When Jeff Alm was about 6, his family moved from Rye, N.Y., to a new home in Marlboro, N.J. The furniture hadn’t been delivered, the cartons were still unpacked, when Jeff’s father Larry noticed that one of his three children had scribbled an obscenity on a freshly painted wall.
Debbie, four years older than Jeff, certainly hadn’t done it. It had to be Jeff or Lance, who was two years older than Jeff, and Jeff’s idol. Larry and his wife Betty decided to let the police teach their mischievous boys a lesson. Due to the gravity of the offense, they said, the cops had no choice but to haul the two imps down to the station. At the interrogation, Jeff submitted his alibi.
“It wasn’t me,” he pleaded. “I can’t even spell.”
Lance was fingered. He admitted his crime. And at a stern and somber family meeting, mom and dad offered amnesty. “I still remember my speech,” Lance Alm recalled. “I said, `Everybody gets a chance to make one mistake.’ “
Jeff Alm’s last mistake was fatal. Driving on an elevated Houston highway with his best friend, Sean Lynch, at 2:30 a.m. Dec. 14, the Houston Oilers defensive lineman lost control of his black Cadillac and struck a guard rail. Lynch was thrown from the car to his death. Alm, who was uninjured, dialed 911 on his cellular phone, called out to his friend, then used the shotgun he kept in his car to commit suicide while a dispatcher was still on the line.
Both men were 25.
Six days later, Alm’s grief-stricken family gathered in Houston to begin settling his estate. Jeff’s mother, Betty Robson, who divorced Larry Alm in 1977, was joined by her second husband, Bill Robson, who knew Jeff for 14 years. Larry Alm, a marketing consultant in Burnsville, Minn., was there. So was sister Debbie O’Connor, 29, a 4th-grade teacher. Her husband Mike remained in Orland Park, where the family has lived since the mid-1970s, where Jeff starred at Sandburg High. Lance, 27, a Chicago commodities broker, couldn’t bring his wife, who is having a difficult pregnancy with their first child.
For two hours Monday night, the Alm family grieved openly in a hotel suite minutes from the southwest Houston townhouse in which Jeff lived. They laughed and cried and told stories and tried to explain how they plan to struggle through this unimaginable tragedy.
“It’s beyond comprehension,” Debbie said softly. “I don’t think in our wildest dreams we’d ever think we’d be sitting here tonight. It’s beyond . . .”
“Reality,” her father interjected.
“It’s the worst possible nightmare,” Bill Robson said.
“I think we’re still all in shock,” Lance said.
“A mother’s worst nightmare is the loss of a child,” said Betty, dignified and controlled.
They wanted everybody to know that two cherished people died, not just a pro football player. David Lynch, Sean’s brother, said last week that his family wanted to let it be known that they lost two people, too. “My parents aren’t handling this very well,” David said over the phone at his parents’ Orland Park home.
The Alms agreed it would be cathartic to talk openly in front of one another. They didn’t balk at sharing their feelings even when asked if they were angry at Jeff for making such a disastrous decision, for being so careless, for changing their lives forever.
More Top Picks How To Prepare An Autistic Child For Change In Routine
“I think I’m over being mad at him,” Lance said. “I went through a mad stage in the beginning, and now I’ve learned to say Jeff couldn’t live with this. He didn’t do this to me or to my family. He did this because he thought that’s what he needed to do at the time. Unfortunately, that was a mistake we can’t take back.”
“I’m angry,” Debbie admitted. “For purely selfish reasons. Because of what he did to us. I’m on a roller coaster of emotions. I’m sad all the time, and I hurt most of the time. When I see what it’s done to our family, I get angry.
“My husband and I decided the next time we see Jeff we’re going to have to slap him around a little bit. This is a grisly thing to say, but before we left the wake, Mike and I both gave the coffin a little whack on the side. We decided he needed a slap.”
“I think I’ve gotten beyond being mad,” Betty said. “I feel devastated. Life will never be the same. I feel like a piece of my heart was torn out.”
“I don’t think I’ve been angry yet,” Larry said. “I was looking forward to Jeff finishing playing football. Football is this terrible two-edged sword. It’s given us so much pleasure and gratification. On the other hand, it’s taken Jeff away from us for every holiday for the last seven or eight years.
“I was really looking forward to his finishing playing ball so we could get on with the rest of our lives and maybe we could all have a normal life together and he could be like everybody else. Football took all that, and football gave nothing back.”
Lance has handled most of the arrangements since the tragedy. He has been the family’s liaison to the Houston police investigative team, led by Sgt. Johnny Moore.
“I know everything about the accident you could know,” Lance said. “Sgt. Moore has given me a few more facts that the papers don’t know. I’m not going to discuss those. I know the whole story, and when my family wants to know, they can ask me.”
“I don’t want to know,” his father interjected before Debbie and Betty said the same thing. “It doesn’t matter.”
The Alm family all agreed on one thing: Jeff was a mama’s boy. He called his mother from Houston three or four times a week, often to ask something as simple as how to cook a roast. Lance was his confidant, his sidekick in athletics and good times. Debbie and their father saw Jeff’s more serious side.
“Jeff was really a very private person,” his father said. “I don’t think anybody ever thought they completely knew Jeff. He was the type of kid who kept a lot of things to himself.”
Jeff was also a prankster. Whenever he would go to a new movie, he would call Sean or his siblings and spoil the ending. It was a bizarre competition to see who could ruin it for the other first.
Jeff was 19 and between semesters at Notre Dame when Robson, a roofer, learned his wife’s youngest son was afraid of heights. Bill had offered Jeff a chance to join him on a job. Jeff grabbed an 80-pound bundle of shingles and climbed a ladder. When he got to the top, he froze. He wouldn’t step onto the roof. He couldn’t walk back down the ladder. He didn’t let go of the bundle.
“My youngest son, Charles, started yelling, `You big sissy, come on. Get off,’ ” Bill recalled. “Charlie had to take the bundle.”
It was Alm’s last roofing job. He never truly had a job other than football, and that worried him. He had earned about $1.04 million in his first three NFL seasons. This year, he rejected a three-year, $2.3 million offer from the Oilers that seemed fair, considering he had started only seven games in 1992 and eight over his first three seasons.
When he asked for $3 million for three years, management withdrew its offer and retained its rights by offering the least it could, $319,000 for one year. Alm sat out five games, grudgingly recapitulated, and fractured his right leg two games after his return. He was ready to return to the Oilers’ lineup when he died.
A month ago, he applied to the NFL’s internship program, a chance for players to begin post-career plans while still in the league.
“He was thinking about what was going to happen if he really had to work for a living,” said his father.
Sean Lynch was an unofficial member of the Alm family, just as Jeff was a Lynch. Sean managed his father’s restaurant, Jack Gibbons’ Garden, a popular steakhouse in Orland Park, where the boys met as high school teammates in 1985.
“Mom and Bill have a satellite dish, so Sean and his girlfriend Beth were always over watching the Oiler games,” Lance said. “We would always go to the restaurant. Somebody from the family ate there once a week.”
A few winters ago, the family’s white highland terrier, Alex, was killed when hit by a car. The ground behind their home was too frozen to dig a grave, so Betty and Sean put the dog in a box, put the box in the garage and waited for the weather to thaw. Eventually, Alex was frozen, too.
“I would go into the garage, open the box and pet the dog,” Betty said. “I think one of the most sensitive things Jeff and I ever did together was bury our dog. We kept looking at each other while we buried our dog. We both had tears in our eyes.”