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By Billy Witz
PITTSBURGH – Jamain Stephens didn’t want much presentation when he showed up years ago for his first day of practice at Central Catholic High School. His father, of the same name, a former pittsburgh Steelers first-round recruit.
But Stephens still made a memorable entrance, dressed in a white T-shirt, as required through all the freshmans, who splashed with red Kool-Aid spots. A correct nickname was born: Juice.
Wherever Stephens went, in high school and then at the University of California, a small university in southwestern Pennsylvania, he brought juice to the room.
Stephens, a mountain of young men, measuring 6 feet and 3 inches and about 350 pounds, betting a defensive tackle. His feet were so big that his best coaches at the school went to the Steelers to locate the 19 peaks in length. His hands were so big that he held a pill in the palm of his hand as if it were a phone.
His personality was equally disproportionate. Juice had a smile on his face, even, as one former instructor said, when he wasn’t smiling. In Cal. U. , as the school is called, he was regularly the first player to play a new recruit. just count on it to facilitate discussions when evening meals inevitably go on. The campus minister said any parent would be happy to see him pass out with his daughter.
“If you see Juice as a human being, you see a wonderful human being,” said Garth Taylor, a young football coach who has known Stephens since he was a kid. “His brain is twice as big as that. “
Stephens’ effect explains why so many others were shaken before this month when the senior died of a blood clot after being hospitalized for Covid-19 and pneumonia.
His death devastated Guy at his best school, where he had repainted this summer, and at his university, where he played the wonderful boy on campus, known for showing off his basketball skills in intramural games, collecting friends for a week. Krispy Kreme runs and advises young people at home.
But his death has also had an effect on the sports scene, as he is believed to be the first school football player whose death can be attributed to the virus.
Most schools in the country, adding Cal. U. , which plays in the N. C. A. A. Level Division II, have cancelled or postponed fall sports due to the coronavirus pandemic, but some schools have advanced, hoping to recover billions in TV winnings and, in all likelihood, ticket sales. in October, reversing an earlier resolution to wait until at least next year. The Pac-12 made a similar turn on Thursday.
Part of the justification for the game is that young athletes, even if they are carriers and transmit the virus, are unlikely to die from it. While this is largely true, the virus may have other serious effects and dangers have shown more serious for blacks and those with higher frame mass indexes, such as many liners.
So while cases persist among school football players (Louisiana state coach Ed Orgeron said last week that “most” of his players had the virus), Stephens’ death may not be his last. More than 10,000 players are expected to meet this fall.
“It’s a billion-dollar industry, I get it,” Stephens’ mother Kelly Allen said in an interview. “But in the face of the threat of the lives of these children. Nothing beats that.
Allen spoke last week in a Catholic central courtyard overlooking the football field, just after visiting a funeral home to prepare for the burial of his only son. Although the California campus in the United States has been closed since March and football activities have since closed, Allen said his son returned to school in mid-August so he could work out with his teammates during a spring season. Players were screened for coronavirus or even subjected to temperature checks on their return.
Allen, who spent Monday, his son’s birthday, visiting his grave, said he had many questions for which he would look for answers.
“My center is shattered into a million pieces,” he says. “I can’t even describe the pain I feel. But do I have a fight in me?Absolument. Si saves the pain of some parents, absolutely. “
Although the University of California allowed students to enter campus, the school reported six cases of Covid-19 this month among students who returned to nearby Vulcan Village, an extensive 770-bed student housing complex where Stephens had lived since his freshman year. .
A school spokeswoman, Christine Kindl, said the school is not guilty of testing or locating contacts with community academics because it is not on campus and does not belong to the university, but to a nonprofit organization that budgets student organizations, Student Association, Inc. State fitness officials are guilty of locating contactArray,” he said.
The distance between the student settlement and the university extends so far: academics living in Vulcan Village pay the college rent, as well as the tuition fees that are sent to the nonprofit.
The university’s president, Geraldine M. Jones, rejected an interview request to discuss the school’s coronavirus policies, but Justin Schiefelbein, manager of Vulcan Village, did not respond to a message.
Cal. U. , an audience with 6,842 registrations last year, is stuck in an elbow on the Monongahela River, an hour south of Pittsburgh. Allen took his son there on August 17 and searched him at his ground floor apartment in Vulcan Village. which is popular with football players because it is adjacent to the football stadium.
When they arrived, Allen cleaned the two-bedroom furnished suite, which has a kitchen with furniture, with a disinfectant and left his son a bag of masks, masses of Lysol and a reminder to stay away from the vacation, which they have connected. epidemics in schools across the country.
Stephens sought to return so he could exercise with his teammates, even if it was in small groups, his mother said. He was determined to make the most of his senior season, no matter when that might happen. he had lost 15 pounds during the summer with the help of a nutritionist and wanted to lose forty-five more during the start of the 2021 season. To help him, his mother left him ready meals.
The sport had taken root early for Stephens.
When he was old enough to sleep in his own bed, Stephens wrapped his hands around a baseball at night and pressed a football and basketball on his pillow, though he rarely saw his father, who moved to North Carolina after five years in the NFL. Stephens started playing football at the age of 6. He was so tall that due to weight limits, he was forced to play with children twice his age.
“For five years, it was essentially a version of the doll,” said Taylor, one of his young coaches. “His legs were whipped, but his brain was such that he returned the next day.
Stephens befriended Taylor’s son, Erick, and they have become so close that they told other people they were cousins. Juice enjoyed asking other people what position they think Erick is playing in, which measures 6 feet and four inches and weighs 265 pounds. supporter or closed wing, and Juice laughed, revealing that Erick played the quarterback at West Liberty University.
The inner joke also bore a message: don’t prejudge me.
Juice considered himself more than an object tied to a desk in the defensive line. When he played wrestling, he would take passes from the air with one hand, like Odell Beckham Jr. On the basketball court, he played like a circular Stephen. Curry, hypnotizing an dissatisfied defender with his haggling and footwork, then bouncing and draining a triple.
He understood how the game can simply connect.
When Chain Gang, his main school’s defense nickname, accrued every Thursday for an open costume forum, Stephens was the first to comfort a teammate whose mother had breast cancer and another whose father had just died, said Dave Fleming, Central Catholic’s Defensive Coordinator.
Kurt Hinish, a defensive lineman at Notre Dame who played with Stephens at Central Catholic, loved the arguments they would have when he took Stephens home after practice. with whom you have partnered, ” said Hinish. ” Juice will interact with you in an original way. “
This empathy is also the source of a step forward in dating in recent years with his father.
“My son and I had a wonderful date,” Elder Stephens said in a phone interview. “That does not mean that there has been no tension over the years; this does not mean that there has been no separation over the years. by the time I wasn’t there as I deserve, as they say, there are two aspects of every story, my thing is that I love my son and my dates with him are getting better. I tell you this: Jamain Allen Stephens was the most productive component of me. “
If young Stephens enthusiastically opened his center to others, his eyes were open.
She saw that her mother, the others, qualified for housing assistance as part of her homework with the Pittsburgh Housing Authority, and how she took two more tasks, as a representative of the bank’s visitor service at night and preparing for weekend tax returns, to pay for tuition. He noted how the men who ran Garfield Park Gators, his youth program, taught younger children, usually black children, more than football and guided them in complicated cases at home, at school, or in other spaces in their lives.
Juice and Erick had visions of one day opening a world-class school so that it wasn’t just a privileged few who ended up in a position like Central Catholic, where they can flourish academically, socially and athletically.
“We lost about 15 friends from other formative years to gun violence and things they shouldn’t have lost their lives for,” Taylor said. “Our dream is to open a school in Pittsburgh where everyone can be precisely what they are supposed to do. Be in this world. “
Erick last spoke to Stephens two days before his death. They were following a long-standing ritual: seeing their favorite athlete, LeBron James. They usually watched together, but this time they were on the phone while James’ Los Angeles Lakers took a big one but they were getting me back for a playoff win over the Houston Rockets. “He said, “They’re about to kick me out of the hospital, I’m going crazy with this game, ” said Taylor.
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By that time, it had been just over a week since Stephens began to feel unwell.
When her mom spoke to him on the phone on Friday, August 28, she asked him if he was congested and he told her that his allergies were acting. But he also said his roommate, Josh Dale, had battered what he thought was a cold.
“The next day he said, “Oh, I put Josh’s cold on him, ” said Allen.
That night, Stephens attended a party in his building, but left soon after because he was tired, according to one of his teammates. School officials didn’t say if any of the six coronavirus cases reported in Vulcan Village came here since the party. In an email to citizens two days later, Schiefelbein, the resort manager, said the party had exceeded the 10-person limit for rallies and warned that similar parties can lead to dismissal.
When Allen called his son on August 31, Stephens slept unusually at 10 a. m. She began reading her a list of Covid-19 symptoms: headaches, sore throats, loss of taste and others. “No, no, no, no, no, ” said Allen. ” And when I got hit at the bottom of the list, I said ‘diarrhoea’ and he said, ‘Mom, when I was given up this morning, I had diarrhea.
Allen picked up Stephens and he was hospitalized later that day after testing positive for coronavirus. A chest X-ray revealed that he had pneumonia.
Stephens told some friends he was in the hospital and sent them a Snapchat photo of a hospital shoe that covered just 3 feet on his massive feet. Doctors transferred him to intensive care for several days to build up his oxygen. He told friends that he expected to be released soon, but was fired the next day after saying he got dizzy while taking a shower.
“And be careful, all this time he’s talking, he’s laughing, we’re joking like we do, ” said Allen.
But the next morning, Allen won a call from a medical assistant: An ultrasound had a blood clot in one of Stephens’ lungs.
Allen called his brother to tell him what was going on, and he went up the stairs to get dressed and move to the hospital. In doing so, a nurse called again with a pressing message: Come on, they were given worse.
“I drove like a bat out of hell, ” said Allen, avoiding containing tears.
“When they took me there, they dragged me to the workplace to get the doctor to communicate to me, and I was just yelling, ‘Where’s my son?’And then, when the chaplain came around the corner and told me he was gone, he just ed screaming. The rest is just a blur, honestly, after that.
For nearly a week Allen did not return home, stayed with his sister and comforted through his brother and other relatives, with the death of his son four months after his mother’s death.
He needs to make it clear that he doesn’t blame Dale, his son’s roommate, even though he had that impulse.
“I don’t need this young man to torture himself, because I’m sure he already feels some guilt,” he says, “This pain I feel, I don’t wish it on anyone. “
In an outdoor interview at his apartment the day after Stephens’ death, Dale said they spoke less than 48 hours before his death. “It’s so surreal that I’m going to be here all the time and he’s just gone. “said. ” I’m still in shock. I don’t need it yet. “
He added: “This is the first user I met when I transferred here, the first user to take me to campus. “Hey, brother, I’ll show you, do this, don’t do this, eat here, make you not eat here. “
Dale said he expected the effects of coronavirus testing, but he had no symptoms. The New York Times followed with Dale several days later, and a guy who knew himself as Dale’s father, James, returned the message to him. He disputed Allen’s version that his son had said he had fallen ill with Dale: “It’s the other way around,” he said before hanging up.
Allen, this edition is a lie.
“Josh knows he’s sick, ” he said.
Stephens buried on Friday. The funeral procession of the Temple of God in Christ of the Pentecostal Church crossed the winding streets of the city until he reached the allegheny cemetery, where he was buried under a maple tree.
As school football season begins, few college presidents or convention commissioners have invoked Jamain Stephens, at least publicly.
Your father, like anyone else, understands why.
“As a competitor, as a father with young people in the game, there is a power and emotion that accompanies him,” the elder Stephens said. “It may lead us not to think obviously of something we don’t know enough about. “
Stephens said his son’s autopsy showed that the right side of his center was enlarged due to the Covid-19 The effect, one of many related to the virus, echoes his time in the NFL, when the league downplayed the severity of concussions.
“It’s about money,” he says. We’re going to get there, not whatever. What if we lose some lives? “
Stephens speaking just before Thursday’s viewing. He attracted more than 500 people, adding dozens of his son’s ex-partners.
Some have played at universities such as Penn State, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame and Clemson. They are tall, strong and imbued with the sense of invulnerability demanded by football, but after Stephens’ death, they were as moved as anyone who has lost to the coronavirus.
That night, Allen said in a phone interview that many players, although they had shared their pain, had continually repeated what they probably wouldn’t admit to anyone else: an awkwardness for playing football, the pandemic.
“That makes Covid look real,” Allen said, “having to look at his friend and teammate in a coffin. “
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