Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  Everyone went searching for Richie—the Civil Air Patrol (which led the effort all through the following day), other kids from his high school, and people throughout the community. But the newspapers were already saying that Richie had been “swept away and was believed drowned.” And he wasn’t the only one: at least six other people in that part of Connecticut were missing and presumed dead after the flood, and several other bodies had already been recovered. It was an epic flood, breaching dams, washing away bridges, and knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people.

  As two days passed, most of the searchers had stopped looking—except for Richie’s father, whose voice was still heard calling, “Richie! Richie!” three nights later from the woods up and down the brook. On the fourth day, after the flood had receded, one of Richie’s friends from school found him, half buried in sand far downstream from where he had vanished. Richie had been a high school sophomore, only a year older than Vinny. He and his family were devastated.

  This had happened in early June, and the varsity team at Lyman Hall invited Vinny to practice with them for the entire summer, hoping it might help keep his mind occupied as he tried to deal with this overwhelming tragedy.

  Greg met Vinny on his first day of school at Lyman Hall, and they became friends immediately. They played together on the football team, Vinny running many of the touchdowns (no one could catch him) and Greg making spectacular tackles. They both made All-State and All-American. Vinny was an amazing tailback and still holds all the running records at Lyman Hall. But they were also close friends away from the field (and still are to this day; Greg lives right next door to Vinny’s elderly mother).

  Greg bears a striking resemblance to Vinny’s dead brother Richie. Although he never met him, Greg has seen many pictures of him and their similarity is uncanny. Perhaps at some level, Vinny and his family realized that. His parents embraced Greg like another son, making him one of their own. He would live at their house for weeks at a time, and it had a soothing effect on him. It felt so comfortable to stay there with them, with none of the stresses he faced at home.

  “It was weird how they completely accepted me into their family,” said Greg. “It was like I was one of them. They loved me and would do anything for me.”

  With his long blond hair, which always hung out of the bottom of his football helmet, Vinny looked like a California beach kid. He was also an excellent skateboarder. Perhaps as a way to deal with his grief, Vinny smoked pot constantly, and Greg started smoking it with him. They were always skateboarding and getting high together. Greg was also drinking heavily, something he had already been doing before he met Vinny. Herb still had connections with the liquor business, so there was always plenty of alcohol around the house. But it was Vinny’s brother Bob who first introduced Greg to cocaine, when he was fifteen years old, and to a large extent it soon took over his life.

  “When I snorted coke, it was like everything disappeared—my father’s illness, all the bullshit going on in my life, it just didn’t matter anymore,” said Greg. “But no one knew I was doing it. I was a good kid. I did my schoolwork. I was an athlete. Fishing all the time. But I was using all that shit. I got into it young and stuck with it. At the time, I saw it almost as a medicine, something to make me feel better. I never did anything horrible to get it, but I wish I’d never started taking it.”

  Greg lived in a tough town, and many of his friends ended up abusing drugs and alcohol or getting into trouble with the police. One boy on his football team would often show up late—and drunk—as the bus was waiting to take them to a game. He’d get on the bus and be crying. Everyone would get out of his way and he’d sit down, reeking of booze. No one said anything. Amazingly, he was one of the best players on the team.

  “He had college scholarship offers everywhere to go play football, but he was just too messed up to do it,” said Greg.

  Herb’s view of Greg changed drastically one day at the end of one of his football games. They were walking out to the parking lot after watching a game that Greg’s team had lost. Herb and Diane were following about twenty feet behind him. Greg overheard a woman behind him say that he was a dirty player, and he turned and shouted into her face, “Fuck you, lady!”

  “Gregory!” his mother cried out, appalled.

  A football player from another high school who had come to watch the game said to Greg, “Better watch your mouth!”

  Greg snapped, kicking him hard in the balls, then beating him senseless while other people tried to pull him away.

  After that, Herb looked at him differently, perhaps recognizing his own ferocity in Greg. Herb’s illness was worsening, making his job as a bookmaker much more difficult. One day soon after that game, he asked Greg if he wanted to make some money, and Greg became a bagman for Herb, picking up cash and delivering it to him, for which Herb would pay him a couple hundred dollars.

  “I had my car, my grandmother’s 1970 Chevy Nova that she gave me,” said Greg. “I was sixteen and doing the collecting—and smoking weed.”

  Herb told him never under any circumstances to look inside the bag. But the temptation overcame Greg when he was smoking a joint with Scott Jackson, and they unzipped the bag, revealing $30,000 in cash.

  “We were like, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ ” said Greg. “We decided we were going to steal the money from the mob and drive all the way down to Florida. I don’t know what the hell we were thinking. I guess we thought we could just live in Florida forever.”

  Greg and Scott often pushed against boundaries together. Sometimes they would deliberately go blasting past police speed traps on their motorcycles, going nearly ninety miles per hour, so the cops would chase them. They’d manage to ditch them, going off-road on muddy dirt trails where the squad cars couldn’t follow. So they had no qualms about breaking rules.

  The two had recently returned from an earlier trip to Florida, where they’d stayed with Greg’s Uncle Donny, and it had been a nonstop party. He let them drive his Ferrari around, and they could drink as much as they wanted. “He would buy us beer and shoot his handgun in the streets of Miami at night when he went on walks with us,” said Greg. “We’d come to these alleyways and empty lots, and he would let us shoot his pistol. He didn’t give a fuck.”

  He also let them take his speedboat to the Everglades whenever they wanted.

  “We would haul ass in that speedboat doing a hundred,” said Greg. “We didn’t give a shit, and Uncle Donny didn’t either. He was cool like that. We loved it.”

  They hadn’t looked up Uncle Donny yet on this trip, but instead had gone straight to Herb’s vacation house in Fort Lauderdale. A couple days later they were sitting on the front porch, smoking a big joint, when Herb pulled up in a rental car. He had just flown down from New York. He stepped out of the car, slammed its door, and walked onto the porch. Grabbing the joint from Greg, he took a big hit from it, then tossed it out in the yard.

  “Tell me you still have the money,” he said, staring grimly at Greg.

  “Yeah, we didn’t spend any of it,” said Greg. “It’s all still in the bag.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then there’s no harm done.” And that was all he said on the matter. But the look in his eyes as he stared at Greg told a different story. This was it, the only reprieve he would ever get. If he ever did anything like this again, he would not be protected by the bonds of blood and would face the full wrath of the mob.

  * * *

  El Cid

  In 1985, in Greg’s senior year at Lyman Hall High School, his varsity football team miraculously found itself vying for the state high school championship. This was the last team in Connecticut anyone expected to become a contender for this honor. They’d never come close to winning a championship in their entire history. The team didn’t even have enough players to break into two teams to practice against each other without having to find non–team members to suit up and play with them.

  “Our ‘coaching staff’ consisted
of former players and their friends,” said head coach Phil Ottochian. “They dressed up and scrimmaged with our kids. They did a great job.”

  The year before, the team had been like the Bad News Bears, winning only one or two games the entire season, and they were competing in the toughest league in Connecticut. Everyone said the team would go nowhere.

  “We were below underdog—below the surface,” said Steve Hoag, the defensive coach at Lyman Hall. But they did have Greg. “He was El Cid,” said Hoag, referring to the medieval Spanish leader depicted in the 1961 Charlton Heston film El Cid, whose body was mounted on horseback and led a victorious charge against his enemies—even though he was dead.

  Greg’s toughness and his stoicism in the face of excruciating pain were already legendary. One day in practice, Greg was hit hard, splitting his chin open like a ripe cantaloupe. He went to the locker room and tried to patch it up with large Band-Aids, but he was bleeding all over the place, so he went home, took a needle and fishing line, and stitched up his face. “Fourteen or fifteen stitches,” said Hoag. “He looked like a rag doll. No drama, no nothing. That was Greg.”

  Greg played many positions for the Lyman Hall Trojans. He had to, since there were so few players. During the course of the season he was the team’s kicker, a defensive end, a guard, and the center. When a fullback got hurt, Greg played fullback for a few games. He excelled at everything he tried.

  The Lyman Hall Trojans were one game away from making it to the state championship and had to play against their cross-town rival, Sheehan High School. They absolutely had to beat them, after which they’d face the reigning state champions, Middletown High School, a nationally ranked team. Hoag and head coach Phil Ottochian had gone to Sheehan High School to scout, when a sportswriter from a local newspaper approached them.

  “You know, it’d probably be better if you lose on Thanksgiving, so you won’t have to face Middletown,” he said, laughing. “Do you have any idea how good they are?” Everyone knew the team’s reputation: Middletown had won twenty-two straight games, averaging forty-four points a game. The players had no concept of defeat. They hadn’t even been behind in a game for a couple of seasons.

  The Lyman Hall game against Sheehan was postponed for one day, after a massive snowstorm struck on Thanksgiving. To the surprise of everyone, the Lyman Hall Trojans absolutely slaughtered the Sheehan Titans, playing in brutally tough weather conditions on a snowy field and beating them 40–0. So the stage was set for an epic showdown: the Middletown Blue Dragons against the upstart Lyman Hall Trojans.

  The championship game was played at Memorial Stadium at the University of Connecticut, and it was packed—more than 14,000 spectators had come to see the high school football game, including the entire student body of UConn and numerous coaches from top colleges looking for new recruits. The Blue Dragons were a sight to behold as they strode onto the field, looking more like NFL players than high school athletes. (Nine of their eleven starters went on to play Division I football in college.) Even their uniforms were as impressive as any worn by pros. Their band began playing the instant the team stepped onto the field, and their fans cheered. But Greg was unimpressed and taunted them mercilessly before the game as his teammates were doing their stretches.

  “They’d run by me, and I’d say, ‘You’re dead! You’re done! This is fucking it for you, man!’ ” said Greg. “They’d look at me like I was crazy, knowing how good they were.”

  Lyman Hall had the kickoff. Although Greg kicked the ball deep down the field, Middletown ran it all the way back through the Lyman Hall defense, a spectacular eighty-eight-yard return, scoring a convincing touchdown in the opening seconds of the game. A collective groan—mixed with laughter from the Middletown fans—went up from the crowd.

  “They came down and were everything they were supposed to be,” said Coach Hoag. “They nailed our guys. It was like, okay, as advertised, let’s go. Like a beautiful woman, here’s what it is.” Right after the play, he overheard someone in the press box offering forty-to-one odds against Lyman Hall.

  So the Trojans had their backs against the wall right from the beginning. The Middletown Blue Dragons had more than sixty players, with separate offense and defense. Greg’s team, by contrast, had only eight good players, and the rest just filled out the empty spots. Everyone had to play both offense and defense. But this made the Lyman Hall team much tougher.

  “We were a really well-oiled team, in great physical shape, because we went through the whole season going both ways,” said Greg. “Everyone on the team was in the peak physical condition of their life at that point.”

  The Middletown fans roared as their defensive team took to the field, overflowing with confidence, ready to put the final nail in Lyman Hall’s coffin. Greg and his teammates knew they had to calm down and start playing their game if they were to have any chance of stopping these guys.

  “Vinny took the first handoff,” said Greg. “We blew them right off the line, and he was gone for a touchdown. Then we went for two points, threw a pass, and suddenly we were ahead.”

  So they were instantly back in the game. Greg kicked off again, and this time they held them. Lyman Hall got the ball back and scored again, and they just kept scoring, intercepting Middletown’s passes, sacking the quarterback, moving the ball forward aggressively, making first downs and scoring touchdowns. By the end of the first quarter, the score stood at 22–6—the first time in more than two years that the Middletown Blue Dragons had been behind in a game.

  Middletown tried everything that first half, to no avail—but it was clear that the Blue Dragons could come roaring back at any second, scoring at will. That’s certainly what most people watching the game that day expected. And then the nightmare scenario happened: with four minutes left till halftime, Greg went down hard—and he didn’t get up.

  “We had rules that we weren’t supposed to run out on the field when a player was down; we would only let the trainer go,” said Coach Hoag. “But as soon as I saw Greg lying there, I ran out to him. He’d always seemed so indestructible. He had a threshold for pain beyond anything I’ve ever seen. But he was on the ground, and I knew it was bad.”

  Greg had a separated shoulder, an extremely painful injury. “I was blocking on offense when it happened,” said Greg. “I fell in a pile and somehow my shoulder just popped out of the socket. It had been giving me problems the game before that, but then it went. I was lying on the field, and it was excruciating.”

  An ambulance came onto the field and drove right up to Greg. The attendants took a stretcher out and tried to lift Greg onto it, but he pulled away. “Forget it, I’m not getting into that,” he said. As he stood up, his shoulder popped back into place, though the pain was still nearly unbearable. The ambulance attendants tried to persuade him to let them help him but finally gave up, put the stretcher back in the ambulance, and drove back off the field.

  The Middletown players were all yelling, “Yeah, we got him! We kicked his ass!”—which made Greg furious. “You guys are all fucking dead now!” he shouted at them.

  Dave Myerson and all of his Yale friends had come to the game to support Greg and were in the stands, dressed in raccoon coats and drunk. Dave jumped onto the field, reeking of booze, and walked up to Greg.

  “What’s the deal, man?” he said. “Are you going to make it or what?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Good! Don’t be a pussy,” he said.

  There was no way Greg would be leaving the game.

  “I was watching as my backup was getting exploited to the max—a young kid,” Greg told me. “They were running over him. I was saying, put my shit back on.”

  “We were holding on at the end of the half,” said Coach Ottochian. “We were exhausted. We’d taken Greg out of the game and gone with a substitute. We had possession of the ball on the three-yard line, and we didn’t score.”

  The team managed to finish the half without giving up any points, but what wou
ld they do in the second half? The only kid they had to sub for Greg was a freshman who had never played in a game.

  No one was talking as they walked back to the locker room, but the body language was clearly Oh, no! Coach Hoag was near tears as he watched Greg being worked on by a University of Connecticut doctor.

  “You know, you spend most halftimes making adjustments to your team,” said Hoag. “The only adjustment for us then was, ‘Now what?’ ” They could hear the team in the other locker room whooping it up, psyching themselves up for the next half, knowing that the advantage in the game had shifted strongly toward them.

  Greg lay on the table with his jersey and his shoulder pads off, but as the end of the halftime neared, he sat up. “Give me my pads,” he said.

  “Oh no, son,” said the doctor. “You’re not going anywhere. Your day is over.”

  Greg stood up and grabbed his shoulder pads, and a teammate helped him put them on and pull his jersey over his head, his injured arm wrapped in place under his jersey. “I’m playing the second half,” he said.