At the End of the Day, the Story Will Be Glory and Triumph. But Some Had to Overcome Serious Obstacles. For Them, Getting to the Big Show Was . . . No Big Easy

NEW ORLEANS — In all, 132 players and coaches will run onto the field today for Super Bowl XXXI.

That means 132 men who will spend four hours today creating memories they will remember for a lifetime.

But no two players or coaches are exactly alike. Some had to overcome obstacles off the field that made anything they have encountered on the field seem mild in comparison.

Some are lucky simply to be alive, let alone play in a Super Bowl.

Following are seven such stories, three from the Green Bay Packers and four from the New England Patriots.

THE PACKERS

WILLIAM HENDERSON, fullback--They had argued the night before, about something so trivial now it’s hard to remember, but there was always tomorrow to smooth things over.

The telephone rang, however, before Henderson and his fiancee were to get together again. The police wanted him to lead them to his fiancee’s apartment near Chapel Hill, N.C., and while he waited outside, they told him nothing.

For hour after hour they told him nothing, while treating him coldly, like some sort of criminal. He asked, he begged, he demanded some answers, and with each piece of information he began to piece together the bad news: His fiancee, Heather Prather, had been murdered.

On May 10, 1996, less than a year ago, he was suspect No. 1, although it would be only a short time before attention was directed elsewhere.

“She had my heart,” he said, “and all those dreams were erased.”

He had been packing that day to return to Green Bay to begin preparing himself for the football season when the phone rang, and it all began.

“It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie,” he said. “My plans had been to take her out that day and just spoil her.

“I haven’t been home since. Can’t right now; I’m nowhere near being over everything yet. To be honest, I don’t know how I have gotten through this. I have not been one of the greatest in returning phone calls or things like that because it brings it all back. I have dedicated this season to her, and I know it sounds weird, but I feel like I have an angel on my shoulder when I’m on the field.”

The police arrested a jealous former friend of his fiancee, who had just been released from jail on charges of attempted murder, kidnap and rape, and he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

“I have asked some ministers, how do you stop from hating somebody like this?” Henderson said. “They told me I don’t know how you ever stop hating in this kind of situation.

“People will watch the Super Bowl and think I’m the luckiest guy who ever lived with all the riches, the car, the women. But they don’t know. I mean I would have settled for the little house in the woods, a bicycle and the one girl I loved.”

Henderson, as articulate as he is a gifted blocker, blew out his knee his senior year of high school, and overcame it. His mother, so very ill during his high school years, had no interest in watching football games but wanted to badly to see her son graduate.

“My mom was sick with diabetes beginning with my freshman year in high school,” Henderson said. “By my junior year she was on her deathbed and she missed my high school graduation. She was so important in my life.

“But she hung in there and I made her promise to see me graduate from college. She died Dec. 1 of my senior year.”

At North Carolina there was nothing special about Henderson the football player. He was splitting time with a guy named Malcom Marshall and ran the ball only 47 times his senior season. He was not invited to the NFL scouting combine, did not play in any football all-star games, and no one mentioned Henderson’s name in the same sentence with the NFL.

“My college coaches told me I would never play on a major level,” Henderson said. “After I hurt my knee in high school I was basically a dead man.”

He began saving money to attend graduate school with the idea of entering physical therapy and beginning life after football.

“My luckiest break in life was having the parents that I had,” Henderson said. “They raised me in a good home, and while my father may not have always been around playing ball with his son, he provided for me and made sure he taught me that by working hard good things can still happen for you.”

GIL HASKELL, receivers coach--It wasn’t until the next day when Dallas offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese visited him in the hospital that Haskell learned the Cowboys, and not the Packers, would be playing in Super Bowl XXX.

Haskell thought that was bad news, and he could not understand why everyone around him was so happy. Later, he would learn he had nearly died the night before, and friends and family were experiencing a victory he could not comprehend.

Standing on the sideline in last year’s NFC championship game in Dallas, he became a horrifying highlight. Packer wide receiver Robert Brooks, drilled on his way out of bounds by the Cowboys’ Darren Woodson, smashed into Haskell, who had not been looking after dropping his head to determine the team’s next play.

He took a helmet to his chest, was knocked unconscious before hitting the ground, and had no recollection of his head bouncing off the turf.

“His eyes rolled back into his head,” Packer wide receiver Antonio Freeman recalled. “His face turned gray and blue. Geez, I don’t know if Gil should be hearing this stuff. It was devastating.”

On his very first night in the hospital, he knows now, he almost did not survive.

“I didn’t know how badly I was hurt at the time; they kept it from me,” said Haskell, a former assistant for the Rams. “All I knew was that I had an enlarged brain and a fractured skull.”

Haskell remained in the hospital for eight days, accepted a visit from Cowboy owner Jerry Jones, and became overwhelmed by the letters he received from people around the country.

“One kid sent me a quarter to buy ice cream because that’s what his grandfather always gave him when he didn’t feel good,” Haskell said.

Haskell, the longtime football coach, however, remained perplexed. He could not understand how he could be taken by surprise on the sideline, and so he demanded to see a replay.

“After I saw it, I understood,” Haskell said. “I didn’t even have time to be scared or feel pain.”

Packer Coach Mike Holmgren said Haskell’s near-death experience not only shook him up, but took the edge off losing to Dallas and missing out on the Super Bowl.

Haskell flinched; that’s a pain he still feels.

“The toughest thing that happened that day was not what happened to me,” Haskell said. “The toughest thing is that we lost the football game.”

CRAIG NEWSOME, cornerback--The man has arrived in the most unorthodox fashion at his first Super Bowl. After leaving Eisenhower High in Rialto, Newsome went to work for the next two years hauling bricks. No college, no shot to be identified by NFL scouts, no way he goes to a Super Bowl without winning some kind of radio contest providing free tickets.

“The pay was good, like $14 an hour,” Newsome said. “But it was just hell. Oh man, that alarm would go off at the same time every morning.”

Up at 4:30 a.m. every day, he pulled on tattered clothes, work boots and trudged off to work. Day after day. He was married, had a child, and he was supporting his family, and then one payday he just up and left.

“It was on a Thursday, and I was gone,” Newsome said. “Nobody knew anything; I was tired.

“I was just coming home and showering and eating and then going to bed. So I left without saying a word. They are probably still waiting for my two-week notice.”

Newsome enrolled at San Bernardino Valley Junior College, played football, accepted a scholarship to play at Arizona State, and a year ago became a first-round draft pick of the Packers.

Understandably, he dedicates his free time now to helping the “Make A Wish” foundation in Milwaukee.

“God’s been watching over me and putting me in the right places,” Newsome said. “When I took that gamble and left my job to go back to school, I guess it was just meant to be.”

THE PATRIOTS

CURTIS MARTIN, running back--The hurt he feels over the murder of his grandmother as he was entering his teens never goes away.

But neither does the pride he feels in helping to capture her murderer.

Martin lived with his grandmother, Eleanor Johnson, and his mother, Rochella Martin, in a poor section of Pittsburgh until the day Johnson was found to have been knifed to death in her apartment while shelling peas.

“You have to stay strong for me now that Grandma’s dead,” Martin told his mother.

But it wasn’t easy.

“We lived in fear for two years,” Martin said. “Because we figured, whoever knew our grandmother, knew us. If one of us went to the bathroom, both of us went to the bathroom.”

It was Martin who remembered a strange man who had been hanging around a basketball court on a nearby playground. The police took Martin down to headquarters and had him pick the stranger out of a book of mug shots.

It was two years, however, before the man was brought to justice, two years of living in fear.

But that wasn’t the only traumatic event in the young life of Curtis Martin.

His aunt was killed in a car accident and about 20 of his friends were murdered. A few bullets even whizzed past Martin himself.

“After so many years, it all piled up and up,” he said. “You’ve got to worry about your safety all the time. You’ve got to go to so many funerals.

“If you look at someone’s girlfriend, or if you accidentally step on someone’s shoes, or if you look at someone and they look at you, the guns come out.”

Martin knew things had gone too far when he realized he had adopted a fatalistic attitude.

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I felt like, ‘If I die, I die.’ That’s not the way the human mind is supposed to think.”

He says religion saved him:

“My belief in God is what helped me to escape. But I just got out by the skin of my teeth.”

TERRY GLENN, wide receiver--Glenn also experienced the trauma of sudden death in his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. His mother, Donetta, was found murdered.

Her body was discovered in an abandoned building where it had lain undetected for three days after she had been beaten to death.

That left Glenn, only 13, and a 6-year-old sister, Dorothy.

Although the murderer turned himself in and is now in prison, Glenn has never been the same.

“Why would a person do something like that?” he asked. “What was he thinking? It just destroys a whole family.”

Because his father had abandoned that family when Glenn was young, he felt it was up to him to care for his sister.

“I knew I needed to be tough,” he said.

He and his sister were passed from aunt to aunt. He lived with three of them in all and, he said, none of them really wanted him.

Finally, his grief still overwhelming, his self-esteem near zero, Glenn was taken in by the Henleys, a Columbus family whose son, June, had become friends with Glenn.

So, as he turned 15, Terry Glenn started back up the long road to recovery on a course that would eventually lead him to Ohio State and then the Patriots.

And now, the Super Bowl.

“You don’t get too many opportunities to be in the Super Bowl,” Glenn said. “I’m sure my mom will be up there watching me.

“But instead, I wish she was here.”

LAWYER MILLOY, safety--Milloy didn’t have to endure a murder in his family. But he did have to watch something almost as painful: the slow, insidious destruction of his family.

His father, Gary, spent three years in prison for the possession and sale of cocaine. His mother, Mae, developed a serious drug problem.

And that left the teenage Milloy as the man of his house. At least, the closest thing to a man.

Milloy’s world shattered when he was 15.

Then a high school student, he came home from basketball practice and learned that his father had been taken to jail.

“I went from having a dad at all my sporting events to him not being there at all,” Milloy said.

As hard as it hit Milloy and his brother, Galvin, seven years younger, it hit Mae even harder. Without her husband or much financial support, she slipped quickly down the dark road to addiction.

“I tried to help out, but [people] have to want to help themselves first,” Milloy said.

In the meantime, Milloy, concerned most of all for his innocent brother, decided the best thing he could do was to help himself. A star in football, basketball and baseball at Lincoln High in Tacoma, Wash., Milloy kept his athletic career in focus, doing well enough to get drafted by the Cleveland Indians after graduation.

“[The family’s problems] was the fuel that kept me running,” Milloy said.

He chose college over baseball and kept running at the University of Washington, where his athletic achievements landed him in two more drafts. The Detroit Tigers picked him in the 19th round of the 1995 baseball draft and the Patriots made him a second-round choice in ’96.

This story has a happy ending. Gary Milloy is out of prison, and although he and his wife are no longer together, both will be at today’s Super Bowl, proudly watching their son.

MARTY MOORE, reserve linebacker and special teams--Compared to these other guys, Moore doesn’t have a problem.

His only liability was that he was the last pick in the 1994 draft. No. 222 of the 222 selected.

Dubbed Mr. Irrelevant by a group in Orange County, he was the guest of honor at their annual Irrelevant Week celebration, winning a trip to Disneyland and other bonuses not enjoyed by draft pick No. 221 or above.

“It was fun,” said Moore, a former Kentucky athlete, acknowledging that he hadn’t even realized he was the last pick at the time he was selected.

What was even more fun was becoming the first in the long and dubious line of Mr. Irrelevants to start in his NFL debut, replacing Todd Collins in the lineup against the Miami Dolphins in the Patriots’ 1994 opener.

What’s even more satisfying is that Moore is still on the team three years later, after many higher draft picks have disappeared, and has become a valued member of New England’s special teams.

Besides, better to be the last guy taken than the first guy not taken.