:no_upscale()/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/GYZT7W22BBBWDJEPUUUFIDGXOU.jpg "Hall of Fame Health helps former players with mental health before it’s too late")
FRISCO – None of the Pro Football Hall of Famers or mental health panelists who attended the Star for the inaugural “Heroes of the Game” fundraiser Saturday night mentioned Marion Barber III by name. Just a passing reference to something that happened “up the street”. A little ironic, but not surprising. Doctors aren’t even sure when Former Cowboys running back died a lot less What either why. Apparently, there is no use jumping to conclusions.
not even if Barber’s sad story it’s exactly the kind that Pro Football Hall of Fame Behavioral Health tries to prevent.
Few athletes have been as open about their own mental health struggles as Charles Haley, or done more to help, but not even he would.
“Did your doctor confirm any problems?” Haley asked me.
No, no one has said much about the death of a man approaching his 39th birthday. A man whose fierce style of play earned him the nickname “Marion the Barbarian”. A man loved by teammates and coaches. An intelligent, thoughtful, and cultured man who played the piano and once ran a soccer camp for inner-city youth.
A man his former teammates barely recognized.
Terence Newman, who played alongside Barber from 2005 to 2010, was driving to a gas station in 2019 when he noticed a man walking on the side of the road. He noticed it because it was raining. Looking closer, he saw that he was Barber. Newman had heard that he had “gone through some tough times” but was unprepared for the face-to-face evidence. For him shock.
The former colleagues exchanged numbers and said goodbye, at least one shocked by the experience.
“I freaked out when I saw it,” Newman told Tyler Dunne recently on his podcast, “Go Long.” “It looked bad. It seemed like he wasn’t there, like he was a different person, like he couldn’t function. And that’s why he walked and didn’t drive. When I tell you that he was scared, I thought he might hit me.
“I was actually scared.”
He had reason to be scared. In 2014, Mansfield police arrested Barber after he entered a church near his home with a loaded 9mm pistol. He told police that he didn’t know where he was. Or what year he was he.
He subsequently underwent a mental health evaluation, one of at least two after retiring in 2011 from a six-season career with the Cowboys and one in Chicago. Whatever the problem, perhaps the CTE-induced early-onset dementia of his football career, a rare but all-too-frequent result, something was clearly not right.
In addition to the curious behavior described by neighbors, there was one arrest in 2019 for two incidents in which he damaged vehicles while running. He pleaded not guilty and received a year of probation, 60 hours of community service and a fine.
Last July, in reaction to a video post of Barber running around with a football, Dez Bryant tweeted that his former teammate was “down.”
Dez added, “We’re just a stat and moments to most people.”
Not for their peers, they are not. Starting with the birth of Pro Football Hall of Fame Health in early 2020, former players are getting more help. A recent iteration: Behavioral Health Hall of Fame. Locally associated with Baylor Scott & White Health, it offers a concierge service to help athletes and their families negotiate all kinds of needs.
Jeremy Hogue, CEO of Hall of Fame Health, wouldn’t put a number on how many cases they’ve done in the last two years. “Dozens and dozens” is all he would say. They are close to the vest, for obvious reasons.
What he will say is that even with the backing of the NFL and the NFLPA, it’s not enough.
“I think what surprised us is the volume of calls that are coming in on the mental health and addiction side of substance abuse,” he said. “Usually not from the players themselves, but from their families, from their agents, from their college friends, from teammates saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a guy who won’t be here for a month.’ “
Texas is a big market for the Health Hall of Fame, Hogue said. Twenty-five percent of former NFL players live in the Lone Star State, most in Dallas or Houston.
One of the most prominent is Tim Brown, Heisman Trophy winner and Woodrow Wilson Hall of Famer and ambassador for the Behavioral Health Hall of Fame. On a panel moderated by former Cowboys and Oklahoma defensive tackle Gerald McCoy, Brown said you can always spot a mentally challenged teammate. Each team had a pair.
Marion Barber didn’t show signs of being a player, that we know of, but she surely did once her violent career was over.
Wasn’t the Hall’s new initiative exactly what he needed?
“Unfortunately, he probably didn’t know that,” Brown told me. “We didn’t know about his situation, right? That’s why the NFL has to be involved. The guys in the locker room have to know what’s going on so they can figure out how to get guys like Marion to help.
“I mean, maybe that could have changed his life.”
Of course, no one can say for sure. We don’t know what went wrong with Barber, and we may never know. His family says the will stipulates that his brain will not be donated for CTE research. He didn’t want an autopsy either. She takes her sad story with him.
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