Craig Garrick: Ex-BYU star free of pain — at last

The last time I saw Craig Garrick was six years ago, and he sounded hopeful. He had just gotten his mangled left knee replaced after years of suffering, and life seemed promising. He was so excited about the new knee that one day when he was driving past a high school, he stopped the car and sprinted up and down the football field just for the sheer joy of running again, the way he once did as captain of the Brigham Young University football team.

Garrick believed the knee would enable him to escape his old demons and finally move on with his life. I believed him and wrote an optimistic story. Like him, I reasoned that since he no longer had his bad knee, he would be pain-free, and if he was pain-free he would no longer need pain-killing narcotics — but I was naive. I was crushed when I learned he had been arrested for narcotics prescription fraud again before my story was even published. A short time after that, I bumped into his wife Carol, and she told me, "I don't think Craig is going to live long."

Garrick died Sept. 3 at the age of 41. Officially, he died from complications resulting from abdominal surgery, but really he died from prolonged drug use, specifically narcotics and anabolic steroids.

Or maybe you could say he died from his obsession for football and from a single horrifying play that changed his life forever at the age of 18.

His old coach and neighbor, LaVell Edwards, spoke at his funeral. Garrick's teammates sat slumped on the pews, the old heroes from the undefeated 1984 national championship team, their hair graying, their faces a little more lined, and few of them terribly surprised it had come to this. Sitting in the congregation were Garrick's four children, his wife, two ex-wives, two brothers and four sisters, all of whom had been dragged through Garrick's tumultuous life of injuries, surgeries, arrests, odd jobs, marriages, drug rehabs and pain, always pain.

Surely, we all had the same thought: Such a waste . . . what could have been.

Despite his excesses and his failings, Garrick was irresistibly likable, a loving, kind, gentle giant who went out of his way to do things for people. He was the kind of guy who gave his national championship football helmet to a neighbor boy because, as he explained to his wife, "He has nothing."

But his flaws were an addiction to narcotics and a willingness to do anything to play football.

At the funeral Edwards spoke of how he once told Garrick's mother Janet that Craig shouldn't play football because of that bad knee, which was so badly deformed that it bent like a bow six inches to the side with every step.

"That's not an option," she replied. "If he didn't play, he would die."

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