Hicks being remembered as inspirational player
Motive remains unclear in shooting outside popular Calgary night spot
CALGARY It is a turnaround at its most jarring.
A more wrenching scenario, from riding high to beaten low, is hard to imagine.
2:08 p.m. Saturday — Calgary Stampeders put their nine-game winning spree on the line against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
5:11 p.m. — Stamps, in typically dramatic fashion, boost their CFL record to 11-1-1.
2:30 a.m. Sunday — Police rush to the Marquee Beer Market, a Macleod Trail nightclub, to investigate a shooting.
11:57 a.m. — Stamps boss John Hufnagel is telling reporters what he can about the sudden-death of Mylan Hicks.
“Obviously, this isn’t going to be very easy,” is how Hufnagel, visibly shaken, prefaced his remarks at McMahon Stadium. “Everyone in the organization is grief-stricken.”
Powerfully and eloquently, Bo Levi Mitchell and Josh Bell spoke about Hicks, a 23-year-old defensive back on the club’s practice roster.
“Everyone’s talking about when is the next time we’re going to lose. It was last night,” Mitchell said. “We had the most devastating loss we could. Football doesn’t seem important right now, to even talk about it. Whatever happens from here on out in the season is whatever.”
Added Bell: “We’re hurting. You lose family, but you have family. So we’ll hold together. We’re lifting each other. We’re talking. We’re leaning on each other right now.”
Celebrating the latest victory, several players had headed to the Marquee. An altercation inside the bar shifted outside, and Hicks was shot. He was taken in an ambulance to Foothills Hospital where he died.
Three men, one of whom was known to local police, were taken into custody. Motive remains unclear. “In reality, you have to take into account that we are in an elevated status,” said Bell. “It’s tough to embrace that level of celebrity — and the danger that comes with it — in some situations. You can be a regular person and it can happen. But, especially being a professional athlete, you have a little more opportunity to be a target.”
The Stamps, who cancelled Sunday’s light practice, held a meeting to discuss the tragedy. Present were Rodd Sawatzky, team chaplain, and members of the Calgary Police Service’s victim-support unit.
Hicks’ locker, for the rest of the season, will remain untouched.
“Grown men or not, everybody cried,” said Mitchell. “A lot of guys outside of this locker-room didn’t know a lot about Mylan. That’s the one thing I ask and I beg of you guys ... please make this story about Mylan. Pick him up, his family. Don’t make this about us and the rest of the season and how we deal with, we don’t care.
“It’s truly about him. Please lift him up. Do your research, find out who the guy was.”
Hicks, a Detroit native signed in May, earned a psychology degree from Michigan State.
After returning from a broken arm in his senior year, he had been the Spartans’ defensive-team recipient Mylan Hicks of the Biggie Munn Award as the most inspirational player.
“It didn’t surprise me that he won that award,” said Hufnagel. “He was a player that had an opportunity to have a future.”
Mitchell himself helped to flush out the picture of Hicks, noting that he was often “pissed off ” because of the kid’s gung-ho approach to fulfilling his scout-team duties.
“Because he literally made plays,” said Mitchell. “He truly just cared about making the team better. I’m not just saying that. I really do mean that.”
Mitchell also poked fun at Hicks’s card-playing ability.
“The smile on his face when he thought he’d won and had the rules a little messed up in his head,” he said. “Now you think back to seeing the guy smile.”
On the field, Bell said the youngster was a “dog” — in a relentless way. Off the field, too, he knew him well.
“Once a week … we go to the movies or we go out to eat,” said Bell, 31. “My little practice-roster brothers, I make sure I take care of them. I feel like, to a degree, I’m a father figure because I’m an old man on the team. So I lost a son. I have a son at home and, just in reflection, it hits you. That could’ve been me, and I have a wife and a son and a little one on the way.”