Like any commentary piece here at eDraft, this article represents the opinion of the author and not necessarily other members of the eDraft team or its affiliations.
When the news broke on Saturday morning that an unnamed Kansas City Chiefs player had killed his girlfriend and committed suicide at the team facility, most of the sports world was in complete and utter shock. When the news started trickling in that Javon Belcher was the unnamed player, it struck an unsuspecting audience in a way that we have not seen since Junior Seau committed suicide last year.
This of course, represented real life and the fallacies that are within the mind of every single human, no matter how successful he/she is deemed to be. It’s so much more than the game of football. While it remains to be seen what led Belcher to kill his girlfriend and then turn the gun on himself in front of his head coach and general manager, one has to wonder exactly what was going through his head.
By committing this horrendous act, Belcher left his three-month old daughter without a father and mother. He seemingly destroyed the lives of dozens of people within the family by committing what has to be concluded as one of the most amoral acts that a human can undertake. While there were a lot of people on Saturday that indicated we should respect his life, the ideal that you don’t talk ill about the recently deceased is difficult for me - there was no honor in the way his life ended. Not only did he take the life of an innocent human, he also committed one of the most selfish acts that a human can do by killing himself.
Did he think about the family he left behind or the organization that he inflicted a tremendous amount of pain on? What about the community of the greater-Kansas City area itself? No, we shouldn’t honor someone that went out like that. No, we shouldn’t honor someone who took his daughters’ parents from her. For she will have no memory of either her mother or father. That is what stings the most.
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who is one of my favorite personalities on television, has been through this. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, sat in her New York City penthouse as his brother Carter jumped from the ledge, committing suicide at the age of 24 in front of his own mother. Carter had an Ivy-League degree and was seemingly a successful individual. For him to put his mother through such grief leads me to believe that Carter was going through some tremendous emotional struggles.
You never see the warning signs. They’re not right in front of your face, nor are they readily apparent on the surface. Short of being a qualified mental health expert we as humans have absolutely no idea what to look at as it relates to the warning signs. Even then, experts sometimes let these, unbeknownst to us warning signs, slip through the cracks.
Is it depression? I don’t know. Could it be some type of undiagnosed mental disorder? We may never find out.
Belcher, was by all accounts, a man of high character. He received a degree in child development and family relations from the University of Maine in 2009. Teachers and fellow students remembered Belcher as a care-free and intelligent individual that seemed to have it all together.
He was introduced to his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins by then teammate Jamaal Charles, whose wife is a cousin of hers. How can what was seemingly a successful and happy life end the way Belcher’s did? We’ll probably never have an answer to that.
This wasn’t a violent act committed due to a history of concussions. All indications point to the fact that Belcher’s football career had absolutely nothing to do with the tragic events that took place on Saturday. His teammates didn’t see it coming, nor did the coaches that he thanked prior to the final minutes of his life.
For their part, the Kansas City Chiefs acted like a class organization following the death of a family member. Their performance on the field against the Carolina Panthers on Sunday was nothing short of extraordinary. How they were able to go out there the day after a brother committed this henus act is beyond me. In reality it indicates that the strength of the human spirit can endure what seems to be unconscionable tragedy. The Chiefs came together as a unit, as brothers, and proved to the entire world that they are more than the sum of their individual parts.
Brady Quinn pretty much had it right with this impassionate speech following Kansas City’s stirring win over the Carolina Panthers.
I just wish that Belcher knew that he had a support staff there in Kansas City. That it didn’t need to end this way and that he didn’t need to take the easy way out. We all go through ups-and-downs in our lives, it’s how we react to those that make us stronger.
As Quinn indicated, social media/networking cannot make up for the touch of a family member, or love a partner. It can, however, act as a coping mechanism for those who were indirectly affected by this tragedy, which seems to be everyone involved in the football world.
I guess we can all take one important lesson from this tragedy. Don’t rely on yourself to go through things in your life that may seem impossible to handle at the time. There is always another route, a person there ready to listen and a support staff willing to help you through it.