He had to play at 110 miles an hour. He had to play with the psyche of a Navy SEAL. If he had to run into a wall, the wall was going to be dented. If he had to dive head first into the ground to catch a sinking line drive, he was going to leave skid marks in the grass.
As a member of the Cincinnati Reds, he was an enigma. On some days he was all smiles and on those days he would stop me and ask, “How’s Nadine (my wife)?” During spring training, he he saw me talking on my cell phone at 11 a.m., he knew it was Nadine and he would grab the phone to chat with her.
And there were other days when he didn’t smile. He would walk right past, seemingly in his own world, and not even say hello.
There was a time, in the latter days of his time with the Reds, when he became angry with me. Freel and his natural father, divorced from his mother, were not on speaking terms.
His father, though, was extremely proud of his son and communicated with me a few times. In one e-mail he told me that Freel had suffered at least eight concussions, including a couple when he was a kid — once when he thought he was Superman (as he thought he was on the field) and drove off a roof and landed head first.
I wrote this and Freel was enraged. He took me aside and read my everything but my last rites and at one point he said, “My father has never been part of my life, I have no connection with him, and he has no right talking about me.”
Everybody knew there was something different about Freel. He told me one day that when he did something wrong on the field, “It was Farney’s fault.” Farney? “Yeah,”said Freel. “He is a little guy who rides around on my shoulders and makes me do bad things.”
It’s been a year since the 36-year-old Freel took his own life. Just this week, his stepfather revealed that the family had asked Boston University to study Freel’s brain.
It was determined that Freel suffered the second of four stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which causes erratic behavior, cognitive difficulties, memory loss, inattentiveness and depression.
Freel displayed all those symptoms and the CTE can be traced back to those eight or so concussions.
It is hoped that findings give comfort to the family, that Freel took his own life because his brain was not functioning properly.
I know it gives comfort to me because I appreciated the way he played the game and I loved Ryan Freel, even after he became extremely angry with me.
Because his statistics were never eye-popping, he worried every year that he wouldn’t make the team. He would come to me day after day and ask, “What do you hear? Am I going to make it? Are they going to trade me?
And then he would run into a wall or dive head first during meaningless exhibition games, trying to prove his worth.
What Freel stood for was emblematic in the T-shirts the Reds once gave away to fans with his name on number on them. It was the only T-shirt ever given away that had built in dirt and grass stains on it.
Freel was proud of it. If he tore his uniform pants sliding or diving, he didn’t like the clubhouse crew to sew it up. He wore the tattered pants as a badge of courage.
He didn’t need to do that. His play on the field showed all the courage he needed to show.
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