The story begins and ends with a grave on a grassy hill in Logan. Jeffrey Daniel Hipple is buried here under a polished, black granite headstone, with the image of his face carved into the stone above a drawing he once made of winged shoes.
From here, visitors can see the west-side bleachers of the Utah State football stadium, the site of so many of his father's triumphs, and out onto Cache Valley, which in summertime opens below into a broad plain of green and gold plaid.
The tombstone tells part of the story:
September 5, 1984
April 9, 2000
Out of the pain of Jeff's premature death came the beginning of understanding, discovery and redemption for his father, Eric. But also the question that haunts him: Why didn't he understand his son's pain? After all, Jeff's pain was his pain; it was what he had felt all his life without understanding it for what it was. The mind-numbing sadness and emptiness, the ailments, the listlessness, the confusion, the days when he couldn't get out of bed.
Eric Hipple was living two lives. Everyone knew him as the quarterback of the Detroit Lions and, before that, as the quarterback for Utah State University. But there was a darker side. There was a man few knew. The man who once threw himself out of a speeding car; the man who flew his airplane between trees; the man who quit going to work simply because he didn't and couldn't care anymore.
Then Jeff took his own life and Eric's life bottomed out.
He not only wound up in jail, he was glad to be there. His eventual quest to understand his son's death turned into a journey of self-discovery and healing. Hipple found an explanation for his behavior and his son's: depression. It became his cause and his vocation.
Hipple is now the outreach coordinator of the Depression Center at the University of Michigan, delivering speeches around the country nearly nonstop to educate people about recognizing, treating and understanding depression. He also wrote a book about his experiences, "Real Men Do Cry," which will be released in Borders bookstores later this month.
"I want people to understand that when things are bad, there are ways to handle it," he says.
It is a curious thing: Most humans seem to know more about the surface of the moon and the depths of the ocean than they do about the human mind. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death in the 15-to-24-year age group. Depression is an illness that few recognize or understand.
Hipple had symptoms of depression throughout his life, although he didn't know it. He did what men and football players are taught to do: He put his head down and kept going and wore a brave face.
After completing his book, he held onto it for a month because, as he says, "I wasn't sure how the title would go over. Real Men Do Cry ... " Ironically, he still couldn't get past the old notion that men couldn't show emotion and vulnerability, which was part of the problem all along, since it prevented him from getting help.
Outwardly, Hipple had everything going for him. He was an all-conference quarterback at USU and later was named to the school's all-century team. Drafted by Detroit in the fourth round of the NFL draft in 1980, he was the team's third-string quarterback until early in his second season. The Lions, unhappy with their 2-4 start, announced that Hipple would make his starting debut in front of a national TV audience on Monday Night Football.
On the day of the game, Hipple was so nervous that he got on his knees in his hotel room and prayed for two hours, pleading "Please, help me get through this."
What happened next was one of the greatest debuts ever by an NFL quarterback. On his first play of the game, Hipple completed a 48-yard pass, and the rest of the night was his. He passed for 336 yards and four touchdowns and ran for two more scores as the Lions beat the Chicago Bears 48-17.
"It was a magical night," says Hipple. "I really felt that someone was looking down on me. I don't remember half the game."
He never had another night like it, but he did play well enough to sustain a 10-year career in which he threw for 10,711 yards and 55 touchdowns.
By the end of the '89 season he knew his body had had enough. He had undergone seven surgeries to make it that far. Hipple has a photo of himself lying on the turf in 1988 with his foot pointed backward — the result of a tackle that snapped his ankle like a stick. After doctors put him back together, he managed one more season.
"I got my starting job back, and I threw four touchdown passes again — but three of them were for the other team," he says.
He was starting over in many ways when he left football. He was newly divorced from his wife, Jann, the tall blonde he met at Utah State when she was a cheerleader and he the quarterback. Jann and the couple's two children, Jeff and Erica, moved to Utah while Hipple remained in Michigan to cash in on his name recognition. He started a new career in the insurance business, and he thrived. During the next few years he made more money than he had made while playing football.
"Then I went flat," he says. "I got bored."
He was clinically depressed, but only in hindsight does he recognize the symptoms and clues. He had genetic precursors for depression — an aunt who had been hospitalized with schizophrenia, a mother who had had bouts of depression, a niece who was bipolar. Hipple himself struggled with depression as a teenager but didn't realize it until he recalled it years later as an adult.
Suddenly, now in his late 30s, he was unable to get out of bed for work. His energy lagged. He couldn't face the office. The business eventually went bankrupt through his neglect. He turned to drinking and drugs and risk-taking behavior.
He earned his pilot's license and flew like a dogfighter. Pilots are supposed to fly above 5,000 feet so they have time to react if something goes wrong. He flew at 500 feet or lower. He buzzed trees. Flying over open terrain in Michigan's upper peninsula — "where I would be a danger only to me" — he flew between trees, turned sideways. He took up scuba diving and hang gliding and snow and water skiing.
"It's self-medication," he says. "It's the brain finding a way to feel better." The brain accomplishes this by releasing the body's own drugs — dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline — in its response to thrills and fear. It produced a high.
On one occasion in 1998, Hipple was being driven to the airport by his second wife, Shelly, when he scribbled a note, handed it to her and leaped out of the car while it was moving 70 miles per hour. The note said he was sorry. He was hospitalized for 10 days.
"The press got ahold of it," he says. "We made up a story that I was leaning against the door. It was very impulsive. I can't even say it was a suicide attempt."
Looking back, Hipple believes even football was another form of thrill seeking for him. YouTube still has a video clip of him being cut in half by a speeding tackler as he ran down the sideline.
While Hipple fought his demons, his son Jeff was having his own difficulties. After his parents saw him struggle in school they agreed that he should move to Michigan to live with his father for his seventh-grade year. He returned to Utah to live with his mother a year later, but he continued to struggle.
"He didn't want to go to school," says Eric. "His mother called me and said, 'We've got to do something."'
Jeff moved to Michigan again to live with his father at the outset of his ninth-grade year.
"He was captain of the freshman basketball team and things seemed to be going well," says Hipple
But there were signs of trouble even before the basketball season was finished. Jeff was declared academically ineligible late in the season because his grades slumped again. He began to exhibit more telltale signs of depression. He withdrew from friends and became increasingly isolated. He lost his appetite, struggled with insomnia and complained of not feeling well.
"They were all the classic symptoms, but I had never even heard of depression," says Hipple. "It was normal to me. It was what I went through. I didn't catch it. I'd tell him, 'Tough it out, Jeff. You'll get past it.' I could tell in the morning he had been crying, and I'd say, 'Come on, get to school; things will be better.' It was what I knew. I did all those things. I used to dodge school. I'd put a thermometer on the heater to make it look like I had a temperature."
In April 2000, Hipple was out of town on business when he received the phone call informing him that Jeff had taken his life.
"I had tremendous guilt," says Eric. "Why didn't I see it?"
After Jeff was buried, Hipple began a free fall into self-destruction. "I gave up," he recalls. "I didn't care if I lived or died."
He turned to alcohol and considered suicide. He was arrested for DUI in Oakland, Calif., and was sent to jail for two to three days at a time for failing to follow a court-ordered probationary program. Finally, out of exasperation, the judge gave him a 58-day jail sentence.
"I was happy when they put me in jail," he says. "No one could bother me. I could shut out the world. They misunderstood the problem. They didn't recognize it was a mental health issue, and they didn't understand that I didn't care what they did to me."
Halfway through his jail stay, Hipple realized two things: He didn't want to be behind bars anymore, and he wanted to know why Jeff died and why this was happening to him. In 2002, he enrolled in an eight-week program in the depression clinic at the University of Michigan to get answers. He learned about depression and realized it had been the source of so many of his own problems as well as Jeff's over the years.
"I went there to learn," he says. "It was eye-opening. Everything fell into place. It explained my own behavior and my family's. I could see why I got divorced from Jann and how it was for her to put up with someone who was living on the edge. ... It probably helped cause my divorce."
The experience led to Hipple's treatment for depression. He also became such an advocate for recognizing and treating depression that six years ago the University of Michigan created a position for him to lead its outreach programs. He speaks to military groups, schools, community organizations, bar associations, dental associations and other professional groups. In recent weeks he has spoken in Florida, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Oklahoma, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, often giving two or three lectures in a single day on the road, as well as doing TV and radio interviews.
For his work, he was presented the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, as well as the 2006 Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association.
"I thought I would go back to the insurance business — I still carry an insurance card," he says. "But I've got to follow this up. This gets bigger and bigger."
Encouraged to put his experiences and insights in a book, he hand-wrote the first 30 pages and then told the rest of the story to a tape recorder. A year after he began the book, he finished it, in May 2008. It proved to be cathartic.
"It was tough," he says. "There were times I cried."
As for his lifelong struggle with depression, he says, "I got treatment, and I am in good shape. I do take medication, but I also see someone to debrief occasionally after I've been out speaking and giving presentations for a while."
Eric and Shelly Hipple have been married for 18 years and have had two children together, Taylor and Tarah. Jann (now Parker) lives in Salt Lake City. Erica has been accepted to Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich.
Hipple believes he has found his calling. His life is more under control now, although occasionally the thrills seem to find him. In 2005, he made headlines by attacking and disarming a knife-wielding man at a party.
"The guy with the knife was threatening several people and had cut one already," says Hipple. "I just tackled him and took away the knife. It was more of a reaction than anything ... probably training from all the interceptions I threw in my career."
As for the pain and loss that have so defined the second and third chapters of his life, Hipple prefers to remember Jeff another way. "He was just a wonderful, happy kid who was very empathetic and took on other people's pain," he says. "Oddly enough, he never drank or smoked. Those things are usually involved in suicide. I've learned to forget about the way Jeff died and be happy with the 15 years I had with him."
E-mail: drob@desnews.com