He would be 50-years old now, only the number doesn’t quite compute.
Fifty is the age of graying hair and widening midsections. Fifty is the age of bad knees and tightening lower backs. At 50, Pete Rose had been banned from baseball, Muhammad Ali was nine years past his last fight.
Fifty is the turf of soon-to-be grandfathers and honorary board members.
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Fifty is … old.
So the idea of Bryan Higgins, eternally gap-toothed and boyish, sitting here at 50, well, it doesn’t make sense.
To those of us who came of age in Mahopac, New York in the 1980s, the kid will eternally be a kid. He is in the photograph you see accompanying this article. He is a 6-foot-1, 190-pound strong safety, dashing down the sideline of Mahopac High School’s football field, ball tucked beneath his right arm after a pick, the glow of prep glory reflecting from his blue-and-gold helmet. He is walking the hallway alongside his pretty girlfriend, Celeste, high fiving pals as they pass. He is voted Friendliest Classmate in the yearbook. He is the third oldest of six siblings, from a loud, beautiful Irish Catholic family in an Irish Catholic town. He is young and popular and optimistic and gifted and …
Bryan Higgins is dead.
It’s a harsh four-word sentence to type, and an even harsher one to read. There are people we grow up with who—if we’re being honest—are half expected to die young. The kid snorting co*ke in the bathroom. The kid who drives 120 mph.
But Bryan Higgins?
Bryan Higgins?
Thirty years have passed, and it still doesn’t make sense. I am from a small town; not altogether unlike the place where Michael J. Fox winds up in “Doc Hollywood.” We had a big lake, a bunch of pizza joints, a microscopic “downtown” that featured a Carvel, a bank, Rodak’s Deli and a barber shop operated by an Italian man named Carmelo (Who greeted a young customer’s mother with a wink and a lone inquiry—“Over or around the ear?”).
What it lacked in excitement, Mahopac compensated for with familiar pleasures. There was the annualJuly 4Father Mooney eight-mile race. There was the volunteer fire department carnival. There was water skiing and sledding and, on fall Saturday afternoons, Mahopac High football.
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Like most who play small-town sports, Bryan Higgins wasn’t destined to become a famous gridiron stud. He was too skinny, too slow (he probably ran a 4.9-ish 40), too raw. Long and lean, not compact and muscular.
But, in Mahopac, Higgins stood out. First, because he was the all-too-rare star athlete who didn’t particularly concern himself with being a star athlete. In those days, the long gray hallways of Mahopac High were overrun by cliques. The “jocks” over there, the “nerds” over there, the “freaks” over there, the “goths” over there. “Bryan didn’t care,” says Christopher Keevins, his childhood friend and the Indians quarterback. “Since elementary school, he made a point of approaching people who were different, sitting down, chatting it up. People would see that and want to emulate it.”
Second, because he wasn’t a traditional football player. The Indians held their games on Saturdays, and players were mandated to take Sundays off. Only Higgins was also a member of the West-Put Gaels, a Gaelic football team made up of the children of Irish immigrants. It was about pride. “On Saturdays, we hated each other,” says Tommy Feighery, who attended arch-rival Carmel High and also played for the Gaels. “But on Sundays we played side by side. Once a Higgins grits his teeth, you know you’re in trouble.
“Bryan—he was a leader. A real leader. You saw him play and you wanted to be just like him. I hated Mahopac, but I loved him.That’sinspiration.”
Upon graduating in 1986, Higgins agreed to play football at Albany, a Division III state school with a mediocre program and a facility the size of a postage stamp. For Mahopac, though, it was as if he were going off to star at Oklahoma or Notre Dame. He was our guy.Our guy. The local weekly,The Putnam Trader, ran a feature on his decision. This wasn’t mere news. This was big news. Heroes don’t stop being heroes once they depart. If anything, the mythology mounts as we watch them develop and grow and emerge.
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That’s why, in my mind, Bryan Higgins must still be at Albany, practicing with the team. Or maybe he’s relaxing in his dorm room on the first floor of Hamilton Hall. Perhaps he’s on the phone with Celeste, who’s matriculating at Syracuse. Or hanging with his older brother Tommy, also a member of the Great Danes.
Sports can serve as a weird mental reaffirmation of our Ponce de León impulses. It’s the part of me that sincerely believes Len Bias is somewhere shooting jumpers in a gymnasium; Lyman Bostock sits in the Angels Stadium medical room, itching to come off the DL. Young athletes aren’t supposed to die. Hell, they all but scream, “I’m alive!”
Alas …
The afternoon of April 21, 1988 was unremarkable on the campus of SUNY Albany, but for a ritual being performed by the brothers of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The seasonal initiation period was coming to a close, and one of the final acts was for the new pledges to walk—clad but in underwear—into a 150 yard-long pond known as Indian Lake. There was nothing devious about the event. Students were sober. The university had granted permission. The sun was out. No one was being asked to lick a dead fish. “It was the idea of coming out of the water as a brother,” says Steven Balet, Bryan’s roommate and a member of the fraternity. “That’s all.”
As the two dozen or so young men eyed the pond, Higgins—the most eager of newbies—sprinted toward the shore, then leapt and stretched his body into a full racing dive. “He was the first one in,” says Balet. “He drifted out the farthest, and at first it didn’t seem like anything was wrong.” Two additional soon-to-be brothers followed, and that’s when it became clear. According to Balet, one of the pledges started to flail his arms. Another rose to the surface in a dead man’s float. They were both rescued. Higgins, in deepest of all, sunk down toward the bottom of the muck. A moment passed before the nightmarish realization took hold: There was a current charging through Indian Lake, the result of a faulty underground cable.
“(Bryan) was under there for like 30 seconds dying of electricity,” Dick Mancino, a fraternity brother, told ABC News at the time. “He floated up and he said, ‘God help me!’”
“He popped up, then went down,” says Balet. “Then—just bubbles.”
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A fraternity member rushed to call the fire department, and rescuers arrived quickly on the scene. But because the water was electrified the effort was tedious and complicated. Cameras caught local paramedics pulling Higgins from the pond, then administering CPR on his lifeless mouth and bare chest.
It was too late.
“I saw it all,” Balet says. “You don’t forget that sort of thing. Ever.”
His number sits atop the high school scoreboard. It’s there, a big No. 88 beneath the words HOME OF THE INDIANS. Thirty years after his death, Bryan Higgins remains the only Mahopac football player to ever have his digits retired.
And, truly, it matters. To Bryan’s family members. To Bryan’s friends. They see the honor and think,That’s lovely. That’s genuinely lovely.
And yet …
Some things can never be completely smoothed over.
Joanne Higgins, one of Bryan’s two younger sisters, can’t forget her mother Angela receiving the call from Albany and breaking down. “She was crying and crying,“ Joanne says. “I remember thinking, ‘It has to be a mistake, right? It’s a mistake.” Keevins, the longtime friend, was told by his mother there was some terrible news. “I thought it was a grandparent,” he says. “I asked, ‘Is it Grandma?’ She said, ‘No—Bryan.’ Bryan?Bryan Higgins?What?What?I’m not sure I’ve ever processed it.”
The funeral was held at St. John’s Church in Mahopac. Bagpipers played the old Irish ballad, “Minstrel Boys,” about a warrior going to his eternal reward. A bus delivered the fraternity members from Albany. Bishop James P. Mahoney stared out at the hundreds of mourners and asked, over their sobs, “Do we say to ourselves, ‘Is that 20 years wasted?’ Not at all. Because it isn’t just school or teams or friends. Bryan Higgins was a presence. He was a person who graced us by being with us and in our midst.”
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As life has marched on, the pain comes and goes. It’s not nearly as hard as it once was, Joanne says, but every April 21 feels like a dagger to the heart. When she thinks of her brother, she wonders what the future held. Would Bryan be the married father of five? Would he be a successful businessman? A coach? Would he live in Mahopac, perhaps on the 11 acres where he and his siblings were raised? Would he look back fondly at his college days? Would he still have his hair? His gapped-tooth smile? His boyishness?
Who would Bryan Higgins be?
A Mahopac hero.
(Photo courtesy of the Higgins family)
