By Ian O’Connor | ESPN
The young woman was dying at his feet. Terry McDonough could see her curled up on the ground, some 35 years later, as if he had just slammed that station wagon into a telephone pole before it struck the low stone wall across the road.
Are you OK, Leslie? Are you OK? McDonough repeated the words he first spoke on a cold winter night in 1982 while revisiting the scene on a warm summer day in 2017. When he pointed to the spot on Gardner Street where he had found his friend, Leslie Messina, his voice cracked, his eyes blinked back tears and his face tightened like a fist.
Some former high school football stars return to their hometowns in middle age to try on their old varsity jackets and to bask in the memories of touchdown runs and school dances and first kisses in the back of their buddies’ cars. McDonough, an Arizona Cardinals executive, returned to Hingham on this day because he was preparing for the first time to share publicly the story of how he caused a classmate’s death, and of how that fatal accident left him a badly damaged human
being who would later lose a marriage and nearly lose his NFL career and his life by abusing alcohol and pills to medicate his pain.
McDonough, 53, is the son of sports writing royalty; the late Will McDonough was the pioneering football columnist at The Boston Globe who led the parade of newspaper insiders into the world of network TV. Terry is the younger brother of acclaimed broadcaster Sean McDonough, who has called Monday Night Football and major college games for ESPN, and the older brother of former NBA executive Ryan McDonough, who became the general manager of the Phoenix Suns at age 33. Terry is the scout who has worked in the NFL for the better part of three decades, who was hired as a kid by Bill Parcells and Bill Walsh through his father’s connections and later by Bill Belichick on his own merits
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Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
More than anything, Terry McDonough sees himself as a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 21 years, since the day he embarrassed himself and his employer, the Baltimore Ravens, in a drunken episode at the NFL combine that ultimately saved him. He wants to stand as an example of why people who feel hopelessly lost and alone should never give up on themselves. He wants his story to be about overcoming the most forbidding of odds. He wants to inspire anyone within earshot who might be drowning in his or her own guilt and shame, and he knew he first needed to expose his considerable sins and flaws in the public square to make it work.
