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John Saunders would never let you see it on TV, but
his melodious voice and calming manner hid the inner demons that
consumed his later years.
One of the longtime faces of ESPN, who died last August at
61 after collapsing on the bathroom floor in his Westchester home, had
begun detailing his battle with depression and suicidal thoughts in a
memoir.
In an excerpt from “Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope” released posthumously Monday in a Sports Illustrated piece,
Saunders recalled his lowest point in February 2012, when he stood on
the edge of the Tappan Zee Bridge and was a split-second decision away
from jumping to his death. Chillingly, the realization that he had it in
him to make the 140-foot drop convinced him to walk back to his car.
“The river’s rough gray surface looked more like concrete
than water. I stood there motionless, taking it all in,” Saunders wrote
in the book, due out Aug. 8. “When I realized I could do it, that I
could jump from the bridge, I got scared. I turned around, got back in
my car, and drove off, heading for home.
“On my way back I decided that whatever I was going to do, it wasn’t going to be that. But what was I going to do?”
Saunders, the Ontario native who wore many hats over his 30
years with the Worldwide Leader, revealed the mental and physical
ailments that all came crashing down on him the day he drove toward the
bridge feeling like a “beaten man.” On top of a life-long struggle with
depression, Saunders still was recovering from the concussion-like
symptoms he incurred from falling on ESPN’s college football set in
September 2011.
“Six months later the lingering effects of the injury were
evident whenever I made a mistake during our broadcast by mixing up
names or getting the score wrong — the kind of simple errors that guys
who’ve been on TV for a few decades aren’t supposed to make,” he wrote.
“Each time I screwed up something, a few anonymous critics on Twitter
would hammer me. That’s part of the business of course, but after a few
months of this I concluded that the one skill I could always count on,
the thing that saved me so many times — my ability to talk on TV — was
slipping away from me.”
Saunders sought help in 2009, when he checked
into Westchester Medical Psychiatric Ward at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Even
though he believed deep down his bosses at ESPN would have respected his
condition, Saunders wrote, he felt too ashamed to disclose the real
reason for his hospital stay.
“If I told them what I was going through, I’m confident they
would have protected my privacy and done everything they could to help
me,” he explained. “But I was still too embarrassed to let them know I
was dealing with serious depression. So I told my supervisors at ESPN
that I was in the hospital for my diabetes, which gave me more incentive
to get out soon before I had to blow my cover.”
An autopsy on Saunders’ brain revealed several factors
contributed to his death: an enlarged heart, side effects from diabetes
and dysautonomia — a condition that causes the automated nervous system
to malfunction.
Saunders’ family — his wife, Wanda, and two daughters, Aleah
and Jenna — donated his brain to Mt. Sinai for research on his request.
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