EPILOGUE

An Impact Beyond the Game

IN HIS EARLY dealings with the keepers of the Heisman Trophy, 2001 winner Eric Crouch was struck by a surreal and ominous thought.

“I was more concerned, being in those meetings, if the Heisman was going to be around,” the Nebraska quarterback said.

The aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks would, like nothing before it, test the foundation of the American institution, but in the years before the Heisman had already proven it was, if nothing else, resilient.

In 1960, when the DAC boasted a membership of 4,500 and had more on a waiting list, the athletic and social club to the elite included a fitness center, a 137-room hotel, seven banquet rooms, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool among its amenities. By 1998, that number of members was under 1,300. Its lower Manhattan home was in need of repairs and the club had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998 and owed New York City $5 million in back taxes.

A Federal Bankruptcy Court judge was considering ordering the club to be sold—likely to investors Richard Born and Steven Caspi, who had purchased the DAC’s $8.3 million mortgage. They offered to lease the club the space it needed, but the sides were at odds. The duo required the Heisman be displayed in the building’s lobby year-round, to which DAC president William J. Dockery replied, “We don’t want the trophy to be sullied by the likes of these real estate speculators.”

A sale would have potentially meant the end of the club, and, in turn, the Heisman.

The DAC dodged the sale in what Dockery called “the legal equivalent of a late touchdown pass.” A shot in the arm would come in the form of a three-year, $1.5 million corporate sponsorship with American Suzuki in the summer of 1999, and a year later, more relief came in the form of Connecticut real estate investment firm Cheslock, Bakker & Associates.

It made a $9.85 million payment to the DAC’s mortgage holder, effectively ending the DAC’s 14-month bankruptcy battle. The firm had also agreed to buy the upper twenty-two floors of the thirty-five-story building at 19 West Street for $8 million and provided upward of $11.5 million to satisfy the club’s remaining creditors. As part of the deal, Cheslock Bakker would sell thirteen floors back to the Downtown Athletic Club for $8 million, meaning the club could keep its cherished location, and the award with which it was synonymous.

The DAC had turned the corner, and did so with the assistance of the Heisman Trust, a nine-member committee that in October 1999 filed paperwork to become the holders of the Heisman Trophy trademark. Its mission, as its filing said, is “promoting interest, excellence and sportsmanship in intercollegiate football through the medium of an annual award.”

But it was also a maneuver to protect that asset regardless of what happened to the DAC. Even if someone acquired the club, it wouldn’t take ownership of the Heisman as well, but for these purposes, the Trust was the guardians of the trophy and it delegated the administration to the DAC.

Both the award and its home had been saved; then 9/11 came and altered that reality.

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the upper levels of the club were being gutted and the windows on the 14th floor and up were opened for added ventilation. Dust and debris from the attacks filled the rooms and overwhelmed the air ducts. While there was no structural damage, the building would need $20-$30 million in renovations.

The DAC’s membership—which was at 1,000 at the time, a 78 percent decrease from that peak in 1960—was also hit by the tragedy, as eleven of them died. The facility was closed for cleaning and the 2001 ceremony—the one in which Crouch received his award—would be moved from the fabled wood-paneled Heisman Room to the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, ending a sixty-seven-year run of announcements in its halls.

“The bottom line,” James E. Corcoran, the club’s president, wrote in a letter to the club’s 900 members that November, “is that if our members living and working out together on Wall Street for the past 20 years cannot come up with a solution to this challenge, then we all know what the final outcome will be.”

The plan was for the DAC to reopen in January, with a goal of expanding membership upward of 2,200, which could give the club $2.2 million to help pay its monthly mortgage. Compounding matters, the $8.3 million it borrowed to buy those bottom thirteen floors from Cheslock Bakker was due in August 2001.

“You’d think we could come up with a way to creatively finance it,” Corcoran told the New York Times in November 2001. “But it’s the whole asset-rich, cash-poor situation.”

The truth was, clubs like the DAC were dinosaurs, links to a bygone era when its clientele used it for banquets and other events. In the current climate, it could no longer keep up with fitness chains that didn’t require thousands a year in fees. The club laid off sixty-five of its seventy staffers and, losing $500,000 a month, had solicited helps from members, sending out 900 letters. Only 200 responded, and when it invited 500 to a meeting on the future of the DAC, only sixty were in attendance. In 2002, once again, the club declared bankruptcy.

US Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY., made a play to get the DAC, and other nonprofits, a share of $225 million in relief plan funds allocated by Congress, but to no avail. The DAC would never open its doors again.

On August 30, 2002, it failed to make its balloon payment. The club’s floors were also in need of $10 million in repairs, and the developer that owned the rest of the building turned the DAC’s floors into luxury condominiums called the Downtown Club.

An icon without a home, the trophy ceremony jumped from the Marriott Marquis to the Yale Club in 2002 (Carson Palmer’s winning year) and ’03 (Jason White) and the New York Hilton in ’04 (Matt Leinart). That’s the environment Crouch points to when he wonders “if the Heisman was going to be around,” before it settled into its current hosting site, the PlayStation Theater (also called Nokia Theater Times Square from 2005–10 and Best Buy Theater from 2010–15).

Gone was the splendor of the DAC, its walls dripping with the words of decades worth of winners. The Trust tried to recapture some of that destination feel in a partnership with the Sports Museum of America, which had hopes of hosting the presentation before it went under in 2009. Now, the trophy’s backers reside in an office building on Broadway near Wall Street, with a staff of two full-time employees—executive director Rob Whalen and coordinator Tim Henning. The Trust—all of whom work pro bono—oversees the operation.

It’s a lean outfit, but the Heisman has survived, driven by two pillars: the award and its charity work.

“We have a dual mission,” Dockery said. “Number one is to maintain the integrity of the trophy … and the second, which is almost as important as that to the trustees, is the charitable mission. To give something back, to be able to make some small contribution to the common good, which we do.”

The Trust has made donations in excess of $7.5 million since 2004, benefitting over 200 registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, and since the 2006 Heisman weekend, that has also included former winners, who for their participation receive checks to pass along to foundations of their choosing.

“I’ve definitely taken advantage of that and given to nonprofits in the Omaha and Nebraska areas, which is just wonderful,” Crouch said. “It’s great. It’s helping a lot of kids.”

Through partnerships with the likes of ESPN, Nissan, and Wendy’s as well as licensing deals, the Trust is generating more than $5.6 million annually.

“This is what the Heisman does in the offseason, is to work on the charitable portions of it,” Dockery said. “We don’t accept donations. We earn these monies that we give away.”

That side of the Heisman has become magnified with the inclusion of the Heisman Humanitarian Award. Established in 2006, its recipients are sporting figures that have impacted communities, counting Olympian Joey Cheek (’06), soccer legend Mia Hamm (’09), NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon (’12), and Hall of Fame baseball manager Joe Torre (’14) among its winners.

The intention wasn’t to bring the charitable side of the trophy to the limelight as much as it was to show younger generations what’s possible.

“Maybe encourage other people to say ‘Marty Lyons [’11 winner] is doing this’ or ‘David Robinson [’13] is doing that,’” Dockery said, “‘If they can find time and energy to do that, maybe I can do something on a smaller level.’ So it’s to encourage people to emulate them also.”

The Heisman’s recipients are doing that on their own. Charlie Ward (’97) works with the Booker T. Washington Quarterback Club, Doug Flutie’s (’84) Flutie Foundation aids families affected by autism, and Tim Tebow (’07) has his own foundation that, among its work, helps children fighting terminal illnesses, offers adoption aid, and has held 200 proms for 32,000 people with special needs.

It’s 1996 winner Danny Wuerffel, though, who has made charity his life’s second act, and has benefitted from the Trust’s donations. With parallels to the Heisman’s own fight for survival, the former Florida quarterback’s work has been a testament to perseverance.

“How do you leverage whatever sphere of influence you have and resources and talents to invest that in a purpose bigger than yourself?” Wuerffel said. “As a Heisman winner, there is a phenomenal platform that has been created and stewarded by others that I was honored to be included in and be a part of … so how do I steward that gift?”

Wuerffel isn’t one to turn away when he feels he’s being led toward something. During his playing days with the New Orleans Saints, he had heard of Desire Street Ministries—which was founded in 1990 by Mo Leverett to aid the 9th Ward neighborhood—from several people, then received a brochure in his mailbox.

“[I] was really fascinated with the mission and the vision,” Wuerffel said of its stated goal “to love our neighbor by revitalizing impoverished neighborhoods through spiritual and community development.” The idea was that Desire Street would begin with its own constituents and then expand its work to other areas in need.

He invited Leverett to speak to his teammates at a chapel service and in turn, the quarterback was asked to come to see the impoverished community. Wuerffel can still recall that eye-opening experience.

“I remember driving into the neighborhood the first time and was just really awestruck by how old the project buildings were,” he said. “I couldn’t believe, they looked like they were condemned and they should have been torn down years ago … and yet at the same time I saw a girl walk out of one of the doors carrying her little doll, and I realized that she still lived there.”

Desire Street had established a church; a private school for boys, known as Desire Street Academy; a children’s medical clinic; and community gardens. Wuerffel played his last NFL game in 2002, and two years later he began working full time with Desire Street, serving as the school’s development director and helping with fund-raising. He saw himself as “really a supportive part of the piece.”

Hurricane Katrina would alter Desire Street’s plans and push Wuerffel to the forefront when it hit in August 2005. The group’s $3 million facilities were located two blocks from the breach on the west side of the canal and it was submerged in eight feet of water, while the people it served scattered across the country as they lost their homes. Desire Street leadership had dealt with financial problems leading up to the storm, wondering whether they could make payroll—“Which wasn’t too uncommon in the early years,” Wuerffel said. But the community was exasperated by the hurricane.

Everything the staff had built had been destroyed.

“Our staff was really broken and shaken up as well,” Wuerffel said, “and you put all those factors together and you do have to wonder, ‘Is this something that was an amazing gift in the time that it existed and the lives that it impacted in those first fifteen years?’”

Wuerffel and his wife Jessica had made contact with eighty of the school’s students, though one he was close with had not been located and many suspected he had not survived. “I just remember one feeling of being just like between a rock and a hard place,” Wuerffel said. “I had the image from Exodus where Moses and the Israelites were up against the Red Sea and then you have this army coming at him and it was like, ‘Man, if something doesn’t happen, miraculously, we’re stuck.’”

He heard word of a facility in the Florida panhandle at Camp Timpoochee that happened to be owned by the University of Florida, which Wuerffel had helped to win four straight SEC championships and the 1996 national title. He drove to Gainesville to speak to school officials and it was during that meeting that Desire Street Academy found its evacuation spot—in a town called Niceville, Florida.

“That became available, and just that whole experience, was incredibly overwhelming,” Wuerffel said.

Leverett resigned in 2006 and Wuerffel took over as executive director, and while the school later set up in Baton Rouge, the state of the economy robbed it of the donations it needed to stay afloat and it closed its doors.

In the summer of 2015 construction began on Desire Community Square, an extension of the foundation that is to be run by local nonprofits Abundance of Desire, Daughters of Charity, and Kids of Excellence. Meanwhile, Desire Street Ministries is now headquartered in Atlanta, but it hasn’t lost its connection to New Orleans. It has moved forward with a twist on that vision of strengthening communities.

“The bigger question was, ‘How do you grow? How do you expand?’” Wuerffel said. “That’s where we did have a shift in that we decided not to start and run multiple Desire Street ministries that were kind of branded by us and managed and run by us.”

Instead, it empowers. The ministry works with individuals across the country who are living in neighborhoods and supports them, taking advantage of the work they have already done instead of trying to start from scratch with their own people.

“I think it’s a highly efficient investment of time and resources in that you don’t have to recreate wheels,” Wuerffel said. “Doing inner-city work, one of the biggest components is about being present and building trust and that takes a very long time, and to find people that have already been living in a neighborhood, some cases all their lives and in other cases, four, five, six years, they already earned some credibility in their neighborhood and some trust momentum.

“Usually at the same time there’s a weariness. It’s really, really hard work to live and serve in neighborhoods. There’s so much need and what we find so often is people with great hearts and great intentions end up burning out, it’s just overwhelming.”

Desire Street—like the Heisman—has overcome. Its leader has overcome as well. In 2011, Wuerffel noticed he was losing sensation in his legs and arms after battling a stomach virus. He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis. During his recovery, Wuerffel was advised to stay immobile.

At first, he had plans of binge-watching movies, but then he saw it as a unique opportunity for true personal reflection, devoid of distraction.

“Just sitting with whatever emotions come up and kind of going deep into your heart and soul was just really difficult and a beautiful time for my life,” Wuerffel said. “[It] forced me to slow down, which is really, really hard to do these days, and I think it has led me into deeper places in my own soul, to discover parts of my life maybe I didn’t want to admit existed, and really do my best to be a kind and humble person and define deeper parts of my life.”

Through this process, he has come to more strongly embody the Heisman. Wuerffel did so as a player as the record-breaking face of Steve Spurrier’s Fun n’ Gun offensive evolution. Now, he’s representing the other side of the trophy, that lesser known but maybe more impactful side.

“If I have five lives to live, there are several things I would consider doing with it,” Wuerffel said, “but I believe as a Christian you have one life to live.… I like the language of ‘you have one life to give.’”