression, worries and pressures. In reality, we’ll never know how deep his depression and his sorrows were. If we knew, he’d still be here.”
In the past five months, Seau’s children have discovered things about their father, his life, his finances and his failures that they’d never fully known or understood before.
“A lot of money went through Vegas,” Tyler said of his father’s gambling. A casino source said Bellagio has now “written off” Seau’s $400,000 marker. Sources close to Seau said that his other outstanding gambling debts in Las Vegas also have been written off.
Tyler called his draining Ruby Tuesday investment his “breaking point,” but said all of his father’s failings — financial or otherwise — “took a toll” on him.
“Bad things after bad things were happening to him,” Tyler said.
Both Tyler, now working at a local restaurant, and Sydney, a freshman at USC who is playing on the sand volleyball team, said they’re grateful for having reconciled their relationships with their father before he died. Meanwhile, Jake, a junior at Bishop’s School in La Jolla who has verbally committed to national powerhouse Duke for lacrosse, is working through his grief by writing about his father, his life and his passions, and their relationship. He already has churned out more than 50 pages.
“There were two Junior Seaus, the one we knew and the one everybody else knew,” Jake said. “There was the manifestation of the powerful, strong Samoan, the iconic man, and there was the guy who sits on his patio with his ukulele, surfs and loves music. He got so wrapped up in being that guy, in being Junior Seau, in being Superman, that he lost who he was. He was always holding himself to such a high standard. Having that name, everyone knew him. I don’t ever want that kind of pressure.”
In the weeks following his father’s death, Jake had a lot of trouble sleeping. He’d jump into the car and drive up to Oceanside, where he parked outside of his father’s beach house and tried to imagine how his life had unraveled, and what his father was feeling at the end.
“I’d sit in front, staring at the house, looking for a reason,” he said. “But there isn’t one reason. One thing would branch into three. Instead, I’ve gone back to doing things I loved doing with him, like surfing. I feel close to him in the water.
“I’ve learned a lot about my father through this process. I understand him better now, but I still wish it were different. The man had too much pride to reach out and ask for help. I hope his story impresses upon people the need for suicide prevention. I want people to know they should talk about their feelings. Don’t bottle them up.”
Above all else, Tyler, Sydney, Jake and Hunter, 12, a sixth-grader with a passion for golf, said that they love their father dearly — and that they have forgiven him. He’s always in their thoughts and prayers. Sydney and Jake have inherited his ukuleles, and they feel his spirit around them whenever they strum and sing. They’re proud of his legacy, and compelled to protect and uphold it. They represented him, along with Seau’s parents, during an on-field tribute at USC’s season opener Sept. 1 and when the Chargers officially retired his jersey No. 55 before their season home opener Sept. 16.
“These memorials and public viewings of us, that’s all about Dad,” Jake said. “This is us fulfilling that side of Dad for him. I want people to remember the things he did for the community, the joy he brought to earth, and the people he touched. But truthfully, when we’re standing on the football field, and we’re handed a framed 55 jersey, I have a hard time. They cue the video of him on the scoreboard, we’re standing there with the jersey, the people in the stands look at us to see if we’re crying, and we’re holding it together. Everybody in the stands thinks, ‘They’re doing well.’ But we’re not OK. It’s only been a few months.
“All that 55 stuff is great, but my father was a person. He wasn’t a number. I hope that people look past that.”
Since their father’s death, Tyler and Sydney have taken on leadership roles within their own little family unit, and at times, it feels as if they’ve channeled their father — his passion, his smile, his ability to touch others, his savvy way of handling the media, his ease at public speaking, his love of music.
They were the creative forces behind the moving tribute video of their father’s life that was shown at his funeral. It was set to the song, “Who I Ain’t.” They invited Paulin to sing it, along with his acoustic guitar, at the cemetery.
“It was probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” Paulin said. “He loved that song because there truly was forgiveness in it. It said that He knows who I am in my heart, and that the other stuff is just what happens in life. It’s circumstances. It’s poor decisions or good decisions, or whatever.”
