The end of a dream
Robert Sowell lived to play football. It killed him.
This is the story of a man who followed his fantastic dream to the Dolphins. It ends in death. And not just death at age 53, but memory loss, anger, questions for science, a continued lawsuit and his widow saying, “I’m proud he achieved his dream, but if he hadn’t achieved it, he’d still be with me.”
You probably don’t know Robert Sowell. Neither did the Dolphins when they received a letter from him in 1983 saying, “Pro football is something I’ve been wanting to do since I’ve been living and it’s something I’m going to do before I leave this world.”
Every NFL team received that letter. Four wrote back. The Colts wrote, “We get 2,000 people each year who tell us they can play football.” The Dolphins sent a scout, Elbert Dubenion, who lived near Sowell in Columbus, Ohio. Dubenion was impressed enough
to send Sowell to Miami to work out for Don Shula.
That’s the short version of how Sowell, at 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds, led the Dolphins in special-teams tackles and became a fan favorite for four seasons and a Super Bowl.
The longer version is even more remarkable. It involves one year at Howard University before returning home to help ends meet after his father suffered a stroke. It involves jobs unloading 300-pound bales of hay all day or rustproofing the bellies of trucks.
Sowell kept his dream. He carried a football everywhere, every day, for a year. He worked out religiously. On off-days from work, he’d go to a park where, “even the alcoholics and the reefer heads sleeping there said I was crazy,’’ he once said.
“I’d be out there at 7 a.m. in the winter with six inches of snow on the ground, and I’d play football by myself eight hours a day.” Alone? “Yeah, alone.” He was cut by the Toronto Argonauts in Canada and played semi-pro ball in Sacramento for $50 a week, an apartment and food stamps. He quit a job to try out with the Chicago Blitz of the USFL. They didn’t sign him.
No wonder he became a favorite inside the Dolphins even before he became a known commodity. “Kroeter,” veterans called him that first camp, after a scruffy no-name rookie in a beer commercial at the time.
In 1983, Sowell was Miami’s special teams player of the year with 20 tackles and three punts downed inside the 5-yard line. He fought double teams, even triple teams one game in 1984, when as the newspaper stories tell it, St. Louis put two linebackers and a tackle on him and he still made the tackle.
The story that resonates all these years came on a play against Philadelphia. Sowell knocked himself unconscious making a tackle.
“It’s a moment I cherish,’’ he told reporters at the 1985 Super Bowl.
Why? Because as the Dolphins watched the film the next week, Shula told players, “That’s the way you hit.”
Shula didn’t know the price of such hits then. Nor did Sowell, whose career ended in his fourth year after an injury. But somewhere around 2010, he felt wrong enough for him to see a doctor. Tests were taken. He sat down his wife, Gail.
“He told me about what was going to happen,’’ she said. “The memory loss and angry outbursts. Everything. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to accept what was going to happen in the future.”
Slowly, she started to see it. He’d repeat things he just said a few minutes earlier. He’d start to work and forget where he was going. Over the next few years, she says, “Now that I was aware of it, I could put together what was happening.”
He died in 2015 of a heart attack. Was it the just the heart? Was it more? How did it relate football? This is something for science to decide. Sowell’s brain cells were among the 111 from late NFL players examined by Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and expert in neurodegenerative disease.
Last summer, she wrote 110 of the players, including Sowell, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head.
“It was very painful for him,’’ Gail Sowell said of his final year. “There was pain. There was some depression. I could see the change in his personality. He was always a happy person, always positive, and I could see that diminish as this went on.”
They were together 20 years, but met after his football days, so she only saw his love of the game as a fan. And he did still love it. They’d see an occasional Dolphins game (though Sowell was a 49ers fan). He also attended high school games near their home in Wesley Chapel and counseled friends’ sons who played football.
“He was happy to achieve his goal, but if he’d have known this was the outcome — he had second thoughts,’’ Gail Sowell said.
So this is a football story, a modern football story, of a kid who beat the longest of odds and lived to consider what that meant. He joined the lawsuit against the NFL before he died. It’s still grinding through the legal system.
“They can’t take a ring away from you,’’ he said at that 1985 Super Bowl.
No, but they can take your health, your mind, your very life long after the dream is gone.