PRO FOOTBALL '92 : Memorial Over, Memories Linger : Lions Can't Erase Thoughts of Utley's Paralysis, Deaths of Andolsek, Len Fontes

By CHRIS DUFRESNE

Sept. 4, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PONTIAC, Mich. — In the well-ordered world of the NFL, where stiff upper lips are requisite and time is precious, the Detroit Lions thought it prudent on July 26 to call a team meeting for the purpose of grieving.

The meeting was between the time veterans reported that evening and first bed-check. As they would with any opponent, the Lions would attack this death issue as a unit, break it down, order up a schematic.

The meeting was the well-intentioned idea of Coach Wayne Fontes. When bad news presents itself, coaches usually call meetings.

At hand were the terrible truths of recent months.

On Nov. 17, 1991, right guard Mike Utley was paralyzed in a game against the Rams. The incident galvanized the team and its fans on an emotional run to the NFC Central Division title and the conference championship game. Utley’s “thumbs up” sign--the gesture he made to teammates as he left the field on a stretcher--became a rallying cry.

Then, the 1-2 stomach punch. On May 8, Len Fontes, Wayne’s brother and coach of the defensive backs, died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was 54. Wayne beat the paramedics to the scene and tried to revive his brother, to no avail.

On June 23, while weeding his front yard in Thibodaux, La., left guard Eric Andolsek was killed by a diesel truck that veered off the highway.

What now?

The Lions, expected to pick up where they left off the previous season, were suddenly confronted with two deaths and an uncertain emotional future.

So Fontes, at 7 p.m., Eastern standard time, stood before his troops.

“I addressed the issues,” he said this week. “There were a lot of tears in the room. It was hard for me to get through the talk. . . . But it’s over now.”

His eyes, sullen and swollen, told another story.

Unlike itineraries and grievances, death is not resolved at team meetings.

“It” was not over.

Linebacker Chris Spielman was Andolsek’s best friend.

“There is not an hour that goes by that I don’t think of him,” he said after Monday’s practice.

Spielman lifted his left wrist.

“See?”

Sweat had all but worn away the 65 Spielman scrawled with a pen on his wrist during a team meeting that morning. Sixty-five was Andolsek’s number.

But Spielman will be expected, as will the others, to keep a stiff upper lip.

“I know it sounds stupid,” Spielman said. “But it’s that male macho ritual stuff. That’s the way you’re almost forced to be in this business. You’re a tough SOB and you know it. So that’s how you act. You’re not going to show a lot of emotion.”

It is not normally appropriate to rank tragedies. But Utley’s accident certainly does not compare with the deaths of Len Fontes and Andolsek. Utley is alive. His teammates still talk to him, touch him.

His injury was an occupational hazard, the chance all players take when they step onto the field.

Utley is still here to describe, as he did recently to the Miami Herald, how it felt when he lost his balance on a block against the Rams, landed on his head and broke his sixth cervical vertebra.

“Imagine the hottest water, the worst burn you have ever felt,” he said. “My legs burned three times worse.”

Utley is still here to curse the doctors who have told him he will never walk again; here to inspire with his determination. Still confined to a wheelchair, Utley has regained enough arm strength to bench press 205 pounds. He has competed in a five-kilometer wheelchair race.

Utley is not what he was. He was reminded of that recently when he dropped a two-pound bag of M&M;’s on the floor. His fingers unable to respond to a basic mental command, Utley retrieved the candies, one at a time.

Utley’s tragedy brought the Lion family together as never before.

The team, 6-4 at the time of his injury, won seven consecutive games before losing to the Washington Redskins in the NFC title game. The week before, the Lions beat Dallas for their first playoff victory in 34 years.

Though he was no longer in the lineup, Utley was a presence.

“There were a lot of tears shed,” said Mike Mills, president of the team’s booster club. “People cried in the stands. It definitely brought the fans together. We felt a lot closer to the players. There was a common bond. We felt the same hurt. The Utley emotion was extraordinary. It’s probably something that will never be duplicated.”

One fan, rummaging through some religious literature, found a picture of Jesus Christ gesturing with what appeared to be the same “thumbs up” pose fans were using in tribute to Utley.

The fan sent the picture to Wayne Fontes, who mailed it to Utley’s mother.

“There was nothing sacrilegious about it,” Mills said. “His mother thought it was great.”

Coming to grips with the deaths of Fontes and Andolsek has been more difficult.

Len Fontes died without warning. Soon after, Wayne Fontes hired his other brother, John, to assume Len’s position as secondary coach.

It has been easier with John, considering all the times Wayne has looked at John in team meetings and addressed him as “Lenny.”

Who better to understand?

“I’ll just look at Johnny and say ‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ ” Fontes said of his lapses. “And he goes ‘I know.’ Then he’ll have a tear and I’ll have one. It just happens. Lenny and I were very close. It’s hard sometimes. I think someone else would take it personal, with me bringing Lenny’s name up. Johnny, he understands. It was his brother.”

Idle moments are the toughest.

“I have a hard time sometimes at practice because I miss my brother,” Wayne Fontes said. “And I have a difficult time before the games when they play the national anthem.”

Fontes isn’t the only one affected. Before a recent exhibition game against Cincinnati, Fontes casually asked Woody Widenhofer, his defensive coordinator, which coach would be in charge of transporting the game films.

“Woody said, ‘It’s all set. Lenny will take the film,’ ” Fontes recalled. “ ‘Lenny always takes the film. He likes to carry it.’ I just sat there and looked at him for a long time. And he didn’t say anything. So I said again, ‘Woody, who’s going to take it?’ and he said, ‘Lenny always takes it.’ I said, ‘Woody, Lenny ain’t here anymore.’ ”

Andolsek was 25 and a rising star when he died so unexpectedly. Police say the driver, James Bennett of Baton Rouge, La., became distracted at the wheel before his truck veered off the road and struck Andolsek. Bennett has been charged with negligent homicide.

Lion quarterback Rodney Peete was at home in Los Angeles when the phone rang.

“I didn’t think I heard it right,” Peete said. “Just like that, he’s gone. I mean, the way it happened. You do so many risky things in your life. Playing this game is such a risk. All of a sudden, he gets killed by standing in his front yard? You see things like that and you say, ‘It’s not fair.’ ”

Peete’s reaction was shared by most.

“The way he died was just so gruesome,” Mills, the booster club president, said. “He was hit by a truck in his front yard. That’s like being hit by a spaceship while putting an antenna up on your roof. It doesn’t happen.”

It happened.

Andolsek and Spielman got in a shoving match when they met, before the coin toss in a game between Louisiana State and Ohio State.

But when they joined the Lions in 1988, Andolsek and Spielman became fast friends.

“Our personalities were alike,” Spielman said. “We lived together, rode on the bus together, rode on the plane together. We both liked hunting, fishing, the same music . . . country all the way. But on game days it was AC-DC’s ‘For Those About to Rock.’ He’d always drive to the game and always put that song on. Every single time for four years.”

The last time the two spoke, shortly before the accident, Andolsek invited Spielman to Louisiana for a visit.

Andolsek issued the same invitation every off-season.

“And I planned to go every year,” Spielman said. “I never did get to go down, no.”

Spielman gave the eulogy at Andolsek’s funeral.

“I said when I came down here I thought I was kind of special,” Spielman recalled of his reading. “I considered myself Eric’s best friend. But after talking to about 50 people, I realized I was just another friend of Eric’s. Everyone else considered Eric their best friend.”

Spielman won’t listen to AC-DC anymore.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m going to change a lot of things that I do. Certain things that we considered sacred, I won’t do anymore. The music is one. There are a couple of other things that are personal.”

Shawn Bouwens dreamed of becoming a starter in the NFL. But not like this. When Utley was injured last season, Bouwens was moved to right guard as a backup. With the death of Andolsek, his mentor, Bouwens has been asked to fill the void at left guard.

Bouwens will start for the first time Sunday against the Chicago Bears.

“I don’t want to win a starting job because someone passed on,” he said, almost apologetically. “Or because someone had a career-ending injury. It’s not the way you want to do it.”

Bouwens is flanked by memories. To the left of his locker is Andolsek’s, which has not been touched since his death. His helmet is hooked and game-ready. A sack of dirty clothes has been left untouched. Andolsek’s playbook is tucked in the corner.

To Bouwens’ right is Utley’s empty stall, strewn with assorted shoes and accessories--just the way Utley left it Nov. 17.

In tribute, neither locker will be occupied this season.

It has been a tragic off-season for Bouwens as well. His mother, Linda, died in April. His grandfather, James Warren, died in June.

Then it was Andolsek, who had always been willing to work with Bouwens on blocking techniques after practice, at the risk of losing his own job.

Every visitor asks Bouwens why he does not switch lockers.

“The reason I don’t mind is because we have a lot of good memories of Eric and Mike,” he said. “We had a lot of laughs in the locker room, playing jokes and games. I don’t want to move. People may think that’s eerie, but all the memories here are good. There is no reason to move.”

Bouwens has a picture of Andolsek tacked in his locker at eye level.

“You think about them every day,” he said. “You wish it wouldn’t have happened, but you’ve got to deal with it. It’s part of life. You’ve got to go on.”

Not allowing his team to obsess over the deaths remains Fontes’ biggest challenge.

Other teams around the league stopped grieving for the Lions some time ago.

Harsh truth motivates Fontes. The Lions are defending champions in the NFC Central. They are considered the team to beat. The Lions are minus two starting guards from a season ago.

Andolsek was the team’s best run blocker. In short-yardage situations, it was always Barry Sanders over Andolsek on 37 Slant.

Truth be told, Bouwens has struggled in Andolsek’s place. You know the rest of the league is taking notice.

“I’m sure when it happened, all the other teams felt sorry for us,” Spielman said. “This is not to sound cold or uncaring, but when you’re looking from it purely as business, the football point of view, you (the opponent) say, ‘OK, Andolsek ain’t playing. That’s a plus for us.’ That’s the way it is.”

So a season that should have opened with great expectations has been tempered.

“I don’t know anybody that’s lost two key players and gone on to be a better team,” Fontes said.

The league stops for no team.

The Bears are particularly spoiling for the Lions because of the way last year’s regular season ended. The Lions clinched the division title on a Monday night when the San Francisco 49ers routed Chicago on national television.

Near the end of the lopsided Bear-49er game, the network turned a camera on Fontes back home in Detroit as he lighted a cigar in celebration.

The moment did not sit well with Coach Mike Ditka or Bear fans, who have since inundated the Lions’ offices with boxes of cigars.

“They should have been mad at the 49ers, not for me smoking a cigar,” Fontes contends.

Such are the burdens of champions. The Lions cannot afford to dwell on them. More changes are in the works. The dismantling of the run-and-shoot offense was completed in the off-season when the team hired former San Diego Charger coach Dan Henning, a devotee of power football.

In remembrance of their fallen Lions, the team will wear Andolsek’s uniform number and Len Fontes’ initials on their uniform sleeves this season.

But Wayne Fontes does not want mourning to become a weekly ritual.

“If you keep laboring on it, it’ll play so much on their minds that it won’t be business as usual,” he said. “We won’t use it as a crutch or say, ‘Let’s go out and win one for the Gipper.’ They will be remembered, but we have to go on.”

But it is not over.

Spielman, an intense person, finds diversions in a scribbled uniform number on his hand.

He is beyond considering the injustice of it all.

“When you come out in this world, no one said it was fair,” he said. “No one gave you an instruction booklet.”