Chapter 6 - Looking for Terry

I loved Mike Webster. “Iron Mike” was our center who played his way into the Hall of Fame. He played sixteen seasons, 245 pro football games. No one was tougher or more loyal. Mike was the only person I ever knew who kept a blocking sled in his front yard so he could practice after practice. I introduced him at his induction in Canton. I pulled out a football, put my hands on his rump, and had him hike it to me one last time.

It was deeply painful but not surprising when I got the call in 2002 that he had died. I didn’t know what killed him, but I had a general feeling. After he retired, his life fell apart. He suffered from a variety of psychological problems, including depression, agitation, and memory loss. He once described his own mental state as a “deep, confusing, twisting fishing line, tangled up mess of confusing things . . . all the time.” His memory got so bad that some nights he ended up sleeping in his car or in a train station because he couldn’t remember how to get home. It was a horrible situation, but there wasn’t much anyone could do to help him. He would just disappear for weeks at a time; he didn’t know how to ask for the help he needed. Or maybe he was too proud. He had once been great.

He was only fifty years old when he died, supposedly from a heart attack. Initially, we were reassured by doctors that his death—and the deterioration in those last years—had nothing to do with the pounding he had taken during his playing career. But after his death, a forensic neuropathologist examined his brain tissue and discovered he’d been suffering from something called CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.

Living with CTE is like being punch drunk all the time. Very few people had ever heard of it. The results of the research were frightening: Some players suffering from CTE had committed suicide. In many cases, life expectancy with CTE was reduced. This discovery eventually forced the NFL to make serious changes to protect active players and offer care to retired players. The sideline tent was created, and players with possible concussions were examined during the game and prohibited from returning to play if they showed any symptoms. But there was nothing that could be done to help retired players. Believe me, when the doctors released that information, a lot of former players began comparing their own conditions with the symptoms. It was easy to make that association.

Learning what happened to Mike forced a lot of us to look at our own lives. During my NFL career, I was sacked 307 times, not counting sacks in preseason games or in college. In college I was sacked twelve times in one game. I was slammed into the turf, flipped upside down, and blindsided more times than I can—maybe fortunately, it turns out—remember. Or maybe even more fortunately, not remember. And in those days, we used pretty basic protective equipment. I remember how big a change it was when they added thick padding to the inside of the helmet.

Beginning in high school, I had suffered numerous undiagnosed concussions. There were games in which I absolutely should not have continued playing, games when I completely blanked out. That wasn’t just me; that was all of us. We took great pride in being tough, in playing through injuries. Without realizing it, some of us were the walking mentally wounded.

CTE was a reality that NFL players had been living—and occasionally dying—with for a long time. The unknown can often be more frightening than reality. Tammy and I decided we should get a baseline study of my brain. I had serious mood swings; sometimes I had difficulty focusing. At times I would get deeply depressed. I had occasional severe anxiety attacks and memory issues. I remember once asking Tammy, “What’s that animal with the long neck that eats out of the top of trees?” I’d totally forgotten it’s a whatchamacallit.

Those memory issues concerned me. A friend of mine once suggested I qualified for Senior Jeopardy. That’s the version of that show with three options: I know the answer. I don’t know the answer. And, you know . . . it’s that tall guy who was in that adventure movie with the blond woman who went out with the guy on that medical TV show.

Most of those things could be attributed to the normal aging process—but it was hard not to wonder if it might be something else. I needed to find out.

Early in the 1990s, I had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Believe it or not, I was happy about that. I thought it was an explanation for some of the screwy things I did, some of the decisions I made that later baffled me: Sell all the horses! Why did I sell all the horses? Buy new horses! I began taking Ritalin. I didn’t hesitate to talk about it to reporters either because I thought discussing it in public might help other people. But the diagnosis didn’t answer all my questions, which is why Tammy and I decided to have my brain examined.

Many years ago, the Yankees’ Yogi Berra had his brain examined after being beaned. The results were a classic diagnosis: X-rays of his head revealed nothing. Whatever the results of my tests, knowing was better than years of worrying.

Apparently, my brain is so special that it took five doctors to figure me out. I literally had five different specialists examining me. For two days they conducted a variety of tests; they did imaging studies, blood tests, and other examinations; then they pointed out the many differences to us. I had no signs of possible CTE whatsoever, which was shocking, relieving, and mysterious. The issues that had concerned me were being caused by a combination of aging mixed with occasional depressive episodes.

I had been married and divorced three times before I met Tammy. Three times. There isn’t a lot that embarrasses me. I’m the guy who agreed to be filmed bare-assed in the movie Failure to Launch. The guy who ran totally naked through a park in Munich, Germany. But three divorces? That embarrasses me. Making mistakes is part of life; we all make them. I threw five interceptions in the same game. And just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, I did it a second time. (Although after that game Chuck Noll said, in my defense, “The only people open were their linebackers.”) But most people learn from mistakes. Most people. Not me, and that was the problem.

My second marriage ended in 1977. We had fundamentally different desires: I desired her to stay home while she did not want to stay home. She wanted to pursue her successful skating career. I admit it: I was a male chauvinist.

I got married again in 1983. The problem with my third marriage turned out to be the same as it had been in my previous marriages: Me. I thought, Finally, I’ve found the woman who can make me happy. The truth was all I was doing was changing wives. It was me who had to change, and I either didn’t realize it or refused to accept it. What made that realization even more difficult was that I was successful in almost every other area of my life.

After she filed for the divorce, it took us several years to reach a settlement. As a result in 1986, I had to sell all my horses and my ranch in Mansfield, Louisiana. It was both financially and emotionally painful. It left me almost broke.

I was living in a public world in which I received constant positive reinforcement. People seemed genuinely happy to meet me, and I was just as pleased to meet them. I’ve never been standoffish. There are some celebrities who build a wall around themselves to keep people away. I have an open door. I make friends everywhere I go. It’s easy for me. When I get on an airplane, by the time the flight is done, the strangers next to me have become my friends, and I’ve given them my phone number. People don’t believe that’s my real number. I have had people call me in the middle of the night mostly to see if they could really call Terry Bradshaw in the middle of the night. When I go out shopping, I’ll spend twenty minutes in the frozen food section talking to people. I have always received lots of nice letters. I know how to be that person.

As a result of that I have a great number of friends that I don’t know exactly who they are. So when I tell Tammy, “This person is a friend of mine,” she will look at me dubiously and ask, “Really? Do you have their number in your phone?”

“Well,” I have to admit, “not exactly.” But then I’ll add confidently, “But they have mine!”

Being friendly with people I don’t know has always been easy for me. But I didn’t know how to be a husband or a partner, and I didn’t know how to find contentment within myself. And I believed I had no one to turn to for advice.

Meanwhile, I was finding that elusive happiness in the studio, working with Greg Gumbel, Pat O’Brien, and Leslie Visser. The concept of a Sunday studio show was being redefined. For three decades, NFL Today had been mostly serious football talk, and CBS wanted to broaden the appeal. As Shaker explained to the media, “Terry’s appeal is the unknown. We don’t always know what he’ll do.”

Well, me neither. By that time, I was an experienced broadcaster. I knew when to shut up. I had enough confidence to consider the cue card suggestions, and I knew how to have fun.

I remember being really nervous before our first show. Gumbel had been working in a studio for 124 years; this was brand new to me. Minutes before we went on the air, we were going through last-minute details when wham! I got knocked in the head by a boom camera. It hit me harder than Butkus. Man, I saw stars, other than Greg Gumbel. That was my first time being sacked by a camera. My head was ringing. I got dizzy and nauseous. I was back in my element, ready to go. It knocked the nervousness out of me.

CBS gave me the platform that I needed. When I was working games, we were on the air for three hours. This show was a half hour, plus a halftime update, when I only had a few minutes. But it was my few minutes. Take it, Terry! Be spontaneous! When Greg mispronounced a player’s name, for example, which was my area of expertise, I held up a cue card on which was written the correct pronunciation. I had a blackboard on which I diagrammed plays, showing viewers not what happened but why it happened. When possible, I spoke from experience.

For example, when Tampa Bay coach Ray Perkins benched his quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, I said I didn’t like it. “He drafted Vinny number one. What Perkins did in my book was wrong. If I was the coach there, I would not sit down the guy who’s going to lead me to the Super Bowl.” Does this scenario sound familiar? “I don’t like seeing any quarterback jerked around after he had a bad game because my ass was in that position. I know what it felt like, and I know what I did to my career.”

You listening, Chuck?

But I probably got the most attention when I began my crusade against boring football. I always believed my job was to say out loud what viewers were thinking. Remember, I was an original AFL fan. Put the ball in the air. Score a lot of points. One Sunday Greg and I were watching a wall of monitors featuring one low-scoring game after another.

“Boy,” I said with a sigh, “aren’t these games exciting?” Which I punctuated with a yawn.

Finally, after the Bears had beaten the Packers 10–0 in an especially dull game, I came up with a solution: the Bradshaw Fun League. It was new! It was innovative. It was, frankly, crazy. “I’m speaking as a fan, not as a TV guy. Will the NFL listen to me?” I asked the camera rhetorically. “Or will they pass off this low-scoring humdrum as just a phase? How’d you like to watch Green Bay against Chicago every Sunday?”

The executives of those teams just unloaded on me. I shouldn’t have pointed out how boring it was. Instead, I should have been complimentary. “Have you ever seen such great defense?”

Bradshaw Ball was my response to dull smashmouth football. I made a long list of suggested new rules. The Bradshaw Fun League was a mixture of serious and goofy—but always fun.

In my not-so-serious rules every player was eligible to catch a pass. The player with the most blood on his uniform got a bonus paycheck. A ball carrier could get up after being tackled and continue running unless he was pinned down for a full second. Fights on the field could not be stopped. If an official accidentally blew his whistle, that whistle got taken away from him. If a team trailed by fourteen or more points in the fourth quarter and scored, they got the ball back. And I advocated letting players pick their personal musical selection, which would be played when they scored.

The serious ideas, I believed, would make the game more exciting. Among them were two-point conversions. Field goals made from inside the twenty were worth only one point, while between the twenty and thirty received two points. No fair catches were permitted and kickoffs into the end zone had to be run out. The ground could cause a fumble. Receivers could bump defenders and run.

To my surprise, more than a decade later, the league actually adopted the two-point conversion.

For the next four years, the show continued to be successful. My part in that was summed up by a columnist who wrote, “You never know what he’ll say next, and that keeps you watching.”

I loved doing that show. For someone like me, regular structure and security are important, and this show provided that. No matter what else was going on in my life, I knew where I was going to be every Sunday throughout football season. And the attention I received was fun. Whenever a controversial or news-making event took place in football, my phone started ringing for the same reason as always: Reporters knew I would answer it and tell them exactly what I thought. I would give them a story. Who doesn’t want people asking your opinion?

It probably would have continued that way for a long time, but that changed forever in December 1993 when Fox outbid CBS—by more than $100 million—for the rights to its portion of the NFL broadcast package. We were all stunned. CBS had been broadcasting the NFL for almost four decades but apparently were beaten in negotiations. It was like leaving the barn door open and somebody came in and stole the whole barn.

As I told a reporter, “I’ve been at CBS for ten years. It’s family. It’s home. I walk into the studio, and I know everyone. I know my job. I know what I can do and say and how far I can go.

“I feel kind of lost.”

Then I got pretty angry about it. When the reporters started calling, I was critical of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the whole NFL TV committee, which had sacrificed loyalty for dollars. “I wonder how those stupid owners feel about that,” I said. “I know they don’t give a damn.”

All my old fears surfaced. What if I can’t get a job? How am I going to support my family and my new ranch? It wasn’t rational, but it was real. Most people can relate to that feeling. Probably the only people who never feel insecure about keeping their job are the unemployed. Once again, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t even know what Fox was. I was living in Dallas, and when I got home, I asked someone how to find Fox on the TV. I put it on. They were broadcasting reruns of the old Perry Mason show in black and white. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. This is going to be the station of the Dallas Cowboys?

I had four weeks remaining on my contract. My manager, David Gershenson, had been discussing my new deal with CBS. And now, poof. As I told the audience at Shreveport’s Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl Minuteman luncheon, “I am unemployed.” Since the news was announced, I admitted, I had learned a little bit about Fox. Rather than being teamed up with Greg Gumbel, I said, “Homer Simpson and I might make a good team. That might be nice. For the first time in my career, I would be considered the smart one.”

I told the jokes, but I was really unhappy. Job security is a big deal and a big part of my life that I loved, which was ending forever. I didn’t believe it was possible that what I was losing could ever be replaced.

For someone like me, change has always been hard. Unlike many players, I had never been traded and played with the Steelers my entire career. Then I had been at CBS my entire broadcasting career. I’d had the same parents and brothers my whole life. Leaving CBS was very difficult for me. It left me with a strange, empty feeling. I would have described it as hair-raising, but in my case, it would have been follicle-raising. No one had ever visualized the classic CBS eye logo being closed. And what was I going to do to my closet full of CBS blazers?

Fox was the new network, owned by Australian Rupert Murdoch. Fox did not even have a sports department, but they were gambling that the NFL would make people aware it existed, force people to find it on their TV, even if they lost money on the contract. Murdoch placed David Hill, who was running the sports division of Murdoch’s British cable channel, Sky TV, in charge. David Hill? Never heard of the guy. Nobody in American sports broadcasting had.

Terry Bradshaw? Hill had never heard of the guy. In fact, Hill knew nothing about football.

But he knew entertainment. He had revolutionized soccer broadcasts in the UK, adding cameras, showing different angles, adding music, and providing more information on the screen. Included in his proposal to the NFL owners was his intention to increase the length of the pregame show to an hour and end each Sunday with a package of highlights from all the games that would lead directly into primetime programming.

All he needed to turn his vision into reality was everything—a studio, a production staff, and talent. According to Hill, when talking about on-air talent, Fox executives advised him, “Don’t hire Terry Bradshaw.” He was fine with that. He had no idea who Terry Bradshaw was. I never did find out who told him that or why.

In late December I was doing the CBS pregame show before a playoff game. I didn’t even know I was auditioning. Hill was watching the game, and as he explained, “I knew Greg Gumbel, but not the guy sitting next to him. He stood up from the desk and walked across the studio to a screen to diagram a play, but it wasn’t really a walk or a strut. It was a confident stride of someone who was totally at home in front of a camera. I knew exactly what I wanted for the pregame show. To find out he was Terry Bradshaw was a bit of a shock, but he was the perfect television personality because with him, you always expected the unexpected.”

When I eventually met with David Hill, he told me, “I want to build my show around you.” The show would be “jovial and entertaining,” he said. Jovial? No one had ever described me as jovial. Santa Claus was jovial. Hill had this incredible vision for his pregame show. It would run an hour. We were going to have a playing field in the studio and bleachers for fans to sit on. We were going to have a weather girl. We were going to have visiting celebrities to talk football. We were going to have loud, exciting music, more cameras, dramatic sounds, and game information in a little box on the screen. We were going to do everything differently. This was going to be an entertaining show about football, not a football show.

To me, it sounded like he was proposing the perfect pregame show for the Bradshaw Fun League.

I received other offers to do things that could have been interesting. But when I spoke with my dad about going to Fox, he said simply, “You’re a football man. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

It was enough.

David Hill modeled his show on the successful pregame soccer show he had created in the UK. To provide balance for me, Hill wanted a defensive player in the studio. He brought in the Raiders’ Howie Long, who had just retired, for an audition. I’ve always believed that when the Good Lord was handing out looks, Howie Long was at the front of the line, but after getting those looks, he cheated and cut to the head of the brains line too.

Howie Long is everything my mama wanted me to be. His middle name literally is Moses. I conducted his audition to see how we interacted on camera. I had interviewed several candidates. Then Howie came in.

Howie was very serious, totally prepared, and perfectly dressed, with every strand of hair in its designated position. That’s exactly who he is. He came in with about four inches of notes in a binder outlining what he thought we might want to talk about. Whatever the subject was, he was ready: He brought his laptop with him. He had spoken with several coaches. He had reviewed films. He was going to pass this test.

The thing was, it wasn’t a test. It was a who, not a what. It was not what David Hill was looking for. But there was something magnetic about him. The camera wanted to date him. I wasn’t going to be the person to tell him his audition was not good; all I really knew about Howie was that he was 6'5", 260 pounds of muscle, while I was 6'1", 260 pounds of not muscle. Instead, I told David Hill that I really liked him, that he could be special. I thought we could work really well together, I said, and that it certainly was worth bringing him back for a second audition.

Before we started the next day I told Howie, “Unload those notes. Just talk to me.” He forgot all about the nuts and bolts of interior linemen. He ignored all those statistics and the information he had gotten from coaches, and he was just Howie. He was very serious about not being very serious, which is hard for him. But he nailed it. He was really good.

So Hill had his offensive player and his defensive player. The third person he wanted was a coach who could provide an overall view. Fortunately, when he was in Orlando for the owners meeting, he heard Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson and owner Jerry Jones screaming at each other. Jimmy Johnson had just won two consecutive Super Bowls. When Jimmy resigned three days after that owners meeting, Ed Goren, our producer, flew to Dallas and signed him.

To hold the show together Hill signed James Brown, who had been an analyst and a play-by-play announcer as well as the studio host at the previous winter Olympics.

To introduce the show, he had a new blaring orchestral theme written. The inspiration for it, Hill said, came when he was standing in line for the Batman ride at an amusement park. He later described the theme as “Batman plays football.” Thirty years later, it’s still instantly recognizable.

Looking back on it, there were a lot of people who doubted this format would work. Football wasn’t entertainment; it was football. The belief was that football fans took their football seriously. For them, football wasn’t a religion; it was far more important than that.

On our first show David Hill wanted to make sure viewers knew that we were not going to be the same old football show. We needed a big opening. Big! Bigger than that! One of our producers, Andrew Becker, approached me with this concept: “Would you be willing to ride a horse through Hollywood into the studio?”

See me smiling? “Well, dang, pardner, shore ’nuff.” To be honest, I did not see the connection between NFL football and me riding into the studio on my horse, but after thinking about it, I didn’t care. Ride my horse in Hollywood? That sounded just like something I would do. It took a considerable amount of planning. This also was my introduction to Fox and watching people getting it done—and caring—and it was impressive. Many of these people had come over from CBS, from John Madden to cameramen and researchers, but, like me, they were given freedom to have fun.

The segment began with me dressed in my ranch-cowboy outfit, standing in the hills with my horse. “Football’s been good to me,” I boomed. “Four Super Bowls. Fourteen great NFL seasons. But now it’s a new day for the fan, a new day for Fox. It’s a new day for this country boy.” Then the camera pulled back to reveal that these were the Hollywood Hills. I rode through the streets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, past Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where a celebrity was putting their handprints in cement, past luxury car dealerships and the expensive shops of Rodeo Drive, past klieg lights being set up for filming, until finally, I pulled up to my hitchin’ post—a parking spot in front of the studio marked “T. Bradshaw”—and tied up my horse.

Here’s how well it worked. When we were celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary of being the number one–rated pregame show, a reporter asked me why we had been so successful for so long. “David understood that he wanted the viewer entertained,” I explained. “We cover the news, but we tend to do things a little more jovially.”

I never dreamed I could enjoy anything more than playing football. But this was the beginning of something more. It also beat selling life insurance by a considerable margin. If only I could have found the happiness, the joy, the sense of fulfillment I eventually got from my TV family with my real family. I didn’t. I couldn’t. At that point in my life, I was not capable of it.

It wasn’t until my third marriage was failing that I accepted the fact that I needed help. That I couldn’t good ol’ Terry my way out of it. That as much as I continued to love the Lord, He was leaving me on my own on this one. I was beginning to realize that my faith alone wasn’t going to fix me. If I didn’t get help, I finally realized, I was going to continue making the same mistakes again.

I’m telling all this in hopes that other people may avoid stumbling on these rocks. I had gone through life believing I was being honest with myself. Admitting that wasn’t always true was difficult, especially when I was continually being told how wonderful I was. In fact, I am great in a crowd. I am great speaking to a roomful of people or to a large audience watching me on TV. But I wasn’t so good at home. I tried. I decided to try marriage counseling. We went to the counselor separately. I wasn’t really serious about it because I didn’t want to work out our problems. I was in a bad place, and I made mistakes and poor choices I regret. I was angry at being in that dark place again, and I was striking out by betraying my values.

I wasn’t ready to reveal my real feelings to anyone, especially a stranger. Growing up in Louisiana, therapy consisted mostly of being smacked upside your head. You had to be “crazy” to go to a therapist. The truth was that my feelings weren’t new, and they weren’t caused by bad marriages. The bad marriages were caused by those feelings.

I wouldn’t even admit to myself that the only times I was truly happy were when I was playing football, talking about football on TV, being on the ranch, or fishing. Success wasn’t enough. The very next day after we won a Super Bowl I started thinking, You’ve got to win it again next year. You can’t enjoy this. It was always, You’ve got to win over the fans, throw more passes, win, do better. The pattern and the thoughts didn’t make sense. Great moments in my life were continually followed by horrible, horrible ones. There was no peace.

I wasn’t ready to admit that, so I didn’t. I couldn’t. If I did tell this counselor what I was really feeling, he might not like me. And I couldn’t take that risk. So as I was talking to this person I put someone else in my body. I represented him, not me. I fed the counselor stuff that had nothing to do with me. This other me was woeful—but funny and likable. Let me introduce you to Mr. Bubba Ray. And I have to admit this counselor did a fine job. It took a little while, but Bubba Ray walked out of that office a happy, healthy man. Me? Not so much.

Then I went to my pastor, seeking a spiritual understanding of my life and my relationship with Jesus. I wanted to find out how to put myself on the path to happiness. I thought if I had really been on top of Scripture, if I had really been a mature human being, and if I really had faith, God would heal my marriage. It was the emotional version of an immaculate deception. Obviously, that did not happen, so the only conclusion I could reach was that I was not faithful enough.

My pastor listened with sympathy. He didn’t judge me. He just allowed me to let it all flow out. He listened for more than a year as I gradually let the truth about my feelings ease out. We prayed about it. He did a good job convincing me that I was a good person and that my wife also was a good person. And finally, he reached a conclusion: “Terry,” he said, “you need professional help.”

He encouraged me to see a Christian psychiatrist. That was a difficult option for me. I had graduated from a counselor to a pastor and now to a full-fledged medical professional. Psychiatry was not something that people with my upbringing easily embraced. Real men didn’t need to spill out their problems to a stranger. But I trusted my pastor enough to try it.

I had to start all over again with the psychiatrist, telling the same stories about Terry Paxton Bradshaw. It was exhausting. As I have learned, it’s a lot easier for me to expose my butt to several million people in movie theaters than it is to expose my soul to a man sitting across from me. But if I was going to change, I had to throw it on the table, and it was still rattling when all of my Super Bowl rings were quiet.

I told him what I didn’t want to hear: how shallow I was, how what I was looking for in a woman was what I could see up front. Admitting that was like being in the kiddie end of the psychological pool. But it was a start.

Even after all that therapy I was still hurting, still struggling to deal with the pain. I wasn’t sleeping. I lost weight. There was an empty feeling in my stomach that just wouldn’t go away. I was distraught, an emotional wreck. I had never experienced anything like that. I even went to a doctor and asked if he could give me a shot to take the pain away, because I didn’t believe I could handle it anymore.

Let me interrupt my story right here to point out that while all this turmoil was going on, in public I was still being jovial. As with many other people, my work was my escape. When I got divorced for the first time, for example, I won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award. The harder I worked, the less time I had to be unhappy. When I was in my work element, on the field, or in a studio, I felt great. Fortunately, being Terry Bradshaw had become a successful business.

One ambition I achieved was that the people liked me. They identified with me. As I explained to TV Guide, “Look, I wish I talked good and looked good and could articulate better. I stutter, I stammer, I scratch and do it all on live television. That’s why I’ve never been able to watch myself, ’cause I embarrass myself. I can’t help it. It’s me. You can’t change who you are.”

There was no artifice to me in public. People liked the fact that I could screw up—just like they did—and laugh at myself.

In addition to my speeches and appearances, I hosted a syndicated show called Home Team with Terry Bradshaw. We shot it in Los Angeles. I was competing with Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, Montel Williams, even Jerry Springer. The TV audience during the day is mostly women, so it was a challenge. I tried. I even took a bubble bath because we had a segment about love and finding your sensitive side. So at five o’clock in the morning, I lit a candle, got something to read, poured myself a cup of coffee, and filled the tub with bubbles. The show lasted only one season, but it accomplished one very important thing: It allowed me to stay away from home for weeks at a time.

I was doing everything I could to avoid confrontation. It took me some time, but I realized that the pain I was feeling wasn’t being caused by the fear that my marriage was ending. I wasn’t hurting over the loss of my wife. She was a good person, but I wasn’t in love with her. It was about my girls. It was devastating for me to accept the fact that my children wouldn’t have their daddy coming home every day. They were going to be the product of a divorced family, including all that figuring out where they were going to be on weekends and vacations.

As the psychiatrist made clear when I got divorced, unless I made fundamental changes, this experience would be just another link in a chain. Chances were pretty certain I’d repeat the same behavior, falling in love with the wrong person for me. The day I got remarried for the second time, I had turned to my father and said, “Hey, Pop, this is the happiest day of my life. This is the real McCoy.” And I believed it. At least until the day after I got married, when it started going downhill. Until we finally split up, then I did everything possible to get her back for all the wrong reasons. That was my pattern.

The psychiatrist made me vow that I wouldn’t get into a serious relationship for three years. “Just work on you,” he told me. “Work on you.” It’s a hard job but somebody’s got to do it. For the next three years, I would focus on myself and my girls. I literally went more than an entire year without having a single date. The psychiatrist also insisted I get tested to see if there was some medical reason for my mood swings. This was still several years before Mike Webster’s postmortem diagnosis. I’d already been diagnosed with ADHD, so I expected the tests to confirm that. Instead, I learned I was also clinically depressed.

Well, that was depressing, at least at first. It’s an interesting cycle. I spent all these years wondering what was wrong with me. I thought, Why am I different? Why am I going through such big ups and downs? Why can’t I just appreciate all the wonderful things that happen in my life? Then I found out that there really was something wrong with me.

It was difficult to accept it. Men don’t get depressed. Especially football players! There was a real stigma attached to this diagnosis. Society was just beginning to openly discuss mental health. I remember when I told my parents, my dad reacted initially with total silence. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand it. He’d raised me to be strong, and I was admitting a weakness. Mostly people considered depression an emotional problem that could be dealt with by being tougher. It isn’t. Tammy eventually explained it to me: About eight o’clock one night I was having a difficult time. We were standing in our bedroom. My heart was racing and I was feeling awful. I didn’t know what to do. “I know how this works,” she said. “This is not a choice. This isn’t the consequence of something you’ve done. It’s not your fault. It’s not because you got hit playing football. Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. Your brain is not producing the right chemicals at the rate it should. That’s why you need to be taking a pill every day.”

As Tammy taught me, depression can be treated with drugs. Doctors had prescribed antidepressants before, but they had only been marginally effective. I didn’t like the way they made me feel, so I stopped taking them. Naturally, I got depressed because I couldn’t take my antidepression drug. But once I understood what was causing those demons, I wanted to get rid of them. They were like the Oakland Raiders of demons. They just kept coming after me. I was willing to try different medications. Eventually, with Tammy’s help, I found the one that worked for me.

It took time. It definitely isn’t an instant fix. I didn’t wake up healed. Tammy kept telling me, “Give it time, Terry. Let it work.” Gradually, slowly, day by day, the world became a different place. For the first time in months, I was hungry. That empty feeling that had been camped out in my chest was gone. I wasn’t shaking. I was a little bit tentative at first, wondering if those feelings were going to come back, wondering if there was something I might do that would bring them back. Some kind of trigger. Boom! Here we go again. But there wasn’t. I walked around all day thinking, I’m back! I’m back!

If I have seem to be harping on this subject, well, I am. That’s because I know, I absolutely know, the difference it made for me in my life—and how many other men and women can be helped.

It’s no big deal, one pill a day. Welcome home, real Terry. It doesn’t happen in one night. It is a process that can take a few weeks. It is not immediate—but this is the way I remember it. When I forget to take that pill I may fall down that dark hole again—but now I know how to get out of it. What was important at that time was that Tammy didn’t force me to take it. Instead she explained to me what was happening as no doctor had ever done before.

Understanding that, accepting that, has made such a huge difference. I stopped damaging myself. No one can be forced into taking medication. Tough love generally doesn’t work. Nothing changed for me until I was ready inside to make it change.

Taking that medication didn’t suddenly solve all my problems. From time to time I have continued seeing a counselor. We all have to deal with ups and downs; we all have good days and bad days. But my pill brought me back to normal. The mood swings were greatly diminished. I was able to sleep. I could read books. Then I had to decide if I was going to tell people about my depression. I was earning a considerable amount of money as a motivational speaker. I wondered if corporations would really want to hire a clinically depressed speaker to motivate their employees.

Eventually I decided I had no choice. I was the poster quarterback for the damage depression can cause. I began talking about it, telling men in particular it was okay to admit they were depressed, that they weren’t alone. I went public about it on an HBO documentary, admitting, “When I sit here and tell you with these cameras running that I’m a clinically depressed human being, it’s hard. It’s very hard to do.”

As I explained about my own experience, “Depression leads you to make terrible decisions, and for me trying to find the happiness created more misery, more pain. Physical problems we put casts on, we operate, or we give shots. I am so happy that I had the courage to get help.”

I pointed out that I understood the social stigma that came with a man admitting he has a problem, but that I hoped there were some men who took a deep breath and told themselves, “If Terry Bradshaw can do this, then I can do it.” I know for a fact that has made a difference. At different times men have come up to me—still in the frozen food section of grocery stores—and whispered, “I’m going through depression, and I’m taking this drug, and I appreciate what you’re doing.” Women have told me that I saved their marriages.

Being diagnosed, then finding an effective treatment, has impacted my life in so many positive ways. Among the things that happened was that I returned to Pittsburgh to join several of my teammates at Mike Webster’s funeral. I had stayed away from that city for a long time. In retrospect, much too long. But a lot of my feelings about the way I’d been treated there during my career had been tempered by the perspective of time—and the medicine.

It was impossible standing there not to think back to the thousands of times in practice and in games Mike and I went to the line of scrimmage together, how many times he snapped the ball sharply, then set out to protect me.

“It’s scary to know today it ends . . .” I paused and took a deep, deep breath. That was a difficult day. I concluded, maybe speaking to myself, “We should never allow the passing of a loved one to be the drawing card that keeps us together.”

Amen, Brother Mike, amen.