Given the fact that I was not much of an athlete when I was growing up - and had no particular interest in such pursuits, to be perfectly honest - I suppose it is one of the great ironies of my life that my first job as a professional journalist should have been as a sports reporter.

Because the paper I worked for at the time was in a city only a stone's throw away from Chicago, there were occasions when I had the opportunity to rub elbows with professional athletes. For the most part the encounters left me thoroughly unimpressed, as the majority of those athletes I met were terribly rude, terribly full of themselves or both. The example that still burns brightest in my memory was Cubs pitcher Mitch "The Wild Thing" Williams, who came to town to sign autographs at a store opening in the summer of 1990; his hateful attitude towards his fans, towards me and even towards his own wife and child left a definite sour taste in the mouths of those who turned out for the event, and for all I know may still be the stuff of local legend two decades later.

One of the few pro athletes who did impress me was Dave Duerson of the Chicago Bears. Duerson had been a member of the Bears' Super Bowl winning team in 1986 and was regarded as one of the best players in the NFL at the time - but that wasn't what impressed me about the man.

In June of 1989, Duerson - along with fellow Bear Dennis McKinnon and former teammate Otis Wilson, then playing with the L.A. Raiders - came to Kankakee High School to conduct a football clinic for local teenagers. But the day was about more than just teaching kids the fundamentals of football; Duerson and his friends also shared from their own lives in an effort to teach the youngsters to stay free from drugs and alcohol.

Duerson's program - known as "Living Straight, Playing Straight" - grew out of his realization that the recognition and fame he enjoyed as a well-known public figure carried with it a certain responsibility to the fans that had made it possible. It was an important mission for Duerson, who as a young man had learned a tragic lesson about the dangers in such behavior.

"You might say I was scared straight," Duerson told the youngsters who attended the camp that day. "One night when I was still in high school three friends of mine called up and wanted me to go out with them, but I couldn't go because I was being recruited for college football at the time. My friends did a little drinking that night, and as it turned out, it was also the first and last time they tried using drugs."

Duerson related how his friends were killed that night, playing "chicken" with a train. It was at that point, he said, that he fully realized the importance of steering clear of drugs.

"I was a pallbearer at all three of my friends' funerals," he said. "If things had been different, I would have been the fourth person in that car."

Later, after making a name for himself as a pro athlete, Duerson took advantage of his celebrity status to try and share that lesson with others.

"In the past there has been a lot of negative things written about some pro athletes, and some of it has been written to try and steer the kids clear of making the same mistakes themselves," he told me. "But it usually works in reverse. The kids see the stories in the paper or on television and say, 'Hey, if (an athlete) can do this stuff it must be okay.'"

There were about 200 kids at the camp in Kankakee that day; Duerson told me that if he reached just one of them, he felt he had done his job. I have no way of knowing how many of those kids actually got the message, but I'd like to think it was more than one.

A year later Duerson was playing for the New York Giants and I had gone back to not paying much attention to pro athletes. But I found myself thinking about that long ago Saturday when I recently heard the news that Dave Duerson had been found dead at his home in Florida.

The news that his death had been ruled a suicide seemed so unlikely when I first heard it. The rest of the story gave me pause again: Duerson had shot himself in the heart, not on the head, and reportedly left behind a request that his brain tissue be donated to researchers studying the condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to athletes who have sustained repeated concussions. Duerson had seen friends and colleagues afflicted with this condition; I've read reports in the past week indicating that he may have been suffering from CTE himself.

A counselor I interviewed some 10 years or so ago for an article about suicide prevention made the comment that suicide is probably the most selfish act a person could ever take. I finally understood what he meant about a year after that, when a very good friend of mine put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger and I saw the effect it had on his family and the community. It has always been impossible for me to imagine my life ever being so bleak that it would move me to willingly end it and inflict that kind of pain on the people that I love and who love me.

But if the reports are to be believed, Duerson's fateful decision seems to have been selfless rather than selfish. I was reminded of that Bible verse that says, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13, KJV) Some will no doubt argue otherwise, but based on the available evidence it would appear that is what has happened in this case. I'd like to think so, anyway.

In 1989 Dave Duerson used football as a means of saving lives; 22 years later, it would seem, he matryred himself as a means of helping to better protect those playing the game today. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Kankakee, Illinois, Duerson told me that he would like to be remembered for helping to save lives; the tragic irony of his life is that he finally felt moved to take his own in order to do so.

(Copyright 2011, by John A. Small)