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and in case any of those kids end up mining us for content... well here's what i mean by alonzo spellman stories...
FOR TWO YEARS, ALONZO SPELLMAN'S LIFE SPUN OUT OF CONTROL. IT WAS A TIME OF EXTREMES. IT WAS A TIME OF WASTED CHANCES.
By Bonnie DeSimone and Tribune Staff Writer
Chicago Tribune
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Dec 12, 1998 at 12:00 am
No one can say for sure whether Alonzo Spellman would have been a productive member of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But as much as the flow of any person's life can be changed by a single bend in the stream, the day in February 1996 when the Chicago Bears matched Jacksonville's offer sheet qualifies.
At the time he became a free agent, Spellman's relationship with the Bears was flawed, but not beyond salvaging. Like a thousand other players before him, Spellman sometimes disagreed with the way he was used on the field. He wanted to test the market.
The Jaguars' four-year, $12 million contract included a clause that committed the club to match up to $100,000 annually raised by Spellman for his children's foundation, then 1 1/2 years old.
The Bears said they weren't legally obligated to include the clause, and they won their claim in arbitration.
Some players would have dealt with it and moved on.
For whatever reason, Spellman didn't.
Jacksonville blames the Bears for the fiasco.
"They matched and then threw the $100,000 in his face," said Michael Huyghue, the Jaguars' senior vice president for football operations. "In a deal worth $3 million a year, what does it matter? All it did was alienate the player. It was handled very poorly.
"I think the foundation truly was important to him. But they didn't embrace that."
The Bears blame Jacksonville.
"The contract was written improperly," said Ted Phillips, the Bears' vice president of operations. "It's my job to see that we don't spend $400,000 needlessly."
Phillips said the Bears offered to include the same clause in a reduced, $11.6 million contract, lowering the guaranteed amount to $11.2 million, but Spellman rebuffed them. "We tried to have him understand why we did it," Phillips said. "It has nothing to do with not caring about the foundation. We cared."
None of this, of course, can rewind the film or serve as explanation or excuse for Spellman's subsequent meltdown, which has cost him a full season in what should have been the prime of his career.
Instead of making a fresh start in Florida, Spellman over the next two years sired an out-of-wedlock child whose birth triggered a costly lawsuit, entered into a marriage that lasted 16 months, feuded openly with coach Dave Wannstedt, was arrested on a weapons charge (later dismissed on a technicality), was suspended, endured another contentious arbitration with the Bears, withdrew from his teammates, stormed out of an off-season meeting with Wannstedt and called Phillips to announce his retirement.
A few days later he was involved in a bizarre standoff with police at the Tower Lakes home of his publicist, Nancy Mitchell. Spellman, who was variously described as angry, exhausted, irrational and suicidal, finally emerged, accompanied by retired Bears great Mike Singletary. The next day, Spellman walked out of Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, shoeless and shirtless in freezing weather.
Those images could haunt him for the rest of his career--if he has one.
His downward spiral was followed by a slow leak of bad news over a period of months the 27-year-old Spellman refers to as "time off" and most other people would view as a lost summer.
"There's been so much stuff said about me that was completely wrong," Spellman said. "People would take stories . . . they'd shoot off a firecracker, and by the time it got back to me it was a stick of dynamite."
But the documented incidents are bad enough.
For a while it looked as if Spellman might wind up living on the street. Divorced in May, cut by the Bears in June, he ricocheted between Chicago, Detroit and his hometown in New Jersey, often staying in cheap motels whose names he says he cannot recall.
He dyed his hair and his goatee a garish blond and dropped from sight, missing numerous court appearances. Even his lawyers couldn't reach him. His driver's license was suspended, his state firearms owner's identification card revoked, foreclosure proceedings initiated on his Buffalo Grove home. A felony weapons charge in Michigan, the most serious of several brushes with the law last summer, has yet to be resolved.
Court records show Spellman has little left of the millions he earned with the Bears. His assets are frozen pending the outcome of his Chicago child-support case.
His foundation, the one pure joy of his life, has carried on largely without him for the last year.
Some people wonder if it all could have gone differently.
"I always believed Alonzo had more ability than he was able to manifest in that situation," said Rod Graves, the Bears' former player personnel director, now assistant to the president of the Arizona Cardinals. "There were a lot of factors that contributed to his lack of growth. He came to us at a young age (20). He was very impressionable. He needed someone for guidance--a mentor or a father figure. If he had had someone he trusted, he could have overcome most of his problems."
But a guy listed at 6 feet 4 inches and 292 pounds is not supposed to need hand-holding. Not with a 10 1/2-inch hand-span. Not with a seven-figure salary and a privileged life.
Spellman admits to poor choices and bad judgment, but he does not accept the diagnosis of bipolar disorder (manic depression) he received in March. He says he will not take medication for the condition even if a prospective NFL employer asks him to do so.
The stigma of mental illness may be fading somewhat in modern U.S. society, but pro athletes could be among the last true stoics on the subject.
"Part of the problem is that athletes are so focused that anything that appears to rob them of that focus gets pushed to the side," said Harry Edwards, the sports activist and academician who serves as a consultant to the San Francisco 49ers.
Whatever steps the clubs and the union take to try to address emotional problems as efficiently as they treat physical injuries, players are still commodities, and a weakness of any kind is a liability.
"When you boil off all the bull, we are not about saving souls or purifying people," Edwards said. "We are a football organization, not a social service organization."
- - -
Spellman's physique makes an indelible first impression. It causes grown men to forget political correctness and emit long, low whistles and use the faintly degrading term "physical specimen."
The body was a blessing and a curse. It created certain expectations. At times, Spellman was labeled an underachiever on the football field. It is not certain he ever could have been perceived as an overachiever.
Spellman's first loyalty is to his family. Over the years he has frequently paid tribute to his mother, who raised six children on what she earned packing fish at a hatchery. The family spent years in a tough neighborhood in Mt. Holly, N.J., across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. When Spellman turned pro, he bought his mother a home in a nearby suburb.
One of the great disappointments of Spellman's life, friends say, is that his money could not buy stability for all his siblings. Spellman's older brother has been in and out of jail on drug charges. Members of his immediate family declined to comment for this story, as did the mothers of his three children.
While Spellman's early mentors say he needed considerable guidance, nothing foreshadowed his adult downfall.
At Rancocas Valley High School, Spellman's potential attracted assistant football coach Raj Mackara, who worked with Spellman every day after school to ensure he met the NCAA's academic entrance requirements. "He had a hard time staying on track," Mackara said. "It didn't just happen. We made him do it."
Larry Romanoff, an Ohio State University administrator and former academic adviser to the athletic department, recalls with fond clarity how Spellman seemed susceptible to whomever had last spoken to him.
"I remember running into him one morning in the cafeteria, and he was carrying four of those little boxes of Captain Crunch cereal," Romanoff said. "I said, `Alonzo, there are better things for breakfast than something with that much sugar. Try Total.' And the next time I saw him, he was carrying four boxes of Total."
That was Spellman--junk food one day, body-as-temple the next. He shocked Romanoff when he made a 3.0 grade-point average as a freshman. But the next year, Spellman sent a surrogate to take an exam for him and was placed on academic probation. By his junior year, it was clear Spellman would not finish out his eligibility.
The night of the NFL draft in April 1992, Spellman had a party at his apartment in Columbus. He had been projected to go as high as 12th in the first round. But his mood deteriorated as that pick came and went. Finally he went into his bedroom, shut the door and refused to come out until then-Bears coach Mike Ditka called to tell him he was the 22nd pick.
Spellman was the youngest player in the league in each of his first two seasons, but he seemed to adjust well to pro life. Former Bear Chris Zorich, Spellman's road roommate, described Spellman as "the most confident person I had ever seen."
Spellman played several defensive line positions for the Bears. He frequently voiced his desire to start at right end, considered more prestigious than left end because of higher visibility in pass-rush situations, and made no secret of the fact that he felt whipsawed by the coaching staff.
Wannstedt would not comment for this story. "We've severed our ties with Alonzo," Bears spokesman Bryan Harlan said. "It's a closed chapter. We wish him well."
Spellman logged a lot of time at right end in 1996, arguably his most productive season as a pro.
In January 1997, Spellman surprised everyone around him by marrying a former exotic dancer, Lizzie Figueroa. The 2-minute ceremony was conducted by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Wayne Rhine during deliberations in a jury trial. Rhine asked Spellman to autograph a copy of the marriage license. "It's not every day you get to perform a wedding for a celebrity," Rhine said.
That celebrity would soon turn to notoriety.
Spellman beat his weapons charge that spring. When training camp opened for the 1997 season, according to Bears staff and former teammates, Spellman was uncharacteristically withdrawn and unfocused. That fall he was suspended without pay after he and the team disagreed on the treatment of a shoulder injury. He later was awarded back pay in arbitration.
A source close to the situation at the time said the Bears, speculating that Spellman's marriage was affecting his attitude, used team security personnel to investigate his private life.
Spellman said he was unaware of any such investigation. He described his relationship with his ex-wife as positive, and said they are still friends.
"We just got married at the wrong time," Spellman said. "There was so much pressure on me, and it weighs on your marriage."
Spellman's ex-wife did not respond to a request for an interview.
Marc Janser, the lawyer who represented Spellman in the divorce, said the case was resolved quickly and amicably. At an April court hearing, Spellman asked to meet alone with his soon-to-be-ex. The pair emerged from a conference room with arms linked, having negotiated their own settlement: a $400,000 lump-sum payment.
The same gentility does not extend to the pending Cook County child-support case, in which Spellman has spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Spellman's third out-of-wedlock child was born to Nina Phan in August 1997. A month later, Spellman spent $300,000 to purchase two annuities, similar to the ones that support his other children, that pay out $2,000 a month until the child turns 18 and $25,000 annually for four subsequent years.
Phan's complaint asks for lifetime support of an indeterminate amount, claiming breach of contract; in effect, that she kept the child based on certain promises from Spellman. In court documents, she estimates her monthly expenses to be $15,000 for herself and the child.
"While I appreciate what he did (buying the annuity), no one asked him to do that," said Phan's lawyer, Paul Feinstein. "He thinks it's enough. We don't. That's what courts are for."
Much of the argument in the case thus far has concerned Cook Circuit Judge Gay-Lloyd Lott's freezing of Spellman's assets, which by this fall had shrunk to about $700,000 in a bond account at Doerge Capital Management in Chicago, court records show. Spellman's lawyers have repeatedly returned to court to ask that money be freed up for necessities, such as mortgage payments.
The case took a strange turn this fall when a Doerge employee, responding to a letter from Spellman's attorney, wired $100,000 from the account in violation of Lott's order. Spellman sent some money to his family and $10,000 to a female friend in Detroit. A letter from Doerge in the court file blames the mistake on a clerical mixup. The person who performed the wire transfer left the firm the next day.
In a deposition this fall, Spellman said he had spent between $75,000 and $100,000 to start a rap record company. He described several of the artists as family members whose stage names are "Seven, True and Al." "They don't have names right now," he said.
In August, Spellman made one abortive attempt to re-enter the pro football world. He paid his own way to Jacksonville, where the Jaguars gave him a routine physical and had two psychologists evaluate him.
"He wasn't ready to return to football at that time," Huyghue said. "He could have bench-pressed a lot of weight and run pretty fast, but intellectually and emotionally, he wasn't where he needed to be."
Team officials also were nonplussed when a local reporter told them Spellman was wanted on a felony warrant for missing a Michigan court hearing.
Through all the turmoil of the last two years, the person who probably has stayed closest to Spellman is Mitchell, his publicist, who readily concedes she is far more than a hired hand. In fact, she said, Spellman has not paid her in some months.
Mitchell is Spellman's friend, adviser and sometime gatekeeper. Several people sought her advice before deciding whether to talk about Spellman. Others praise her for keeping his foundation running.
Last summer Mitchell was among very few people whose calls Spellman returned. She has bailed him out of jail. She handles the day-to-day finances of the foundation. Her husband sold Spellman the annuities for two of his children. In the case pending in Chicago, Mitchell testified she is holding the checks from the annuity in escrow until the case is resolved.
She becomes by turns passionately angry and upset when she talks about Spellman's circumstances. She said she has urged him to take medication. She frequently mentions him in the same breath as her son, who took his own life three years ago.
"Let anyone criticize me. Go ahead," Mitchell said. "I don't think I could have given him any better advice. I was afraid he was going to die. I'm not going to stand over that body and say, `Oh, what a shame.' "
- - -
Spellman worked for years to correct his too-high stance and his tendency to be pulled offside. He still wants to believe that if he stays low enough and doesn't jump the gun, his body will once again take him where he wants to go.
"He always wanted to do the right thing," said Raj Mackara, his voice choked with emotion. "He didn't always know how, but he always wanted to do the right thing."
There are plenty of people who believe Spellman will get another chance, including Brian McCaskey, the Bears' liaison to players on off-field issues.
"He lost his way, and he didn't know how to get back," McCaskey said. "I think he'll find his way back. I'm not qualified to say he should or shouldn't take medicine, but if he stays on the straight and narrow, he will get a tryout and he might do very well."
Zorich was more succinct.
"Are you kidding?" he said. "If he can run and he can hit, he'll have a job."
And if he can keep body and soul together.
_________________ Curious Hair wrote: Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?
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. That's fulltime. Olin is rich so this means nothing to him. He just wants to do something to get away from the wife and kids. Shocked that Herb quit his producer job for this. But Herb isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.