So he played, and he died, 20 years later.

"We should do another story," Carol told me after the funeral, outside the chapel. "The last chapter. Craig would like that."

This is that story.

---

About three weeks before Garrick died, Kyle Whittingham, a former BYU linebacker and current assistant coach at the University of Utah, was waiting in the checkout line at Home Depot when a tall man wearing a Home Depot apron hailed him: "Hey, Coach Whittingham."

Whittingham gave the stranger a cursory hello and looked away, but the stranger persisted

"You don't recognize me, do you?"

Whittingham looked closer. "Craig? Is that you?"

It was Garrick, his childhood pal, whom he hadn't seen in a couple of years.

"He was a totally different looking guy," says Whittingham. Garrick's face was gaunt and angular from severe weight loss, the result of vomiting six, eight, 10 times a day for several months.

Whittingham and Garrick had set out together to achieve their dream of playing college football when they were in the eighth grade. They lifted weights together. They ran together. They played on the same Provo High team. They were both heavily recruited. They both went on to star at BYU.

"We were inseparable for 15 years," says Whittingham. "We were a pair."

But all these years later, their lives were dramatically different. At Home Depot, the differences would have been startling: Whittingham fit, muscular, prosperous; Garrick, raw-boned, pale, sick.

Garrick walked to the parking lot and talked to Whittingham and his children in their car.

"He told me that he was going to have stomach surgery, and I said I'd come see him in the hospital," says Whittingham.

Garrick had a large tumor in his stomach that was blocking the entrance to the small colon. It was bleeding into his stomach and had to be removed. "It was a routine operation for most people," says David Garrick, Craig's older brother and a recently retired surgeon. "I did a lot of them in the Gulf War." But in Garrick's case it was anything but routine. "He had so many problems that a tonsillectomy would have been a risk," says David.

Garrick had an enlarged heart, liver and kidney damage, internal bleeding, high blood pressure, anemia, poor circulation, arthritis and numerous tumors, among other problems. He had lost 30 pounds in just a few months because he was throwing up everything he ate, along with the blood that was leaking into his stomach. After examining Garrick, three different doctors were overwhelmed.

"I don't know what to do," they each told Carol.