Sports Illustrated, May 13, 2013, page 53.
Drinking and Driving and Dying.
Go and Find it and Read it.
I read it this morning while working my circulation clerk job at the library. If I had not been front and center in a public customer service location, I would have had tears streaming down my cheeks by the time I was finished reading the article. As it was, my eyes were overly watery, and I had to swallow multiple times before answering questions from patrons while I was reading.
Thomas Lake, the author of the SI piece, has created a work of written art. He takes the reader on a journey through time, beginning on the day a certain NFL player was born and concluding on the day that same player died a scant 25 years later. Almost like reading a dairy, each dated entry through the years of 1987 to 2012 provides a snapshot of events in the American cultural photo album entitled Drunk Driving. The first snapshot, on October 20, 1987, is not the first page of the album. No, this snapshot occurs well into the album, three quarters of the way through a year that will add 23,632 pictures tagged as “Died in Alcohol-Related Car Crashes”. It occurs seven years into the snapshots that are tagged “MADD”. It occurs in a city whose MLB team is playing Game 3 of the World Series in a home stadium name for beer.
Bit by bit, Thomas Lake pulls out selected pages of the album, selected pictures of the cultural landscape of DUI America: deaths and MADD efforts to curb them. This being Sports Illustrated, many of those selected images feature professional athletes, both as DUI victims and offenders. And the thread that connects them all together so cohesively is the evolving story of the baby growing into adulthood named Jerry Jerome Brown, Jr. and the choices he makes that find him a 25-yr-old Dallas Cowboys player, dead and drunk, in a vehicle driven by his legally intoxicated surviving teammate, crashed less than a mile from the headquarters of MADD, leaving his unborn daughter to make her own choices.
