Articles

The Pat Summerall story

By David Palmer

Pat Summerall’s epiphany, that moment of truth when he knew that he was in serious trouble with alcohol, came while he was broadcasting the 1992 annual Masters Golf tournament at Augusta, Georgia for CBS. It was something he had done and done impeccably for 24 years.

In a radio interview this year with Dennis Rainey, President of Family Life in Little Rock, Summerall, a former Arkansas Razorback, New York Giant and premiere broadcaster, described his ghastly confrontation with the truth.

“I was staying in Augusta in a strange house…I had a few drinks before I went to bed, and I got sick. I got up at three in the morning, and I went into the bathroom and threw up, and I looked at—this is kind of gross—but I looked at what had come out of me, and I didn’t realize what it was. It was part of my stomach, and it was blood. And I thought, “what the heck, what’s wrong with me?”

“On March 4, 2007, combat veteran Chris Dana, put a .22 against his head, muffled it with a comforter and ended his life as quietly as a book drops. He had PTSD and didn’t get the help he needed.”

These deeply affecting words were written by Eric Newhouse, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, in his book, The Faces of Combat: PTSD and TBI. (PTSD stands for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and TBI stands for Traumatic Brain Injury).

Drinking: A Love Story

By Caroline Knapp

Freelance journalist Knapp began drinking in her early teens and continued unabatedly until she "hit bottom" in 1995 and checked herself into a rehab at the age of 36.

During that time she managed to graduate with honors from Brown and have a successful career as a journalist, and few people suspected she had a problem with the bottle.

Here she recounts the years of denial that helped her rationalize the blackouts, innumerable hangovers, broken relationships and family tensions characteristic of the alcoholic's story.

Knapp interweaves her personal history with factual information about alcohol abuse, including frequent references to the AA meetings she's attended. Here's a confession utterly devoid of self-pity, an extraordinarily lucid and very well-written personal account of a common addiction that is filled with insights as well as a comprehensive treatment of the subject.

The text reproduces a questionnaire for alcoholism made up by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

Note: Carolyn Knapp died June 3, 2002, at the age of 43.

By David Palmer

On a winter night in 1976, Mary T. decided she would kill her alcoholic husband, when he came home from work.

Frustrated by her inability to control his drinking, Mary finally said to herself, “It’s not the drinking, it’s him. He’s the problem, and I need to get rid of him.” Attracted to the image of herself as a widow, she had rejected the divorce option and went straight to murder.

As to the means, she eliminated both an ice pick in the neck and running over him in the family car. Instead she chose drowning him in the bathtub when he came home drunk, making it look like an accident.

With her mind made up, the first night he showed up drunk, she hit him. When he fell, he hit his head on the coffee table, and it knocked him out. She filled the tub, took off his clothes and pushed him in, and he slipped beneath the surface.