Early Monday morning, with the sun valiantly fighting through the overcast, Brad Gaines sat on a hillside, in front of the brown marble tombstone as he has every May 6 for the last 11 years.
He talked to his late friend Chucky Mullins. He reflected on the terrible events that brought them together. He prayed for Chucky and for himself. He prayed, too, for Washington’s Curtis Williams, whom Gaines followed closely because his story practically mirrored Mullins’. The similarities are eerie.
Both Williams and Mullins were defensive backs. Both suffered paralyzing injuries on Oct. 28 in college football games. Both died 18 months later on May 6.
Eleven years apart.
“The ironies are pretty unbelievable,” Gaines said Tuesday from the office of his wellness center in Hermitage, Tenn. “On Monday, hearing about Curtis Williams dying, I felt the same way I felt when Chucky died. It brought back a lot of the same feelings.”
Three times a year, Brad Gaines makes the 175-mile drive from Nashville to Russellville, Ala., to visit Mullins’ grave. Every Christmas, Oct. 28 and May 6, Gaines drives past the cotton fields and through the backwater northern Alabama towns to Russellville, population 8,195.
He sits in front of the grave for maybe 15 minutes. He polishes the marble with spray cleaner, digs the grime out of each letter in Chucky Mullins’ name. He leaves the tombstone as shiny as a football helmet.
“I never miss a visit,” Gaines said. “It just gives me time to reflect on different things. It gives me time with Chucky. It makes me feel better. It’s my therapy.”
On Oct. 28, 1989, Chucky Mullins, playing defensive back for Mississippi, stuck his helmet into Vanderbilt junior tailback Brad Gaines. The collision shattered Mullins’ spinal cord and scrambled Gaines’ life.
“It’s still the first thing I think about every morning when I wake up and the last thing I think about every night when I go to bed,” Gaines said. “I can remember everything about that day.”
When men as young and vital as Chucky Mullins and Curtis Williams suffer tragic injuries while playing a game, everyone searches for answers to why they happen.
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“I always tell people, don’t blame the game,” Gaines said, “but unfortunately, on this level guys are bigger, faster and stronger. You’re going to have accidents. I only have daughters. I don’t have sons.
“I think football’s great, but the guilt I’ve felt over this, certainly I wouldn’t want to subject a son to.
“But if he wanted to play, what could I tell him? You have to let him, but just tell him there’s a chance of injury, and how do you know if you’re the one?”
Gaines came from a football family. Brother Greg played linebacker for seven seasons with the Seahawks, and brother Chris played with the Cardinals, Miami and Tampa Bay.
“It was my whole life,” said Gaines, who used to sneak into the Vanderbilt weight room to work out on holidays.
He had been the leading receiver in the Southeastern Conference, but after the collision the game never felt the same. He lost his passion. He started dropping passes. Vanderbilt coaches begged him to get over it, but he never could.
He played out the rest of the 1989 season, then quit a week into spring practice before his senior season. The next February Gaines went to the NFL combine, but he wasn’t drafted. He played one season for Shreveport in the Canadian Football League, then left the game with a heart too heavily burdened to put into sports.
“I was a party to an accident, and it made me realize how fragile life can be and how you always have to be aware of that,” Gaines said. “The experiences made me look at life a whole lot differently. It’s made me look at relationships differently. I’ve learned to appreciate life and relationships a lot more.
“I’ve always been a private person. I’ve always hid my pain. I still do. Before this happened, I’d never had any tragedy in my life. I’d never been responsible for anything.”
Kerry Carter, the Stanford running back who collided with Williams, still hasn’t talked publicly about the hurt he has felt since the Washington safety was injured. We can only imagine he feels the same things Gaines feels.
The evolution of Gaines’ pain has been slow. At first it devoured him, filled him with morbid regret. A stiff breeze could have scattered his resolve. He was shattered. But over the years he used the pain as motivation.
“The memory is there every day,” Gaines said. “Playing football, standing on the field with 90,000 people screaming, I mean, the adrenaline is unbelievable. I don’t think you can duplicate that feeling in anything else you do in your life. And that feeling was taken away from me.
“I became disenchanted with football after that and I didn’t want to play. I didn’t care anymore and, believe me, that’s not me. It takes a long time to get over it, and really you never get over it. The key is how do you let it affect the rest of your life. I’ve chosen to let it affect me in a positive, rather than a negative, way.
“I struggled with it for so long. I still struggle with it. But the thing you have to do, you have to turn it around so you can help other people.”
Gaines speaks to church and civic groups about accepting life’s most difficult challenges. He speaks about finding the moral courage to continue.
His tells people his friendship with Mullins was one of the blessings from the accident. Gaines was a white kid from a middle-class family. Mullins was black, poor and an orphan. Gaines was the kid who had everything. Mullins lost his mother to pneumonia when he was 12, and he never knew his father.
Gaines and Mullins were opposites drawn together by the terrible events of one Saturday afternoon.
“The first time I went to visit him, I didn’t know how he was going to feel about me personally,” Gaines said. “I didn’t know if he was going to think it was my fault. That feeling of guilt worked on me pretty good, but he always assured me it wasn’t my fault. That was the first thing he said to me the first time I saw him. The way he treated me, no question it helped me deal with it.”
Gaines said he visited Mullins, hoping to make Mullins feel better. But by the end of his visits, it was always Mullins making Gaines feel better.
Eleven years ago, when he learned Mullins had fallen into a coma, Gaines drove to the hospital. He spent the last three days of Mullins’ life in the hospital room, talking to Mullins, reading to him, trying to will him back to life.
“He was a guy from rural America, a good old Southern kid,” Gaines said. “He was light-hearted. He was always a very positive person. He knew when people came to visit him that they would feel uncomfortable. But he made you feel comfortable right away. He just had a way of doing that.”
On Monday at the Russellville gravesite, Gaines bent his knees in front of a brown marble headstone once again, working through the pain of that horrible afternoon.
And when he drove back down the one-lane road, out of the cemetery and back toward Nashville, he felt hopeful again.
After all these years, Chucky Mullins still has a magical way of making Brad Gaines feel better about life.
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