Fairy tales go like this: Sam Fraley not only recovers from a terrifying, debilitating disorder, he comes back as a Division I football player in time for his dying father to see him play.
Only Gerry Fraley died before his son walked on as a deep snapper at Temple, and it looks as if Sam won’t play Saturday against SMU.
If it’s not the ending a screenwriter would have dreamed up, it’s a fact, and Gerry Fraley forged a national reputation at newspapers, including this one, as a gruff, irascible ballwriter’s ballwriter, building compelling stories from the bottom up on fact after fact after fact.
Gerry was the best sportswriter I’ve ever known, and though baseball was his best sport, he could cover anything. But this is a story he’d have never written. And not because it isn’t remarkable. It’s an inspiring account of how Guillain-Barre syndrome temporarily paralyzes a young man yet motivates him to play college football, and in the process giving him something meaningful to share with his father in the little time they had left together.
As good a tale as it is, Gerry wouldn’t have written it. Too personal. Would have violated his impregnable code of honor.
But if you think Sam’s story wouldn’t have moved his old man, you didn’t know him like I did.
As Sam’s mother, Pam Maples, said, “He would be so thrilled, so proud, so excited. He would have been over the moon.”
Football as therapy
On a Friday, just six days before his high school graduation in Redwood City, Calif., in 2017, Sam woke up with a headache. He figured maybe it was the after-effect of a concussion. Maybe it was stress. He had a lot on his mind. Six weeks earlier, his father had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Sam hadn’t heard from him in weeks, which was unusual, when, all of a sudden, he called with the news. He tried to tell his son everything would be all right, but Sam knew he was lying.
On Monday, three days after that throbbing pain above his eyes, Sam awakened to find the headache gone. In its place was a numbness in his legs that left him barely able to claw his way out of bed. His mother heard a thud and yelp and found him lying on the floor of his bedroom. From there she wrestled her 6-2, 210-pound son into the car for his third emergency room visit in four days.
This time a neurologist looked him over. Told him to raise his eyebrows and puff his cheeks. He couldn’t do either.
“Have you ever heard of Guillain-Barre syndrome?”
According to the National Institute of Health, GBS is a rare neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system. Cases range from relatively mild with few side effects to patients on ventilators. Less than 10% of the time, it’s fatal. There’s no cure and no way to predict how bad it will get. GBS runs its own course at its own pace. The Cowboys' Travis Frederick missed an entire season after he was diagnosed in December 2017, and he’d never lost the ability to walk.
The numbness started in Sam’s feet and worked its way up like floodwater. One day it was his knees; the next, his waist. By Tuesday, he lost the use of his left hand. Wednesday, he was so weak, he couldn’t so much as scratch his head.
Thursday, what should have been graduation day, he hit rock bottom. Any worse, doctors said, and he’d need a ventilator.
Sam immediately started on a course of rehabilitation and slowly, painfully, made his way back. He’d planned to go to the University of Texas to be closer to his father but didn’t enroll until the next spring. He stayed a month. “Too much, too soon,” he said. He went back to California and enrolled at Foothill College, a commuter school 20 minutes from home.
He also went out for the football team, which went over about how you’d expect.
“Are you out of your mind?” his mother asked.
Before she took the boys to California after the divorce, Pam told Gerry that Sam and his twin brother, Tyson, would never play football. Too dangerous. But life had been hard for the boys after the split. They needed structure and discipline. So when they got to high school and asked to play, Pam relented. The twins thrived in the football culture. Sam turned to it again in his rehabilitation.
“I need to do this,” he told his mother.
His concession to her concern was that he’d go out for deep snapper — something Gerry had taught the boys how to do in eighth grade, in case of emergency — instead of linebacker.
Talking his father into it wasn’t an issue. Gerry had played nose tackle in the ’70s at prestigious Carnegie Mellon, a D3 school in Pittsburgh. At maybe 5-11, 230 pounds, he’d been a better engineering major than athlete, and he gave up engineering for journalism. Until quitting football his senior year for a newspaper internship, his favorite college memories were evenings after practice, a chill in the fall air, he and his teammates laughing as they walked across campus to the dining hall to harass the manager about keeping the light on and food warm.
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“I’m not gonna tell you what to do,” he told Sam, “but playing football in high school and college is the best thing I ever did.”
Sam laughed a little at the heavy-handed nature of the advice.
“Which was very Gerry Fraley,” he said.
When your father is a minor celebrity and major character who claims managers and superstars and a former United States president as pals, not to mention the fact that he’s held in awe in press boxes nationwide, you might know him better by reputation. Not that Gerry wasn’t a dedicated father. He once compared parenting twins to always being on the power play. Took them with him everywhere. He was a fun dad. Easy enough when wrasslin' and the Three Stooges constitute two forks of your holy trinity. Whatever they wanted to do, he was game.
Like a lot of dads, though, Gerry was a closed book. He’d do anything for anyone if he liked you. But connecting with his boys on an emotional level was simply out of his reach, and not just because of the miles that separated them.
“The thing I hold onto,” Sam said, "was that he did not have a single selfish bone in his body.
“But there was an element of distance.”
Following in dad’s footsteps
When I saw Gerry on opening day of 2017, his appearance shocked me. He looked gaunt and exhausted, his skin the color of straw. He promised us he was seeing a doctor the next day.
He called not long afterward with the same terrible news he would later deliver to his sons, only without the empty assurances.
What he wanted to know, he said, one father to another, was what he should tell his boys.
His voice breaking, he asked, “Should I tell them that I’m dying?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t ever tell them that.”
He lived two more years, long enough to see Sam and Tyson play college football. He watched Sam fight his way back from GBS. Listening to Gerry relate the harrowing details, I thought it seemed like more than any father should have to bear. Especially when you know you’re not going to be around to see how it turns out.
The offer to walk on at Temple came three months after Gerry died. The fact that it meant he’d be living in the same state where his father went to school and worked his first big-time newspaper job, only made it better. Sam likes to think about his dad moving him into school, then taking him to dinner at the best cheesesteak joint in town.
Of course, that’s not how the story ends. Nothing and no one’s perfect. In this, his junior year, he has yet to suit up for a game. Practice is a lot of work only to find yourself watching from the stands. He wakes up an hour early every day just to work out the reminders of what GBS did to him. Even now, more than three years after his diagnosis, he hasn’t completely recovered and may never feel quite the same again. He can’t fully smile. Can’t shut his eyes. Needs ice after practice for his feet. “Buzzing,” is how he describes it.
Not that he would ever complain, though. Most of what you just read came from his mother. Sam’s story is a remarkable one, all right, but hardly a soul at Temple knows it. He’s a sweetheart of a kid, but he’s his father’s son.
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