Even the loyal but loquacious fans in Philadelphia, who famously take to the talk-radio air waves to critique Andy Reid after every defeat, are likely to be muted for a few days out of regard for the Eagles’ coach and his family.
Usually a lightning rod to those typically eager to emphasize that the Eagles haven’t won a Super Bowl during a stewardship that makes him the NFL’s longest tenured head coach, Reid was struck by a lightning bolt on Sunday morning, when oldest son Garrett was found dead in his training camp dorm room at Lehigh University. It is a loss, obviously, far more profound than just another beating by an NFC East rival.
It won’t be too much longer, though — after the appropriate period of grieving by Reid and wife, Tammy, and their four other children, and the stretch of requisite respect that must be granted them — that the questions will start.
One can predict with a degree of certainty that there will be a point at which someone asks if the rigors of the job rendered Reid something less than a solid family man. If the long hours away from home, the absences inherent in being an NFL head coach, were contributing factors to Garrett Reid’s documented struggles.
The issues were raised in 2007, when Garrett Reid and younger brother Britt were charged in drug-related incidents. And as well intentioned as many such questions might be, they don’t justify, and certainly can’t explain, why good and hard working people suffer tragic losses. The truth is that stuff happens, no matter how attentive or fostering a parent tends to be. While there figure to be therapists and psychologists and students of the behavioral sciences who will weigh in over the coming months about the potential ramifications of workaholic parents on the family unit, the theories probably won’t hold much water.
It’s hard to imagine any parents more nurturing than Tony and Lauren Dungy. But that didn’t stop their son, James, from committing suicide in 2005. We don’t know Joe Philbin, but those who do suggest that the new Miami Dolphins’ coach and former Green Bay offensive coordinator is a good a decent man. But in January of this year, Philbin’s son, Michael, was found to have had alcohol and marijuana in his system when he drowned in the Fox River in Wisconsin. None of the deaths mark Reid or Dungy or Philbin as delinquent in parenting skills or caring.
The deaths of their sons, instead, are a sobering but real reminder that celebrity hardly insulates one from tragedy. And as each man will discover, or already has, there is no getting over the premature passing of a child. Words, no matter how eloquent, hardly console or comfort. Nothing makes sense of the situation.
No one should offer up assertions about Andy Reid’s off-field matters, especially those of fatherly reach or parental methods, without truly knowing his dedication to his family is known only to those under his roof.
When James Dungy died in 2005, and I was working at a different Internet site, I was asked by my then-editors to write a column. Part of it:
“Benumbing does not begin to describe the experience. Truth be told, a parent who loses a child never has the hurt scarred, never grows a callous over the wound.”
It was true nearly seven years ago for Tony and Lauren Dungy, was likely the case for Joe Philbin and his family earlier this year, and doubtless will be the same for Andy and Tammy Reid and their family now. “Lose a football game,” I suggested in 2005, “and there is almost always a make-good opportunity just a week or so removed … Lose a child, and a parent, no matter how ideal the child-rearing, experiences a painstaking self-examination.”
There are, Andy Reid tragically discovered on Sunday morning, matters far more pressing than readying a team for the upcoming season. And all of us relearned the lesson that fame can’t insulate a person from pain.