Counting the Days While My Mind Slips Away

by Ben Utecht

  I didn’t even answer. I just raced back over to where I started and got back down in a three-point stance, ready to go.

  From the back porch I heard my mom clapping like I’d just made the game-winning tackle in the Super Bowl. “Way to go, Beno-Button,” she called out. “And be careful,” she had to add because she’s my mom. Then she called over to my dad, “Jeff, you take it easy on him.”

  My dad just smiled and nodded. “Okay, Lori,” he said while giving me a little wink. “All right, Ben, let’s do it again,” he said.

  I also heard my dad’s voice call my name a few years later when my hands were big enough to catch a football. “Go long, Ben,” he said, motioning with his left arm and winding up the football with his right. The backyard of the parsonage where we lived wasn’t big enough for me to run real pass routes. Instead my dad went across the street from our corner lot and had me stand on the curb right in front of our house. “That’s it, go long.” I took off running down the side of our lot, right up next to the six-foot-tall cedar fence that surrounded the property. For a preacher, my dad had a really good arm. He lofted a spiral in my direction. I scrambled to get under it, moving right up next to the fence. Most of the time I caught the ball. Sometimes I smashed into the fence. There were times I did both. But catching the ball up against a tall fence was really good practice for me. I got used to grabbing the ball out of the air in tight places, even when that meant the catch was followed by a collision.

  After I made the catch I took off running toward the make-believe end zone at the end of the fence line. Then I quickly sprinted back toward my dad. If there weren’t any cars coming, I stopped at the curb and threw the ball across the street to him. “Nice catch, Ben. Good hands. Ready to do it again?” I always was. And my dad’s arm never seemed to get tired. He’d stay outside throwing passes to me as long as I wanted. I loved the game. He loved spending time with me. It took me a while to figure out that that’s what I loved about the game as well. Football meant time with my dad.

  I still heard my father’s voice calling my name when I signed up for my first real full-contact football team, right after my family moved to a new town. My father is a Methodist pastor. The Methodist church moves their ministers every five to ten years. Right before the start of my sixth-grade year it was our turn to go. We left the little town of Lindstrom, Minnesota, a place where everyone knows everyone else, to go to the historic Mississippi River town of Hastings, Minnesota. Hastings was ten times bigger than Lindstrom, but it was still basically a small town. I worried about fitting in and being accepted there. My mom and dad told me not to worry, that everything was going to be okay, but I wasn’t so sure.

  I joined my first football team and had gone through a few weeks of practice, but I still didn’t really know anyone. Most everyone already seemed to have their circle of friends. Breaking into social circles can be tough in small towns. On top of that, I had a late birthday, which meant I was a year younger than most of my classmates all the way through college.

  I may have been younger than most of the other sixth graders, but I was one of the biggest guys on my team. The coach had me play end on defense and wide receiver on offense. On the first play of the first game of my life, I lined up on defense directly across from the offensive tackle, just as the coach had shown me. I leaned over, planted my fingers in the grass in a three-point stance, and dug in my cleats. My dad stood on the sideline next to one of the coaches. Like me, my dad didn’t yet know anyone in town.

  The quarterback barked off the signals. I looked up and down the offensive line and saw a huge gap between the tackle and the guard. Why am I lined up directly across from this guy where he can easily block me when I could jump the gap and avoid him? I wondered. Before the ball could snap, I jumped over into the gap. The moment the center moved the ball I fired off the line as fast as I could and headed straight toward the quarterback. I got to the quarterback as he was about to hand the ball off to the running back. I grabbed the ball out of his hand and took off running down the field. As I ran toward the end zone my dad yelled from the sidelines, “Run, Ben! Run, son!” No one came close to me as I trotted across the goal line, untouched, to score my first touchdown.

  The coach standing next to my dad turned to him as I crossed the goal line. “That kid, now that’s an athlete,” he said. Then he introduced himself to my father. I didn’t have to worry about fitting in any longer.

  After I started playing organized football my dad and I still tossed the football around the backyard, but more and more he watched as I played. After Little Raiders football came junior high, then high school. My dad and my mom were always on the sidelines or up in the stands. When I went off to college they came to as many games as they could, but they had to watch all the road games on television or listen on the radio. After the Indianapolis Colts signed me to a free agent contract out of college, my dad went down to the local Irish sports bar and grill and made an arrangement with the owner. “My son plays for the Colts, but the local stations don’t show many of their games,” my dad explained to him. “Do you think you could have one of your televisions show the Colts game so we can watch?” The owner could not turn him down.

  Through my first year playing for the Colts my dad and mom went straight from my dad’s church to the Irish bar and grill every Sunday. When we played early games that started at noon Minnesota time they sometimes missed part of the first quarter. In my second year my dad bought the NFL cable package so he could watch, and DVR, the Colts’ games at home. They came to games in Indy when they could. They were in the stands in the RCA Dome when we beat the New England Patriots in a miracle comeback to advance to the Super Bowl. Of course they were here, in Miami, for the biggest game of my life.

  And I had just blown my dad off when he tried to share a moment with me before the Super Bowl. I felt sick to my stomach. I could not take another step. Me playing in this game wasn’t just my dream. It was his as well. Go back to where it all started, came to me in a gentle whisper. Go back to where it all started. I knew right then that in this moment the biggest game of my life was not the most important thing. I turned around and scanned the stands for my father. He’d left the railing and started walking back to his seat. I caught sight of him just up the ramp a little ways. “Dad! Dad!” I called out to him.

  He stopped and turned.

  I waved for him to come back down to where he had been a few moments earlier. He came back to the rail. I reached up my hand as high as I could as he reached down to me. I grabbed his hand tight. Tears filled my eyes. “It all started in the backyard with you, Dad. I love you. Thank you so much,” I said.

  My dad smiled. “I love you, too.” We were in the backyard again, playing football, my mom cheering me on from the porch. It was as if no one else were there, just the two of us.

  The sound of the crowd returned. I had to go. I let go of my dad’s hand and ran out onto the field with my teammates. The game started with a huge play by the Bears and ended with our team holding the Lombardi Trophy as world champions. The Super Bowl was all I imagined it to be. Yet I came away from the game reflecting on how I almost lost something irreplaceable before the game even started. Standing in the tunnel, caught up in the hype and excitement of the Super Bowl, I nearly let the game consume me. I almost lost myself, my real identity, all because of a game.

  I now look back on that moment with a sense of irony. Even though I made a conscious choice to go back to where it all began for me and there recover my true self, I now face a battle in which I may not have a choice in how this ends. The game has already changed me in ways from which I may never recover. Future changes could well lie in front of me. The odds are troubling. In all fairness, it is not the game of football in and of itself that extracted such a heavy toll on me, but rather the lasting results of what medical books call mild traumatic brain injury. Most people simply call them concussions. I suffered five documented concussions over the course of my playing career, which stret
ched across four years of college ball and six seasons in the National Football League. I never thought about the long-term effects of this injury until it was too late.

  However, this is not a book about concussions, or even football. Both play a major role in my story, but they do not define me. Mine is a story about a preacher’s son who grew up in a loving family, a boy who grew up praying for a family of his own someday. When I found the woman with whom I now share my life, I knew I had found everything I had ever dreamed of. Now all of us, my mom and dad, my wife, my sister, and myself, are locked in a battle as I hope to hold on to those I love. They are not going anywhere. Unfortunately, my memories are. I have already lost some I once treasured.

  I now understand that our essence as human beings lies in our ability to remember. Everything that matters about our identities—our very sense of self—comes from our memories. We may live in the present, but the present doesn’t last. Every moment quickly slips into the stream of short-term memory and journeys toward the ocean that is the long-term memory center of the brain. There our memories take root, shaping us, refining us, defining who we are. We are the culmination of all we have experienced, all we have thought and read and believed, all we have loved. We are living memories. Without memories we cease to be ourselves. In a very real way we cease to be.

  And that is the very real possibility I now face. My memories appear to have an expiration date even as I fight to hold on to them. I don’t know who will win this battle. That is why I am compelled to write this book. Yes, this is my story, but it is also a love letter to my wife and four daughters. Someday all that you are about to read may be nothing but a blur to me. But with this book in their hands, my family will always remember who I was and why I loved them so much.

  CHAPTER 2

  FOUNDATIONS

  MY DAD IS A PASTOR, which makes me a preacher’s kid. When people hear that, most automatically assume I was either a hellion or one of those perfect kids who never did anything wrong. Those are the two main stereotypes of preachers’ kids. I didn’t fit either picture. I didn’t even know there was supposed to be anything different about my family until I was around eight or nine. My mom and dad were just my mom and dad. We went to church a lot, but that was where my dad worked. I didn’t think it any stranger that we spent a lot of time at church than a football coach’s kids think it odd that they spend a lot of time at football stadiums.

  I was never intimidated by my dad’s job. Honestly, I thought it was kind of cool to watch him up in front of the church on Sundays preaching a sermon. He has a gift for holding people’s attention, and I don’t just say that because he’s my dad. I once overheard someone call him “the Velvet Hammer” because of his preaching style. I really like that. It’s him. As I got a little older I looked around at people during church and I could tell that they were into what he was saying. Sure, I could always find someone who hadn’t slept enough the night before, but you can find that anytime anyone gives a speech. When I played for the Colts I had one of the most dynamic, inspiring head coaches ever in Tony Dungy. I too had days where my eyelids got a little heavy listening to him, but that was on me, not him.

  But it wasn’t just the way my dad did his job that caught my attention. He and my mother lived out the things he taught as a pastor. They didn’t make a big deal about it, nor did they act different when church members were around. The two of them simply set an example for my sister, Ashley, and me about what is really important in life and what a life worth living looks like. I saw it first and foremost in their relationship with one another. My mom and dad love one another, but more than that, they are in love with each other. Their example showed me the kind of relationship I wanted to have with my future wife someday.

  Don’t get me wrong. We were a normal family and there were times my parents lost it with my sister and me. Growing up I was always such a high-energy, ultracompetitive kid that my mom, who grew up in a family of girls, thought something must be wrong with me. I didn’t always know when to stop and I pushed every boundary she ever set for me. But those moments became teaching times for us. My parents held weekly family meetings where we actually talked, all of us, together. Neither my mom nor dad turned these meetings into a lecture or a time to point out everything I had done wrong in the past week. I’ll never forget, or I hope I don’t, all the times my mom and dad truly listened and even apologized at times for things they had done that might have hurt my sister or me. Now that I am a dad I understand how hard it is to admit to your child that you were wrong. That only makes me respect my parents that much more.

  This was the environment in which I grew up. Faith was a big part of who we were as a family, but it was a faith that was more than talk. It was a way of life. This faith shaped the way we interacted with one another and with other people. It also shaped the way in which my parents approached the big questions and problems of life. And one of the biggest challenges they faced was one they shared with a lot of families: how to send their children to college without leaving them drowning in student loan debt. Football, believe it or not, became an answer to prayer.

  •  •  •

  By the time I started high school my mom and dad started to think sports might be more than a way for me to build friendships and work off excess energy. From the time I was a little boy, coaches told them I was a bit of a natural, especially in football. I didn’t play football in eighth grade, I played soccer instead, but some of my friends talked me into coming back on the team in my freshman year of high school. That year I played wide receiver, defensive end, and punter. My greatest growth and improvement came as a sophomore. I remember my sophomore coach, Pete Zach, telling me he was sending great reports up to the varsity head coach, Bob Majeski. When I played in high school Coach Majeski rarely, if ever, allowed sophomores to play varsity football. When I was a junior my body started to fill out and catch up with my height. I had my best season yet as our football team, the Hastings Raiders, made it to the Minnesota State Football Tournament, held in Minneapolis at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, where the Vikings played.

  In addition to football I also played hockey through the winter. Believe it or not, I was a goalie. At six feet six inches without skates, I was probably the tallest in the state. I probably should have played basketball but in Minnesota hockey is a way of life and there was no exception for me, especially since my grandfather Bob Utecht was the legendary rinkside voice of the Minnesota North Stars. He even coined the phrase “Let’s Play Hockey,” which is now proclaimed before hockey games at every level all over the country.

  I loved hockey, and I was good at it, but football was my sport. One of the men in my dad’s church, a guy named Terry, had played college football at the University of Minnesota. After my standout junior season, he and my dad were talking after church one Sunday. Terry told my dad he thought I had what it took to play Division I college football. “So what can we do to get him noticed by colleges?” my dad asked. Terry suggested making a VHS highlight tape of my best plays and sending it off to whatever colleges I might want to attend. My dad then contacted another man in the church, David, who ran the local cable news station. He also called his brother, my uncle Greg, who was the technology director in another school district. David went through all the footage available from my games, both football and hockey (at this point, I still hadn’t decided which to concentrate on), and picked out the best plays. My uncle Greg then turned those into a VHS highlight tape.

  My mom and dad made several copies of the tape, then prayed over them. They said, “Lord, we want what’s best for our son, and you know we have little money to send Ben to college. If it is your will, please bless him with a scholarship.” With that, they sent the tapes off to the head football coach at every Big 10 school (there were only ten back then), along with Stanford, Syracuse, and Notre Dame.

  It didn’t take long for their prayers to be answered. Throughout the winter and spring of my junior year in high school I received
recruiting letters from every school to which we sent tapes. The letters all said basically the same thing. “We’re interested in what Ben can do. We would like to see more of him. Is there any chance he can come to our summer football camp so that we can evaluate him firsthand?”

  Getting these letters was a huge honor. However, the football camps, along with the travel there and back, were very expensive. My mom and dad asked me which schools I was most interested in since there was no way I could go to camps at all of them. I thought and prayed about it for a while, and narrowed my list down to two: Penn State, which was coached by the legendary Joe Paterno, and Minnesota, which was only thirty miles from our home in Hastings. Minnesota was coached by Glen Mason. When Coach Mason took over, more than twenty years had passed since the Golden Gophers had won a Big 10 championship. The team hadn’t been good in a while, but Coach Mason now had it on the rise. I liked the prospect of playing for a rapidly improving team. I also liked the idea of playing close enough to home that my family could come to my games.

  The U of M camp just happened to come first that summer. I planned on attending it in June. Then I was going to go to the Penn State camp, a trip my family would work into a summer vacation.

  On the first day of the U of M camp the coaches lined up all the players by position and had us run the forty-yard dash. The forty is the standard by which coaches and scouts evaluate all football players’ speed. I don’t know how or why they settled on the forty, but your forty time is crucial. I ran it in 4.4 seconds, which is a really, really good time. Vic Adamle, the Gophers’ wide receivers coach who was recruiting me, immediately noticed.