San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FIU MOURNS KNOX ON, OFF THE FIELD
Practice ended at Florida International on a steamy Friday morning, and coach Mike Macintyre gathered the team to go over the plan for the rest of the day.
When he was finished, there was one last order of business.
“Let’s have a prayer,” Macintyre said. “A prayer for Luke’s family.”
Football resumed at FIU two days after 22-year-old linebacker Luke Knox — the brother of Buffalo Bills tight end Dawson Knox — died in a Miami hospital. The cause of death still has not been announced, though police have said foul play is not believed to have been involved.
Macintyre has been close with Knox’s family for decades. He’s known David Knox, Luke Knox’s father, for more than 40 years. Macintyre went to Brentwood Academy in Tennessee, the same prep school that many in the Knox family attended.
He coached Luke Knox at Mississippi, and Macintyre taking over at FIU after last season is part of the reason why Knox transferred there.
Macintyre and his team spent Thursday off the field grieving, snacking on pizza and chicken sandwiches, trying to watch a movie, telling stories about Knox, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, often hugging. On Friday, they got back to football.
“There’s no perfect formula, but you love the kids, you’re with them, you’re listening to what they say,” Macintyre said. “And like I told every one of them, and our coaches reiterated it multiple times, everybody grieves differently. You don’t know when it’s going to hit you. So, we allowed our kids to say, ‘I want to practice, I don’t want to practice,’ and I think that they’ve you handled it the best they can.”
Most players chose to practice Friday. Some asked to be excused, instead spending time with counselors and psychologists.
Luke Knox was unresponsive Wednesday night when found in his dorm room there by a teammate, police said. Police officers administered CPR upon arrival, and county rescue personnel took over when they came to transport Knox to a nearby hospital.
Macintyre spent hours there, hoping for a miracle. He went to the airport to pick up Knox’s parents in the wee hours Thursday.
“We’re in the process of working through this,” Macintyre said.
He has had to deal with something similar before, at Georgia Tech in the late 1980s, when one of his teammates, tight end Chris Caudle, drowned in a boating mishap. Macintyre said he also had been getting calls from other coaches who have lost a player.
Dawson Knox has helped raise funds for the P.U.N.T. Pediatric Cancer Collaborative in the Buffalo area during his time with the Bills. In a span of about 24 hours following the announcement of Luke Knox’s death, the organization received more than $100,000 in donations.
Most of those donations were for exactly $16.88. The 16 for Luke Knox’s number at FIU, 88 for Dawson Knox’s number with the Bills.
Dawson Knox announced that services for his brother were to take place Saturday in Tennessee.
The first of many tributes came Friday, after the postpractice prayer. Their final chant as they broke the huddle was “1, 2, 3, Luke.”
“I thought that was very fitting,” Macintyre said.
And when he said that, he was no longer able to hold back his tears.