‘What Will Happen to Me When I’m 70, 80?’ The Disappearing Life of an NFL Retiree

It was a big day for Randi Willhite. She was the chosen emcee of a Black Student Union event at Loyola Marymount University in 2008. Her father, Gerald Willhite, the former Denver Broncos running back, was in the audience. He had gone over her speech multiple times. He had given her tips on hosting the evening. But a week later when Randi was discussing how it went, she realized her father had no clue what she was talking about. She tried to make him remember: “Dad, the event you attended with me.” She paused. Then: “The one in which you helped with my speech.” But nothing. Willhite couldn’t remember a thing.

“Anyone could get angry at that,” Randi said in a phone interview. “But I have developed a lot of acceptance and understanding for what my father is going through. I can’t get mad at him.”

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Memory loss is just one of the problems that plague Gerald Willhite, 55. Frustration, depression, headaches, body pain, swollen joints, and a disassociative identity disorder are other reminders of his seven-season (1982-88) career with the Denver Broncos, during which he said he sustained at least eight concussions.

“I think we were misled,” Willhite said from Sacramento. “We knew what we signed up for, but we didn’t know the magnitude of what was waiting for us later.”

When Willhite read about the symptoms of some former players who were taking legal action against the NFL, he thought “Crap, I got the same issues.” He decided to join the lawsuit that claimed the league had withheld information about brain injuries and concussions. He feels that the $765 million settlement, announced last summer and earmarked for the more than 4,000 players in the lawsuit, is like a “Band-Aid put on a gash.”

For more than half a decade, Willhite says he has been coping with his other personality—the one that he says leaves him wondering “Why am I in this room?” He often locks himself up, stops communicating with people, and leaves them wondering where he has disappeared to.

“How I deal with it is I joke about it,” Willhite said. “I’m a Gemini so I say I have two personalities. My daughter always asks me, ‘Dad, who am I talking to? Is it Gerry or Jerome?’”

He feels his problems could get worse as he ages and he wonders if the settlement will cover future health care. “You’re disposing me like I’m trash,” he said. “It’s not enough. What will happen to me when I’m 70, 80?”

Willhite had never played football in high school and he had had barely two years at San Jose State University when, in 1981, he became only the second player in NCAA history to run for 1,000 yards and catch 50 passes. At that time, coach Jack Elway described Willhite to the LA Times as the best running back he had been associated with. The following year, Willhite was the Broncos’ first round draft choice.

He had an aggressive style of play. “I was like a crash dummy with all that jumping and diving,” Willhite said.

“Our nickname for him was Steel Will,” his former Broncos teammate, linebacker Kenny Woodard, said over the phone. “It was a metaphor for how strong he was.”

But in hindsight, Willhite regrets putting his body on the line. “In the 80s, it was like: You don’t show your weakness,” he said. “We thought we were Superman.”

In a game against the Kansas City Chiefs in 1985, Willhite said he got knocked out and sustained a concussion. Willhite gained 55 yards on 13 carries before that concussion late in the second half.

“My head hit the turf and the lights went out. That’s all I remember,” Willhite said. But the next week he practiced for a game against San Diego even though his injury hadn’t healed. He sustained another concussion.

“I don’t remember all of 1985. It’s like I didn’t exist,” he said. “People show me photos from that season but I don’t remember it.”

Willhite was very close with his Broncos teammates, which included Roger Jackson, Sammy Winder, Woodard, and Darren Comeaux. “We were inseparable as teammates. I think we kind of brought that bonding together for the whole team,” Jackson, who played as a defensive back for the Broncos for five years, said from Macon, Georgia. “When it would snow, we would always ride together. When we were late we would be late together. Then we would all get fined together,” he said laughing.

“He was the best locker room entertainer. He could dance like Michael Jackson,” Jackson said of Willhite. “He weighed 200 pounds, but he could get off the ground anywhere and do a backflip. He could do it in dress shoes, tennis shoes, boots, blue jeans on, it didn’t matter. That’s the kind of athlete he was.”

But over the years, the toll of the running back position started to become evident. Willhite didn’t have a single pro season without a major injury. He had four operations on his right knee and in a game against Minnesota in 1987, his right leg snapped on the field. More concussions followed in games against the Cincinnati Bengals and Oakland Raiders.

“It never really scared me,” Willhite said, “because I didn’t remember anything.”

But his injuries later came back to scare his twin daughters. When Ryan and Randi were 10, Willhite was playing with them in their Sacramento home. “He was trying to show us a simple karate kick and his knee popped out,” Ryan recalled. “My sister let out a scream. We were really scared.”

Over the years, as their father’s memory loss became more apparent, they learned to help him with an electronic and paper trail. “He often doesn’t remember things verbally so I leave him texts and notes,” Randi said. Last March, Willhite needed some help calling people. “He gave us a list but Randi told me, ‘What do I do? It has the name of the same person over and over again,” Ryan said.

“He probably has more problems than any of us,” says Jackson. “Some of the things we talk about, we have to refresh his memory. We would say, remember. ‘This is what you did,’ and he would say, ‘Oh! Yeah Yeah, yeah!’ But when we get away we say, ‘You know he didn’t remember that right?’”

Long conversations about football frustrate Willhite now. He says that anything that makes him think about and evaluate his career messes with his head the whole day. Randi says people talk to him expecting he’d be up to date on football, but he doesn’t watch it anymore. “I think mentally he is trying to close that chapter of his life,” she said.

When Willhite slips into what seems like his second identity, the scene at home becomes a riff on the Snickers ad campaign that was introduced during the 2010 Super Bow that sees hungry people transform into strangers. “My daughter (Randi) told me she majored in psychology to figure me out. When she sees me like that, she says, ‘Dad, go eat your Snickers.’”

“I know I’m no longer the same person,” Willhite added. “It makes me wish I never played the game.”