The Long, Dark Winding Road of Charlie Wysocki, Former Maryland Star

Dozens of youngsters had shown up at an indoor sports complex in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on a muggy June day to participate in the Fourth Charlie Wysocki Football Camp. The camp's namesake didn't take part in many of the activities, watching from the metal bleachers nearby, or a table during lunch break and, when the drills moved outdoors, from under a tree.

The former Maryland running back and star eagerly signed autographs and posed for pictures with the campers and their parents, but never talked to them at length -- nor did he say much to a reporter chronicling it all. He spoke slowly, deliberately, often with one-word or one-phrase answers, and seemed distracted or disinterested much of the time.

"It's really not Charlie,'' Daniel LaMagna said later that day. LaMagna owns a semipro football team in the area, the Northeast Pennsylvania Miners, and organized the camp in honor of his friend of the last six years. LaMagna said that Wysocki also had a radio interview scheduled for the weekend to publicize the camp, but Wysocki's mood had darkened enough in recent days to convince him to call it off.

Most of the time, LaMagna said, "Charlie will talk your ear off. He will talk your ear off. There were times where he would call you every day -- he's like a second wife.'' LaMagna laughed, then added, "Now that he doesn't call, I say, 'Wow, why is he not calling?' "

He generally knew why, though, and a month later Wysocki was, indeed, calling and talking and laughing and, most significantly, recalling details from more than three decades earlier. The variations in mood, temperament and communication are symptoms of what has been described as a severe form of bipolar disorder. Wysocki, 50, has suffered from it for nearly his entire adult life, along with between five million and six million other Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

By Wysocki's count, he has been hospitalized in mental institutions 20 different times; the current 15 months he has been out on his own is one of the longest stretches of the last 30 years. He takes 10 pills a day -- five in the morning, five at night -- for the bipolar disorder, as well as insulin to control his diabetes. He is unable to work and lives off of a little over $600 a month from government disability payments.

Right now, he can recite those details clearly. On his good days and his bad, he can also tell tales of his life before mental illness gripped him: a life in which he was a candidate for the 1981 Heisman Trophy. When he either held or was about to break all of Maryland's rushing records, many of which still stand today. When he was named Offensive Player of the Game in the 1980 Tangerine Bowl after running for a bowl-record 159 yards. ...

When movie studios were negotiating with him and his adoptive parents -- a white Wilkes-Barre couple, Stan and Patricia Wysocki -- for a story that was The Blind Side a year before Sandra Bullock graduated from high school and five years before Michael Oher was born. When Rocky Bleier, the former Steeler who returned to the NFL after being injured in combat in Vietnam, sat in his living room and said that Wysocki's life could be turned into a movie just as his had been. ...

Even when he went on tour with the other '81 Heisman candidates, including Ohio State's Art Schlichter -- later to be suspended by the NFL for gambling -- with whom he said he played cards for high stakes during a trip to Hawaii, going up $60,000 at one point. When he wanted to leave with his winnings, he said, "he said he was gonna throw me off the hotel balcony.''

Wysocki still believes his life story is good enough for the big screen, or even the small screen. He also talks a lot about a book, which others have already started compiling. "The Blind Side is one story. Gale Sayers (whose 1971 memoir was eventually made into Brian's Song) is another story, Rocky Bleier is another story,'' he said. "But everybody I talk to says I've got a better story than them.''

Before that, though, those close to him persistently push Wysocki to tell his story every chance he can. Even in between stays in the hospital -- most often Clarks Summit State Hospital just northeast of where he grew up, "pretty much my home for several years,'' he said -- he made time to talk about where he had been and where he eventually went.

LaMagna, a former small-college football coach who first came to the Miners as a coach, created the camp specifically to raise awareness of Wysocki's condition and to raise money for mental health-related organizations. Wysocki's story resonated so strongly that one of the players -- safety Matt Whitman -- painted a portrait of him in his college uniform, and the team plans to auction it off.

Wysocki also began speaking to groups on behalf of the suburban Washington-based National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) about five years ago, and officials there encouraged him to expand that as well. Marshall Epstein, a manager in the group's education, training and peer support center, said he is steering Wysocki toward an active role in Mental Health Awareness Week in October, and to NAMI's national convention in Chicago next summer.

"Charlie has insight, which is good; that's one of his strong points,'' Epstein said. "He just has a hard case.''

"Some of this medicine makes you forget stuff,'' Wysocki said. "But I haven't forgotten anything.''

That goes for the best portions of his life, and the worst. The best can still be seen in Maryland's record books and heard about from those who saw him play. The worst includes at least one suicide attempt, at a mall south of Wilkes-Barre not long after finishing his college career, an act that he does not remember. It also includes a summer in the mental ward of a Maryland hospital, where he had to be admitted after police found him, according to one account, screaming uncontrollably on Maryland's campus, where he had come to take classes and finish his degree. "He had another seizure,'' is how his father puts it. "He never went back (to school).''

"They had me on medication, and it wasn't interacting right,'' Wysocki remembered of that summer. "They had to tie my arms and my legs together. I hit a couple of people. I don't know why. I hit a nurse, I hit a doctor.''

Another time, at another facility, he said, he received shock treatments.

"It was hell for 20-something years,'' Stan Wysocki said, recalling all the extremes the family went through helping Charlie -- including getting him to take his medicine, which he would hide in a crevice above the fireplace of their home. "He had a stretch of four or five good years. But it seemed like every football season, something would happen. He would sit and think about what happened to him.''

Everything seems to flow back to what Wysocki accomplished as a college player, and what never was accomplished afterward.

Wysocki's Maryland career concluded in 1981, he held 28 school records; some (three career 200-yard games, two in one season, 334 carries in a season, 50 in one game) still stand, and others (career rushing, single-season rushing, career 100-yard games, career 1,000-yard seasons) lasted nearly 20 years. He still holds or shares three Atlantic Coast Conference rushing marks.

His spectacular junior season, the one that ended in the Tangerine Bowl against Florida, in which he ran for 1,359 yards and battered Duke for 217 yards on 50 carries, is what put him on the national radar, and helped bring Columbia Pictures to his adoptive parents' house in Wilkes-Barre. That, and the tale of how the Wysockis' son, Steve, brought his black friend Charles DeGraffenreid home from high school when Charlie couldn't go to his own home -- where his widowed mother was trying to take care of 13 children, one of whom, Robert, tortured the younger Charlie incessantly, once lighting him on fire.

And there was not a discouraging word to be heard about his personality or character. Former Maryland teammates have said for years that Wysocki had seemed like the last person they would have suspected would descend into mental illness. He was as kind to the world as the world had been unkind to him, remembered Stephen Perillo, a manager on the Meyers High football team when Wysocki played.

"He always watched out for the underdog,'' recalled Perillo, now a minister and musician in Wilkes-Barre. Even though he had not seen Wysocki since high school -- he visited the football camp in June specifically to reconnect with him -- Perillo said that he inspired him in his outreach and uses him as an example: "He was a giver. He's the kind of person you want people to mold themselves to be.''

Yet even he was not fully aware of what had happened to his classmate since, nor why he never hit it big after college.

Injuries scaled down Wysocki's stats -- and ended his Heisman hopes -- as a senior in 1981; still, the NFL seemed a lock for a player who, at 5-foot-11 and 195 pounds, had a pro body, pro mindset (he never flinched when told, on the day he carried 50 times, that he'd probably run it on every down in the second half) and pro athleticism (he was an all-state wrestler in high school and wrestled as a freshman in college as well, and set a district long-jump record that lasted nearly a decade).

"We had a hundred-something colleges coming after him,'' said Stan Wysocki, a masonry contractor for 42 years whose other two children, Steve and Millie, live a few blocks away from the house in which they were all raised. "It was getting unreasonable.''

Thinking about the pros, though, was not.

When it all went wrong is hardly in dispute. How much it contributed to the road Wysocki has traveled since is still questionable. The facts are clear and well-documented (in one case, in an ESPN feature aired during the 1990 NFL Draft): no team picked Wysocki. His friends and family had come to the house for a party and all left disappointed. But teams still had interest. The Cowboys, his favorite team, sent a scout to the house to offer a $2,000 bonus.

At the same time, on the phone was a scout from the Kansas City Chiefs, wanting to offer him $15,000. "Oh -- my -- God,'' Stan Wysocki says even to this day. The Chiefs' representative was driving up the highway, telling the father not to let the son sign anything until he made it to the house.

Wysocki now says the Cowboys' scout "lied'' to him; Stan Wysocki called it "a song and dance.''

Wysocki went for the far-smaller guarantee to go play on the same team as his favorite player growing up, Tony Dorsett. "So you know where my head was -- it was pretty much up my a**,'' Wysocki said. "I don't know what I was thinking.''

He was released early in training camp. Even now, it seems like the logical starting point for his slide. It also has been suggested that it was just a case of bad timing, that the illness was due to manifest itself then, the signs present already -- they tend to surface in a patient's early 20s -- and making the Cowboys or not would not have mattered. Stan Wysocki has heard all the explanations. "It's a chemical imbalance, for no known reason,'' he concluded. "We took him to the best places we could find.''

Wysocki kept trying to play football. He received feelers from Washington's franchise in the USFL in the early 1980s, and several former college teammates promoted him heavily at every pro stop they made. Each attempt ended with another episode or another trip to an institution. There were stretches where he didn't speak to his adoptive parents, and other stretches where he not only was at ease with them, but with his blood relatives -- including Robert, the older brother, whose own mental-health problems eventually surfaced and led him to numerous incarcerations for assault. Wysocki continues to try to help his brother get the help he needs.

He is in a better position now to help, even with his long history of hospitalization and his inability to work or drive. In between hospital stays, he stayed in a group home with other mental-illness sufferers, but for more than a year now he has been able to live on his own -- first in an assisted-living facility, now in a house in nearby Plymouth that he shares with a female companion. He pays his bills, and he has stayed active with LaMagna's semipro football team, when healthy.

He never let on why he was so non-communicative at his camp ("I wasn't feeling well. It wasn't you,'' he told a reporter), but friends suspect one of two reasons: a problem with his medication and the typical behavioral variations common to his condition.

"He does go through phases where he doesn't communicate with me, and that's largely due to his mood disorder,'' said Epstein, who has had bipolar disorder himself for roughly the same time period as Wysocki. As for medications, Epstein said they are absolutely necessary to treat it (and are more effective with some form of therapy), but because of how they affect different people, he calls them "an educated crapshoot.''


LaMagna said he was drawn to Wysocki by the memory of his own father being so helpful to a similarly-ill friend. When he got to know and befriend Wysocki -- first from a local flag-football league, then after seeing Wysocki around another semipro team in Scranton -- he devoted himself to getting his message out. He set up a website (charliewysocki.com), got him involved in his current team and became engaged in putting the word out about him, including putting him in touch with the local NAMI chapter.

"He played such a large role in my life,'' he said. "He's like a family member.''

Wysocki recognizes how many people genuinely care about his well-being, and he says he wants to return the favors. If a book or movie about him comes about, he would enjoy the money from it, he said, but that's just part of what he wants to derive from it. He's also starting a foundation to spread the word.

"I think I can help people with this sickness,'' he said. "I can help people that are not only bipolar, but with other sicknesses.''

Everybody close to Wysocki is glad that he is in a good place in his life right now. Bipolar disorder has no cure; managing it is the best hope, and doing that has been his struggle for nearly 30 years.

"It seems like a story that keeps on going, and we're missing the ending,'' LaMagna said. "We don't know what it is.''