Life does not come with instructions. It's the reason you can never be too lucky or too old.
Jeff Alm was neither when he took his own life at the end of an expressway ramp early Tuesday in Houston. Police said Alm lost control of his speeding Cadillac leaving Interstate 610, striking guard rails on either side of the roadway, and causing his passenger and best friend, Sean Lynch, to be thrown through the window to his death.Distraught, the Oilers' 25-year-old tackle took out a shotgun he had in the car for Lord knows what reason, put it in his mouth, and fired.
The most sensible thing anybody said about his senseless death so far has come from - of all people - Oilers defensive coach Buddy Ryan.
"That's the bad thing about having a gun handy sometimes," Ryan said, "because, you know, all at once you make a decision that you wouldn't have probably if you had thought about it a little longer."
The young don't think about many things, and even when they do, it is usually not for long. With rich, gifted young athletes, pampered and pressured in ways the rest of us cannot grasp, it's even less and for shorter periods of time. In retrospect, it seems Alm was thinking about too many of the wrong things; whenever suicide is involved, in retrospect, it almost always seems that way.
And while he had a solid friendship with Lynch going back to their days playing football at a suburban Chicago high school, he apparently was not close enough with any of his Houston teammates to ease the frustrations of an especially frustrating season.
Alm brooded after the club's management forced him to cave in during a contract dispute, then again because he was forced to sit out a few games for signing the deal after a league-imposed deadline. Last month, he brooded some more after an injury to his right leg cost him a couple more games. While rehabbing his leg in the Oilers' gym, Alm would sometimes read the newspapers aloud to workout mate Lorenzo White.
"I was just thinking about all the things he used to read about in the paper about suicide and about news coming on," White recalled later Tuesday. "He'd always say, `Lo, what do you think about that guy?"'
That Alm would become `that guy' may even have been foreshadowed by a discussion just a few days earlier. Without identifying the players, a Houston television station quoted several saying that Alm had argued with some teammates about weapons. Not about the fact he had a shotgun - that would hardly make him unusual among athlete's todays - but that he insisted on carrying it around.
"Certain players leave here at 2-3 in the afternoon and they have hobbies," running back Spencer Tillman said.
"Cody Carlson shoots a camera," he added matter-of-factly, "and some like to shoot weapons."
The picture Oiler teammates painted of Alm was hardly recognizable to people who watched him chase the dream of playing pro ball. Those people remember him, home from South Bend on break, wolfing down a steak between laughs with Lynch at Jack Gibbons Restaurant, the family business Lynch entered after graduating from high school.
To them, Alm's death was something sudden, something more noble, something like the Greek myth of inseparable friends Damon and Pythias, only with a tragic, twisted ending.
Tom Seliga coached Alm and Lynch and a hundred other kids at Carl Sandburg High in Orland Park, Ill., before giving up those duties last season. He remembers the 1984-85 teams both played on as a particularly self-motivated group.
"I never had a problem with those kids," he said. "No alcohol problems, no discipline problems, no nothing."
Seliga admitted he had no idea whether Alm could have lost his way, whether he had changed, or even whether playing for pay could have changed him. But he had a hard time reconciling his memories with this set of facts.
"Here's a kid who ever since I've known him knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. I never saw the kid in a depressed state.
"But then," he added haltingly, "a lot of people have that attitude. I just assumed that after the accident . . . I don't know what the period of time was . . . to see your best friend all of sudden, gone . . . who knows what clicks in just a matter of seconds?"