Marques Harris’s television flickered with images of the sport to which he’d dedicated nearly two decades of his life, and now he felt pangs of nostalgia. So he did what hardened men are too often reluctant to do: He let a friend know that he missed him.
As the former Chargers linebacker watched the Bills and the Chiefs clash in the AFC Championship in January 2021, one of his first NFL buddies sprang to mind. Harris had entered the league with San Diego in ’05 alongside receiver Vincent Jackson, and now their longtime teammate, defensive lineman Jacques Cesaire, was an assistant with the Bills, who were one win away from a trip to Super Bowl LV in Tampa. If that happened, Harris thought, it was about time for a long-overdue reunion, after the pandemic had kept them apart—Jackson in Tampa, where he’d ended his career; Harris in Colorado; and Cesaire so often on the road.
If Buffalo wins, I’m going to come to Tampa Bay, Harris texted Jackson. I would love to see you.
John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated
Jackson, a quiet, lead-by-example man with an iron physique and an intellect to match, was among the teammates Harris had admired most. The two shared a locker room for five seasons in San Diego, and Jackson attended both Harris’s bachelor party and his wedding. So Harris wasn’t particularly alarmed when his old friend didn’t immediately respond. He knew that Jackson kept busy with his kids, his foundation, his burgeoning real estate and restaurant businesses.
Harris, though, didn’t know that he was texting a man who by then had been holed up in a hotel room outside of Tampa for two weeks as semis rumbled down I-75 outside his window. He didn’t know that his 38-year-old friend’s frontal lobes had shrunk. Or that the damage had triggered forgetfulness and paranoia. Or that Jackson had suffered depression in the six months after his 12-year NFL career ended, in 2016. Or that the only remedy he found for his loss of identity and mental acuity was at the bottom of a bottle, and that drinking had led Jackson and his wife, Lindsey, to shield their four children from his deterioration, setting him on a course to that lonely hotel room.
Harris, when he texted, had no idea that Jackson was alone, drinking himself to death. He only knew that he missed his friend.
The Bills, ultimately, lost. The texts went unreturned. For Harris, a father of five, life marched on. For Jackson, it didn’t. On Feb. 13, three weeks after that playoff game, housekeepers entered his hotel room and thought he was asleep when they saw him hunched over, motionless, on a sofa. The next day, they thought the same. On the 15th, a cloudy Monday, they found him in the same position and called 9-1-1. Jackson’s blood alcohol level, an autopsy would later reveal, registered at 0.28%, around the point at which most people lose consciousness.
That news devastated Harris not only because he’d lost a friend, or because that friend had seemed better prepared than any player Harris knew to find light in the void that often follows a career’s final whistle. Harris was floored because Jackson was the sixth former football friend who had either killed himself or died in despair—a list that includes Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam and pro football Hall of Famer Junior Seau, both of whom ended their lives with a bullet.
Weeks passed after Jackson’s death. Eventually, grief began to subside—but Harris couldn’t escape the emotion that crept into its place.
“Fear.”
