The Man I Never Met Read online

  For years, I had a life in Denver that was unconventional but fulfilling, at least for a while. I spent my summers at the Broncos’ training camp on the University of Northern Colorado campus, in Greeley, Colorado, about seventy-five miles northeast of Denver. I spent my fall weekends with the Broncos. I spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day at practice, or in the Broncos’ press room, or on the road covering them. For fifteen years, I had covered the Broncos, writing two or three stories per day throughout the year, feeding a fan base that was insatiable.

  Football players spend an incredible amount of time at their team’s facility, and coaches and executives famously work from before dawn to after dusk. I was a single guy. I had nowhere else to go, nothing else I really wanted to do. Their schedule fit mine. I developed close relationships with a lot of them. Eventually I helped Mike Shanahan, Terrell Davis, and Bill Romanowski write books. Football people became the people I saw most often. They became part of the landscape of my life.

  But still, they weren’t family. And as I grew older, that life started to feel emptier to me. Players came and went. So did coaches. I still loved being around them, and I still loved covering the NFL, but I also wanted something more.

  After I got divorced, my parents would say that I would settle down when I found a woman I wanted to spend time with as much as I wanted to work. I felt like I was at that point, or certainly getting close to it. I just needed to meet the perfect woman.

  And when I say perfect, I mean perfect. I wanted to fall in love so badly that I’d built up this romantic ideal in my head. I wanted a flawless person, a spotless résumé, everything to be exactly right.

  I remember one night when I was with my uncle Marty Freedman in Denver. He wasn’t actually my uncle, but I thought of him that way. When I moved to Denver, he was the only person in the state that I had any previous connection to; he was my aunt’s uncle, and he looked after me as if I were his nephew. On my very first Sunday in Denver, he had me over to his house to watch the Broncos play in Los Angeles against the Raiders. The first Broncos game I watched in Denver was with him, which was appropriate.

  Marty was a huge sports fan, and he would take me to Nuggets or Avalanche games whenever one of his children, or grandchildren, didn’t want to go. Sometimes I was his backup plan, but I never minded being his backup plan.

  He did so much more for and with me, taking me to meals and games, offering me advice, becoming someone I loved very much. We went to regular breakfasts in Cherry Creek, discussed dating and finances, and when something good happened to me, he was as proud of me as one of my parents would be.

  Years later, after our relationship strengthened, we went to a Denver Nuggets game, and he said, “You know now, at this stage of your life, when you do get married, you’re going to be marrying someone with kids or someone divorced?”

  I was almost offended by it. This was both silly and hypocritical—after all, I had been divorced myself. But I was oblivious to that. He was being practical and real, but I wasn’t interested in practical and real. I was locked in on what I perceived to be the perfect romantic story. And when I didn’t find it after years of looking in Denver, I decided I needed to make a change.

  * * *

  I loved Denver. I still do. Even now, the city runs through my soul, but after seventeen years there, the city felt socially suffocating—I’d run into the same people everywhere I went, and every woman I dated seemed to know the same people I knew. I don’t know if I was depressed at the time, but for as well as I knew Denver, I felt lost. Most of my peers were married. Many of them had kids. It felt like life was leaving me behind.

  I had the freedom to move because I had switched jobs. In early 2004, while I was working for The Post, I got a call from somebody at the fledgling NFL Network. His name was Eric Weinberger, and he was interested in hiring me. I talked to Eric and the people he worked with there for six months before they offered me a job. They never said what they might want me to do. It was this nebulous interest. League-owned TV networks were a relatively new phenomenon; MLB Network would not be launched until 2009. Nobody knew if this would work or what it would be like. But finally, Weinberger called me back and said, “All right, this is what we want you to do: parting shots like Mike Lupica and information like Peter King.”

  To my ears, those were magical words—a winning combination. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King was—and is—one of the best-known and best-read NFL reporters in the country. He was also a mentor and a friend. Lupica had been the best-known sports columnist in New York since I was a kid, and his “Parting Shots” on Sports Reporters was an ESPN staple. It made me seriously consider leaving something I had poured the first fifteen-plus years of my career into doing.

  I agonized over it for days. Do you make the jump and leave the newspaper field in which you’ve honed your skills since college? Or stay on the path that you’ve been on, that you love, that you dreamed about since working for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, at the University of Michigan? Newspapers were still considered safe harbors for a journalist. Back then, newspaper reporters looked at TV reporters with some mild disdain. I had some trusted friends and advisors who urged me not to make the mistake of a lifetime, not to leave the career that I was building in newspapers, not for a league-owned network. I still can hear their voices today. “Don’t do it, don’t do it…”

  But the more I thought about the NFL Network job, the more I liked the idea of it. Then, one Thursday in July 2004, I was a panelist on ESPN’s Sports Reporters, shooting the show at the then ESPN restaurant in Times Square, in the center of New York City. Mike Lupica was one of the panelists that day. He forgot his sport coat and had to go to the nearby Macy’s to buy a replacement one before the show. After the show, as I was leaving the studio and my father was driving me back to LaGuardia Airport to fly back to Denver, the NFL Network finally called with a firm offer.

  It was for more than twice what I was making at The Post.

  And I knew in my gut that my time at the newspaper, and maybe in newspapers, was done.

  My next thought was: When do I start?

  Getting that offer while my father was driving me to the airport was one of those life-changing moments that always will stay with me. It is still one of the most memorable and most exciting moments of my career. Sharing it with my father, a huge sports fan on his own, meant so much. My father usually is reserved and soft-spoken, but even he got excited at the idea of me now making the switch.

  I still can picture right where we were, pulling up to LaGuardia Airport, when the offer came in. I went inside, checked in for my flight, and began calling people from a pay phone right in front of the gate—this was in the days before everybody had a cell phone—to let them know I would be leaving newspapers to try out television. At the time, it was considered a bold move, leaving newspapers for television, and especially a league-owned network, but I was ready to take the leap. With the network being based in Los Angeles and the league offices in New York, I could have gone home then if I chose. But at the time, I was dating a woman from Colorado, so moving was not at the forefront of my thinking. Yet after we broke up the next year, I started to feel that pull again. I felt like New York City was calling me home.

  * * *

  When I left The Denver Post for the NFL Network, my work had morphed from the daily grind and rush of a pro football beat to something even more intense. I was just getting my feet into the national reporting world and trying to acclimate to that. It was a big adjustment, print to TV, covering one team compared to thirty-two, and these professional changes had an impact on my personal life. My job was my first love, but I was trying to find another love to complement it.

  The new job provided me with the ability to pick a new city to live, any city I wanted. There was something about New York that was especially alluring. I never had the opportunity as a professional to work in New York. My family still was living there—my parents in Bellmo
re, my sister and brother-in-law and their children in Melville, and my brother in Long Beach.

  And so I acted on the urge that I’d first felt when I saw those hijacked planes hit the tallest buildings in New York City: I moved home.

  In December 2005, I found an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I fell in love with the apartment immediately. I wrote in my journal:

  I can’t tell you how psyched I was … Felt like I had started a whole new chapter in my life, and this was very therapeutic. Just left me with a great feeling, one day after feeling terribly uneasy about everything and wondering if I could make the move. But I went bold and did it and was happier than I thought I would be. Was really happy.

  I planned to move in when the football season ended. I had high hopes for my new life. I was living closer to the Long Island home where I grew up, closer to my parents, closer to my dearest friends—and closer, I thought, to the life I wanted to live.

  I was thirty-nine years old. I was hoping to get married and start a family of my own. I was also still grinding. My job at the NFL Network was supposed to entail one column per week on NFL.com and roughly one appearance per week on the network’s flagship show, NFL Total Access. Within no time, I was on TV every day. The network depended on me to be its news-breaker. I was writing stories every day. But the story I pursued hardest was my own.

  * * *

  My failed marriage was just one in a long list of failed relationships. I believed my luck would change when I moved to New York. Even before I moved in, I had a woman in my sights. We were introduced the same way I had met other women through the years, by mutual friends, thinking there might be some sort of love connection. So we exchanged emails for over a month, starting in January 2006, and we seemed to hit it off. Even though I had not physically met her, and there was so much about her that I didn’t know, something about it felt magical.

  I left the Pro Bowl in Hawaii in mid-February, flew straight to New York, and in the middle of the night, went right to the apartment I had rented on the Upper West Side. I was so excited to meet this woman in person that I had arranged for the doorman to let her in days before I even got there, so she could inspect and prep the apartment at her request.

  When I walked into that empty apartment at about 1:00 in the morning, I found one of the nicest gestures I could ever imagine.

  My new woman friend, whom I had not yet met, had left out chocolates for me, sprayed her perfume on my pillows, and laid a trail of rose petals all around the apartment. It truly took my breath away.

  We met for the first time the very next night, a dinner date on the Upper West Side. That relationship started fast, sputtered out, and then, after a few weeks, reality set in. We dated for a short time, and then it ended.

  * * *

  If you want to know what went wrong with that woman and that relationship, here it is:

  She was dating me.

  I wanted a relationship to work out so badly that I painted this picture in my head of the perfect relationship … and every time imperfections surfaced, as they inevitably do, the relationship stalled. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine. What I failed to take into account at the time was that we’re all imperfect. No relationship, or person, could live up to the standard I’d set in my mind.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if Michelle Obama had shown up at my front door. Or Jennifer Lopez. Or Olivia Munn. Whoever. Just name a woman you find charming, beautiful, and lovely, and understand—I would have found something wrong. I wouldn’t like her legs, or her laugh, or what she ordered for dinner, or the way she cried, or the fact that she cried at all. My friends mocked me for it all the time.

  A lovely, very nice schoolteacher was too soft-spoken—not enough energy. An attractive, alluring saleswoman said she didn’t like that I worked on Sundays—and I couldn’t do anything to change that, so that was the end there. Sometimes relationships would end over nothing. A mild disagreement. A bad moment. A wisp of air. As soon as something wasn’t exactly as I’d envisioned, I bailed. It was over.

  I made so many stupid decisions and silly mistakes. My relationships brought a rush, the same way breaking a big story would bring one. Then the high would wear off, and it would be time to move on to the next one. Sometimes I wondered if the mind-set I needed for work—go hard for twenty-four hours, before moving on to the next story—secretly seeped into my thinking and adversely affected my relationships. I’d meet a woman and I’d tell my friends, “Oh, this one’s got a chance,” just like a tip on a big story. Every time, I meant it, too. But my friends knew me better than I knew myself; they would just laugh at me. They knew the end was coming well before I did. They had seen it too many times—one bad rerun after another.

  I wanted fireworks, and that’s what I got: one spectacular, explosive moment, followed by everything going quiet and dark.

  I was in a lot of relationships that were serious until they began.

  I dated a lot of women when I lived in Denver. That sounds exciting, but it wasn’t. I was not looking to be a lifelong bachelor. I lived what sounds like a great life in the rare times I wasn’t working: Wake up, work out, play golf, go on a date. But it’s only great if that’s what you want. For me, it was definitely unfulfilling.

  * * *

  But there I was, a single man in New York, living in the same building as Howard Stern and NASCAR star Jeff Gordon. That also sounds a little better than it was—my six hundred–square-foot, one-bedroom apartment was a closet compared to theirs. But it was a clean, well-lit apartment. It was my New York City rental, and I loved it.

  I was ready to live the life I envisioned, with my friends all around me. This was news to my friends. A lot of them lived in the suburbs and had children. They weren’t able to—or even interested in—dropping everything to come hang out with a single guy who had lived in another state for two decades.

  My search for a wife continued. I kept looking, kept hoping, kept dating, kept failing, kept sinking. One woman, who was on TV, stopped corresponding with me for two weeks, then called me and ask to go to a spinning class together. I said, “Yeah, OK.” But I was really thinking, What’s going on here? Another woman that I knew from college sent me a rather nondescript note about possibly getting together, then never followed up. This was how it went. Nothing caught, my mood sank, and now the new surroundings didn’t look quite as appealing as they once did.

  It only took me a couple of months to realize my life in New York was not what I’d expected. I started to think I may have made a mistake. It was such a foolish, simplistic plan: I’m going to go home, surrounded by my friends and family, start a new social life, hopefully meet the perfect New York woman, and be happy.

  The low point came Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start of summer, one of the best social weekends of the year. I did not have a lot of social options in New York City, but my friend David Simon invited me out to his family’s house in Southold, Long Island.

  The train ride out there felt long and lonely. And when David picked me up at the train station in Hicksville to drive me out to Southold, I felt I might have been at my low point. Both he and his brother, Michael, tried to talk some sense into me at a time when they were dealing with some issues of their own.

  Michael had been divorced twice. He had two kids. He was trying to find stronger professional footing. He kept listening to my sorrows, and he would say, “What are you worried about?” I knew what he meant—he had much greater responsibilities than I did. I was working for the NFL Network and living in Manhattan. It seemed great from the outside, but when you’re living in quicksand, you can’t figure your way out. I was miserable.

  I’d had some rough moments, like anybody else—seeing other relationships fail, struggling to find a job when I started my career. But this was the worst I’d ever felt. It felt like I was breaking down mentally and physically.

  How bad did it get? Well, at one point, I literally stopped going to the bathroom, or at least … how d
o I put this gently? I couldn’t do my full business in there. This lasted for more than a week, and I grew increasingly concerned.

  Then, on the last day of May, I went to the gym, where I watched Katie Couric’s last appearance on The Today Show. As she signed off from the show, it brought me to tears. Nothing against Katie Couric, but that was a bad sign. I headed to appointments with three therapists. Yes, three. In one day. They were like tryouts. I began cycling through them the way I would dates or stories. I was so desperate to feel better that I would have done anything.

  The first therapist was OK. She said The Today Show touched on my emotions and I needed to give therapy a real chance. I didn’t love her, but I wrote in my journal:

  I do think I just liked having somebody to talk to at this point, I’m that desperate to feel better.

  The second therapist was much more insightful. She had explained why my rose-petal romance was failing: It was built on fantasy. She said that I was impulsive, that I saw everything as black and white, and I needed to get myself under control.

  After my second appointment, I ate a bagel and lox for lunch, hoping it would help my stomach. It didn’t. I had high hopes for my third therapist of the day—in my personal journal that day, I described her as “my top candidate.” But like in so many of my romantic relationships, my high expectations quickly led to disappointment.

  Even at a time of mental and physical illness, I still found time to schedule another forgettable date that night, before going home. I don’t even remember who the date was with, but I remember the rest of the night well. When I got into bed, the pain in my stomach was so debilitating that I knew I would end up in the hospital. My body was not functioning properly.