Hiding In Plain Sight

Randy's eyes would grow wide when he received such heartbreaking news, the team's security chief, Coral Gables police major Ed Hudak, noticed. Then, in a flash, they'd narrow to a squint, and he'd become so ... so businesslike, so calculating, as if he'd rehearsed for this all his life. So discreet, materializing like a funeral director when he was needed to utter just a few well-chosen words, then dissolving into the background. So skillful at nudging players from the ledge of despair to the next assignment, the next opponent. So cool in the wake of Pata's murder that finally linebacker Jon Beason went to him, burning. "Half the team doesn't even seem like it bothers them!" he cried, both of them knowing that he meant Randy as well.

"Jon, you can't judge people by how they react to death," he replied. "Everyone deals with it differently. You'll never see me crying, but I hurt inside. I recruited Bryan. He was always in my office. I loved him. But if we dwell on it, this season will go down the drain. You've got too much to finish here, too many people depending on you."

Beason swallowed hard ... and agreed. A few weeks later Coker was fired and word spread through the team: Coach Shannon was a candidate for the job, right up there with those hotshot names. They'd watch him rise from his desk at 9 p.m., almost always the last coach to leave, reminding them to cut the lights and the TV in his office when they were done, then heading off God knows where. They'd wonder aloud about the coaching rumors and come to the same conclusion: They didn't want some stranger to walk in and take charge of the brotherhood. They wanted the stranger who'd just walked out that door.

WHO NEEDED to know that drugs and sex and despair had annihilated his family? Nobody. Not his players. Not his fishing buddies. Not even that well-meaning athletic director, fishing too, casting that big net with the Eagleton Question.

Nobody on the Dolphins staff had needed to know, one day seven years ago, that Randy even had an older brother named Ronald, let alone that Ronald had AIDS, let alone that his funeral would commence in an hour. Randy just slipped away from his office, slipped into the back of the church, stood by the door with his arms folded, slipped the money into the proper hands for the burial—but never went near it—then slipped back to work.

Nobody needed to know what it was like in grade school to see both your big brothers, twins Ronald and Donald, out on the street fried on cocaine, thrown out of your house by your mother. What it was like to see the needle tracks climb their arms, to tell them to stop and be told, "You ain't none of my daddy, squirt." To watch Ronald stop peeing when AIDS shut down his kidneys, then start gasping when it choked his lungs, then leave the world when it went after his heart.

Nobody needed to know what it was like to wear a mask to visit your brothers, to watch them both become infants, their skin going all wrinkled and gray, their bottoms in Pampers. Nobody needed to know that AIDS had done away with Donald a decade earlier. Pity—that's all it would bring. Damn near as deadly a disease.

Nobody needed to know about JoJo, the sister who'd raised Randy while his mom worked two shifts. The sister who doted on him, taught him hopscotch, took him to the park, the movies, the beach ... then moved into Pork 'n' Beans, the projects near the ones Randy grew up in, and started overdosing on 8-balls—heroin laced with cocaine. Nobody needed to know how her hair turned so spooky red and soft and her body wasted away when AIDS spat at the 21 pills she was taking a day and swept her away too. Ten days before the April 1989 day that should've been the shiniest of his life, when the Dallas Cowboys drafted him.

He'd learned as a boy to hit the floor each time there was a bang! and his mother cut the lights in Miami's Liberty City projects. He'd learned as he grew older to sit with his back to restaurant walls, eyes on the door, to check his watch and suddenly remember somewhere he needed to be when someone unknown and unsettling showed up. He could take no misstep in a world where a lover's fluids carried death and a cocktail with friends could get your head blown off.

So nobody needed to know what happened, a few months before Randy's third birthday, to the dad he was glued to almost every minute the man wasn't working. A.J. Shannon was just stopping at Frontier Bar for a drink after knocking off at a construction site back in '68 when a fight broke out between two of his buddies. Just trying to break it up when he got hit and got hot too, tumbling outside the bar in a brawl that ended with him being shot dead.