The bartender returned and passed out fresh cans. “At tailgates, at a wedding or party or, in this case, for a funeral.” “It’s just what we do,” says one of the old teammates, Brian Daigle. Some social rituals just are, and remaining a member of the tribe means never challenging its code. When the bartender went to fetch another case, someone pointed out the paradox of meeting at a bar to honor a man who had drunk himself to death. How had he kept it all secret, even from them?
They tried to square it with what he had become. He had been their team captain, the best of an illustrious collection of Harvard men, an almost comic assemblage of genes and charm. Mostly they reminisced about the roommate they had come to bury. On this night in Nebraska, the friends broke the seal. And over there, near the Herbie Husker mural, was the nation’s leading voice on sports-related brain trauma, the man CNN called when Tua Tagovailoa suited up after a concussion last season and Newsweek interviewed after Aaron Hernandez killed himself in prison. One was a federal air marshal until he couldn’t stand the boredom. Another ex-roommate has written jokes for Jimmy Kimmel. The carnival kid is Harvard’s defensive coordinator now. If football teams are sports’ biggest tribe and produce unbreakable bonds, the friendships grow that much tighter when they involve sharing a refrigerator and toilet. Old roommates keep certain memories locked away, untouched until they’re together again. But the same nonsense made them laugh: the teammate from California who wet the bed, the kid whose family ran a traveling carnival, the time a traffic cone mysteriously appeared in their living room after a night of drinking. Now they were in their mid-40s, their broad shoulders rounded, their hairlines giving way to the beach erosion of time. Most of them had played football at Harvard in the late 1990s.
Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.Ībout a year ago, a bunch of old college roommates met up at a tavern in rural Nebraska.
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