Written by Chris Hatch at No Coast Bias
In a way, it had to end like this.
A story this rife with turmoil, wrought with inner strife that too-often manifested in outward physical violence, that was punctuated by such sheer brilliance between chalk lines couldn’t end with the phrase “died peacefully in his sleep”.
I didn’t know Lawrence Phillips. Not who he was or what he had been through or, indeed, what he was capable of putting others through. Sure, his rise from the streets of Los Angeles to the mountaintop in a state with no mountains has been well documented, but finding our way into the acronymed mind of LP, one of the most notorious enigmas in college football history isn’t something many of us could do.
Hell, most of us wouldn’t want to.
But finding out Lawrence Phillips died today, likely by his own hand, in a small cell in a California prison was, for many Nebraskans, exactly like the man himself: conflicted. Complicated. Hard to pin down.
While his on-field brilliance for the Nebraska Cornhuskers was the stuff of legend, his life off the field seemed to be in a perpetual state of downward spiral. Each time, when it seemed Phillips had hit the cold, unforgiving granite, we — those privileged enough to have no knowledge of it — clichély call “rock bottom”, he seemed hell bent on jackhammering through and going deeper.
Lawrence Phillips’ death made me sad in a macro kind of way. It made me sad with a wide-scale lens, because if I zoomed in too close to Phillips, I was scared of what I might see. What might be reflected in the cruel realities of his life. But his passing made me sad for the people he has hurt and the life that he lived and that some people in this world, despite all their opportunities along the way, never stand a fucking chance. And I don’t know entirely what that means, but that’s what sitting down to write about the death of a Husker legend and Husker spook-story does to a would-be obituary: muddles it right up.
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