Alan Gonzalez, 17, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Marquice Jackson, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Jazmine Van Buren, 16, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Advertisement:
Jacob Kundert, 17, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
The Eben G. Fine Park near the University of Colorado in Boulder, where the Heisman Trophy-winning running back Rashaan Salaam was found dead, Dec. 15, 2016. In the days since his apparent suicide at age 42, Salaam’s friends and family cannot help but wonder if the trophy and expectations of fame undercut his life, just as surely as injuries did his career. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Rashaan Salaam’s Heisman Trophy is displayed at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Dec. 15, 2016. In the days since his apparent suicide at age 42, Salaam’s friends and family cannot help but wonder if the trophy and expectations of fame undercut his life, just as surely as injuries did his career. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Rashaan Salaam’s jersey hangs in memory of his Heisman Trophy-winning season in a locker room at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Dec. 15, 2016. In the days since his apparent suicide at age 42, Salaam’s friends and family cannot help but wonder if the trophy and expectations of fame undercut his life, just as surely as injuries did his career. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Advertisement:
Oscar Lopez Aguirre, 17, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. “He talked about the mistakes he made and how he kept going,” Lopez recalled. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Nevaeh Padilla, 16, one of the high school students whom Rashaan Salaam once mentored, in Edgewater, Colo., Dec. 15, 2016. The Heisman Trophy-winning running back had become a valued mentor to students at Jefferson High School before his apparent suicide at age 42. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
Folsom Field at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Rashaan Salaam starred for the Buffaloes in his Heisman Trophy-winning 1994 season, Dec. 15, 2016. In the days since his apparent suicide at age 42, Salaam’s friends and family cannot help but wonder if the trophy and expectations of fame undercut his life, just as surely as injuries did his career. (Ryan David Brown/The New York Times)
(EDS: REPEATS for all needing. NOTE story originally moved in previous cycle.); (ART ADV: With photos XNYT42-51, sent Wednesday.); Susan Beachy contributed research.
BOULDER, Colo. — Through the darkness, Rashaan Salaam drove his run-down Suzuki sedan. He was, as usual, alone.
Advertisement:
For months, friends said, Salaam had been a recluse who left his rented condo in a Denver suburb only occasionally, to buy groceries and, even more rarely, for a solitary morning walk. Now and then he went to a bar for drinks and a steak, sitting by himself.
But on this Monday night, Dec. 5, Salaam, a former football standout, was headed for the site of his greatest triumph.
From his home, it was eight miles to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Salaam was a running back who won the Heisman Trophy in 1994. On the final dash of his last game at Folsom Field here that year, Salaam roared 67 yards for a touchdown, collapsing in the end zone and spurring his teammates to hoist him onto their shoulders as fans waved “2000” signs; he had become just the fourth college player to exceed 2,000 rushing yards in a season.
Now, on an unseasonably warm December night, he drove past the stadium and cut through the heart of the idyllic Colorado campus, where, he often said, he still felt most comfortable.
Less than two miles from where he had scored his career-defining touchdown, he pulled into the tiny parking area of Eben G. Fine Park, bordering the burbling Boulder Creek.
Around 8 p.m., a few hours after the voting closed for the 2016 Heisman and five days before the 22nd anniversary of Salaam’s trophy win, a young man walking in the park saw a body lying beside an idling sedan. Salaam. A revolver lay nearby.
Advertisement:
Salaam’s death at the age of 42 is being investigated as a likely suicide. Autopsy results are expected in about a month.
But in the days since the death, as friends, relatives and associates puzzle over the circumstances, they cannot help but wonder if the Heisman and its attendant expectations of fame had undercut his life instead of elevating it.
“Rashaan came back to Boulder a few years ago to revive himself,” said Francisco Lujan, one of Salaam’s close friends and a business associate. “He was trying to find a way to find himself. He returned to where the memories were good.”
T.J. Cunningham, a Colorado teammate who had stayed in touch with Salaam until a few months ago, said he believed Salaam’s football career, which sputtered after he left college largely because of injuries, always weighed on him.
“Rashaan was 20 years old when he won the Heisman Trophy,” Cunningham said. “To achieve the epitome of success at 20, but then you can’t get to that point again — what did that do to Rashaan?”
That may be an insoluble question. For people who knew him, the prospect that he took his own life is hard to reconcile with someone best known for an infectious smile that brightened a room when he entered it.
As Cunningham said: “He was a happy guy. I can still see him at Christmas last year, at my house teaching my 2-year-old how to hit a baseball. But, you know, Rashaan struggled with some things.”
Advertisement:
Many of his friends believed he suffered from depression and mood swings — typical signs of the brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that has afflicted scores of players.
The disease is linked to repeated hits to the head and diagnosed posthumously, but it is unclear if Salaam’s family members have donated his brain to be tested. The Salaam family declined to be interviewed for this article, and multiple phone messages and email messages left for relatives drew no response.
Salaam’s brother, Jabali Alaji, told USA Today shortly after Rashaan’s funeral on Dec. 9 that if Salaam’s brain were examined, “I would guarantee they’d find it. I would guarantee it.”
But several of Salaam’s friends who spoke with family members said they were told Salaam’s brain would not be tested.
Though injured often, Salaam had no known history of repeated concussions or head trauma. But as Cunningham said: “Rashaan had a lot of collisions. He wasn’t a fake and juke guy; he ran right through you.
“CTE? He showed all the symptoms,” Cunningham said, “and CTE probably added to that.”
Whatever the cause, it was obvious to people around him that Salaam was dealing with mental health problems.
He routinely retreated to his condo and stayed there. Phone calls and texts from friends went unreturned for days or weeks, especially since October.
Salaam spent Thanksgiving by himself, a next-door neighbor said, in his small, plain one-bedroom condo next to a playground and a municipal wastewater plant in Superior, Colo.
Advertisement:
“He was always in his condo,” said the neighbor, Deanna Ardrey. “He would sit there by himself every day. You knew there was something off.”
Riley Robert Hawkins, a school social worker and behavioral therapist who had been a partner with Salaam in a charitable foundation since 2011, talked to him about whether he should seek treatment for depression.
“You could tell he was fighting some things,” Hawkins said. “Anxiety and depression, that’s bipolar. It was always there to some degree.
“Like many of us,” he said, “I think he thought he had a handle on things.”
Maurice Henriques, another Colorado teammate who had remained close with Salaam, said it was impossible to pinpoint what ailed him.
“For the family’s sake, you’d love for there to be an explanation,” he said. “But it’s probably a cocktail of things — depression, some CTE, and Rashaan still trying to deal with the transition from football.
“How,” he added, “do you re-identify yourself?”
(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.) Prize or Millstone?
When he was first handed the Heisman in 1994, Salaam had no idea how much the 25-pound trophy would complicate the rest of his life. Going forward, it distorted the perception of his career.
Salaam had a spectacular NFL rookie season with the Chicago Bears but faded markedly thereafter, lasting for only four seasons.
After that, he more and more kept his distance from the trophy, whose renowned pose is a stiff arm.
“He felt people viewed him as a failure,” David Plati, an associate athletic director at Colorado and a friend of Salaam’s for nearly a quarter-century. “He was frustrated with his NFL career. That’s the burden the Heisman carries. He felt pressure that he had to go do something in the pros as good or greater than what he did in college.
Advertisement:
“He felt that people were looking at him, thinking that he let them down.”
Still, the Heisman loomed large. Everybody wanted to see it and touch it. Salaam wanted to stand apart from it.
“He wasn’t a huge fan of the trophy itself,” Lujan said. “When he was making an appearance, people would always ask if he could bring the Heisman Trophy to the engagement. He’d turn them down. He didn’t like carrying the trophy around. It made him feel like the only reason anyone wanted to see him was because he had a Heisman Trophy.”
Once, visiting Salaam at his home, a friend saw the trophy being used as a doorstop. For the majority of the last 22 years, Salaam’s mother kept the trophy at the family home in San Diego.
Salaam was conflicted about the trophy from the start; he declined to do several major interviews the year he won it.
“That’s the thing. Deep down Rashaan didn’t care about the trophy and never did because he didn’t like being singled out,” Plati said.
“Rashaan wanted to be just one of the guys,” Plati said. “But he knew his offensive linemen wanted him to win the Heisman. He understood it was important for the university and the football program.”
Salaam is Colorado’s only Heisman winner and eventually got into the experience of winning it, even enjoying the week in New York for the ceremony. At the time, it seemed like a one-week, one-time thing — not a lifetime designation permanently attached to his name.
Advertisement:
He had won the trophy in his junior year and entered the 1995 NFL draft. Yet he was perturbed, even insulted, when he was the fifth running back taken in the first round.
But Salaam had proved others wrong in his career before.
With his mother urging him on, he had left his hometown, San Diego, and traveled by bus two hours daily to attend La Jolla Country Day, a private school where he excelled academically and on the football team. But La Jolla played eight-man football, and Salaam was barely noticed by college recruiters. His La Jolla coach mounted a campaign to promote him, and soon Colorado took him on.
He was, however, on the third string as a college freshman. Though he was a sturdy 6-foot-1 and weighed in at 220 pounds, there were doubts about whether he had the speed to compete at the highest level of college ball. He made progress as a sophomore, and by his spectacular junior season at Colorado had more than vanquished his critics. And yet, NFL evaluators still had reservations, which is how Salaam fell to the draft’s 21st pick.
As a rookie, Salaam rushed for 1,074 yards and 10 touchdowns, becoming the youngest NFL player to rush for more than 1,000 yards. But a series of leg injuries limited his playing time and effectiveness in the next two seasons, his last with the Bears.
In 1999, he carried the football once for 2 yards for the hapless 2-14 Cleveland Browns. He was also briefly with two other NFL teams but never got on the field. In 2001, Salaam played for the Memphis Maniax of the ill-fated XFL.
Advertisement:
At 28, he regrouped and spent nearly a year getting in top shape because the San Francisco 49ers had invited him to training camp. Around that time in 2003, in an interview with ESPN, Salaam decided to open up about his marijuana use while with the Bears.
He said he was too young to handle the money and success of his early NFL career and blamed an undisciplined lifestyle for hampering his development as a professional. Salaam later said he had hoped the interview would show a newfound maturity, since he was admitting to a mistake and describing a new, robust work ethic.
But the reaction to the interview, and to Salaam, was decidedly negative. He was cut by the 49ers toward the end of training camp. After a short-lived flirtation with the Canadian Football League, his football career was over.
Quiet Aftermath
Salaam said in interviews years ago that he had invested much of his nearly $4 million NFL payday with a San Diego brokerage firm. Shortly after retiring from football, Salaam began spending months in China where he started a mixed martial arts business. None of his friends were sure how or why he made a connection with China, but there he promoted championship events and shuttled between his native California and Beijing.
By the beginning of this decade, he sold the China-based venture and returned to San Diego. There, Salaam lived quietly, and mostly, anonymously. A self-described “bachelor for life,” Salaam never married although his friends said they had met his various girlfriends over the years.
Advertisement:
About five years ago, Salaam decided to return to the Boulder area in what was viewed as an attempt to regain his footing in a familiar place.
He began working with Lujan, a coach at a local high school, who had a startup company that did testing for NFL and CFL scouting combines.
Salaam was paid $2,500 or more for public appearances and helped with the testing. He appeared financially secure. While he did not live extravagantly — rent at his condo this year was about $1,500 a month — he never seemed in need of funds. A 2011 newspaper account reported that Salaam sold ornate rings he had received for winning the Heisman Trophy for roughly $9,000. Salaam said that the rings were sold, without his knowledge, by a family member.
“Rashaan’s primary goal when he came here was to start a foundation to help at-risk youth,” said Lujan, who eventually put Salaam in touch with Hawkins, the school social worker, who years earlier had founded the SPIN Foundation — Supporting People in Need.
Together, Hawkins and Salaam planned events, camps, clinics and appearances, and they devised programs to benefit underprivileged children. Salaam became a fixture at Jefferson High School in Edgewater, Colorado, where Hawkins has worked for 15 years. Salaam regularly spoke with classes and worked with students individually and in groups.
For four days in April 2015, for example, the foundation brought about 30 Jefferson students and staff members to the ski slopes of Aspen for a trip that was called a “Ski for the Heisman” program.
Advertisement:
“Rashaan was like a family member to Jefferson students,” said Oscar Lopez, a senior at the high school who participated in the trip. “He was like a big brother and he was always encouraging us to better ourselves. He talked about the mistakes he made and how he kept going. His big message was to stay positive.”
Lopez, who is a wrestler and football player, said Salaam once cautioned him about taking care of his body in athletics.
“He told me if I was hurt, to protect myself and stay off the field,” Lopez said. “He had injuries and went back out there. He said, ‘Don’t do that, let it heal.’”
Lujan said the cost of the Aspen trip was $25,000.
At Jefferson High, students who had laughed on the Aspen slopes with Salaam and been buoyed by his enthusiasm for their future prospects were thunderstruck by his death.
“I broke down because he was always here for us,” said Janessa Kiome, a senior at Jefferson. “And that night, no one was there for him.”
Hawkins and others have been counseling the Jefferson students. Seated in his school office last week, Hawkins sighed and said: “Rashaan was trying to save lives, but he had trouble saving his own life. There are things we can explain and things that we can’t explain.”
It had been hard to get to know Salaam well, as he was introverted by nature and something of a loner, especially in the last few months.
Advertisement:
He was a semiregular at C.B. & Potts, a bar and restaurant about a mile from his condo in Superior. He usually came in around 10 on Sunday nights, well past the dinner rush. He was always alone, and he would sit in a section of the bar unoccupied by other patrons, ordering a steak and two or three vodka drinks known as Moscow Mules.
“He was always nice to everyone,” said Chris Rosa, a bartender there who works Sunday nights. “But more than a few times, we’d be talking and he’d say he was mad that injuries and bad luck messed up his NFL career. He said things spiraled out of control and he wished things had been different.”
Rosa said he had not seen him in the last couple of months.
Neither had his friends or the people he worked with, like Lujan and Hawkins.
“Everyone has the same story,” Lujan said. “We’ve asked each other, ‘When did you last hear from him?’ And everyone answers, ‘About a month or six weeks ago.’”
Salaam’s neighbor, Deanna Ardrey, was among the few who saw him regularly during this period.
She had met Salaam a few months earlier when she moved in with her boyfriend. She learned only by accident that Salaam had played football, then Googled him and was dumbfounded to discover his celebrity.
“We talked about football, but he was more likely to talk about other things, like astronomy,” Ardrey said. “He was always pointing out planets to us in the sky.”
Advertisement:
On sunny days, Salaam kept his front door open and Ardrey would hear music playing. In the fall and winter, Salaam’s television would be tuned to football games.
“We would hear him watching games all night and yelling at the TV,” Ardrey said. “But I mean, he was always there by himself. Every day, every night. His car was always in the driveway.”
In the days before his death, Ardrey noticed something unusual: His car was frequently gone at night.
“In the last few days, I’ve been thinking: How many times did he go to that park thinking he might — and then changed his mind?” Ardrey wondered last week.
On the morning of Dec. 5, Ardrey saw her neighbor as she got in her car and waved at him. He waved back and smiled. Much later, he drove away from the condo, leaving a light on in the living room.
