Simmons, Sam different symbols of same issue

Roy Simmons died Feb. 20, in his tiny subsidized apartment in the Bronx. He was 57, having lived for 14 years with an HIV diagnosis and through bouts of drug and self-abuse far longer than that.

He died in the era of disclosure, shortly after the SEC’s defensive player of the year, Michael Sam, came out as gay. He lived in a time of secrets, and Simmons kept his thoroughly cloaked. Until 1992, when he came out on Phil Donahue’s TV talk show, one of the few and first of the football class to do so, more than eight years after playing in Super Bowl XVIII, his final NFL game.

If his 57 years demonstrated nothing else, it was the corrosive nature of secrets. It is hard enough to live one life well. And almost impossible to live two.

His was a complicated case to the very end. Simmons’ family was left scrambling to give him a dignified send-off. They established a Roy Simmons Funeral Fund on the web site Giveforward.com, which remains open. They went back and forth with the NFL and the NFL Players Association seeking additional help. Services were planned Saturday in his hometown of Savannah.

Simmons was not an easy man to eulogize.

He was on one hand the most welcoming big man anyone ever met.

“I guess you can smile through anything because that guy always seemed to be happy,” said Kent Hill, Simmons’ offensive linemate at Tech who now runs a Fayetteville-based cookie company. “If you were down, just hang around Roy and you were going to feel better. That was the kind of light he brought.”

Yet, even at a young age, Simmons was harboring a deep pain. One of six children in his family, living in a small row house on Savannah’s west side, Simmons used to make a little money doing chores for neighbors. At the age of 11, while working around one home, he said the man living there raped him. His family hushed up the crime.

In a 2003 New York Times story, Simmons spoke of all the times as an adult when he wondered how much that event warped his sense of himself. The questions often came to him while drunk or high. “I think all my life it affected me. The acting out. The sex with the boys, the girls. The drinking,” he told the Times.

He fathered a daughter, who is grown now, graduated from Morris Brown and living in Atlanta. At the same time he was living the life of a closeted gay professional football player.

Once Simmons left Tech, drafted by the New York Giants in the eighth round in 1979, he had scarce contact with his friends at school. That community was left dumbstruck by his revelations on the Donahue show.

“Roy was highly intelligent, and he was a master of deception,” said Atlanta’s Reggie Jackson, who played with Simmons and was a fraternity brother. “None of us had a clue.”

Here was someone capable of embracing his family and friends completely. When he went to New York to play ball, he took his mother and two youngest siblings to live with him briefly. Gary, the youngest, recalled his big brother bringing cupcakes to his elementary-school class and how good it felt to be in the glow of Roy’s celebrity.

“He was someone I looked up to. He played the father figure as well as the big brother figure. And I love him for it,” Gary said.

Yet when Roy was off indulging in drugs or reckless sex, he was capable of completely shutting out those who loved him most. He had the dubious gift of being able to drop from sight for long periods of time.

“He would go to a dark place. Those who loved him and knew him were not invited there,” said Jimmy Hester, a longtime friend and New York author and publicist. Hester encouraged Simmons to come out on Donahue and to write his book.

Simmons had so much to tell, so many warnings to offer another generation of players. His was a brief career, squandered in part by his drug use. His earnings evaporated. He went through rehabs and relapses, cleansings and missteps. In that small apartment in the Bronx where he died, he remained surrounded by many of the temptations he could never completely escape, Hester said. Simmons had been in declining health, recently hospitalized with pneumonia, according to Hester. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office had not yet released a cause of death.

Simmons started 29 games on the Giants line in three seasons from 1979-81. After quitting for a season, he got a last chance with Washington, going with the Redskins to their Super Bowl loss to Oakland at the close of the 1983 season. He brought his family to the big game. He later confessed that he also brought a succession of lovers, both male and female, with whom he partied all week.

Even when he was coming clean Simmons felt that his voice was not being heard. The book did not sell well. When he tried to gain access to the Super Bowl media center before the 2006 game in Detroit to discuss the lessons of his life, the NFL denied him a pass. Days after the game, he held an impromptu news conference outside the NFL’s New York office with celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, charging the league with discriminating against him because he was gay and HIV-positive.

His desire to be included as a lecturer in the league’s annual rookie symposiums went unanswered. Flashing forward to this year, as Sam was gaining such loud national attention with his announcement, Simmons was feeling like a forgotten figure. Hester said he heard secondhand that Simmons was distraught about not at least being invited to the Los Angeles party marking Sam’s announcement, or being recognized in some way as a contributor to the timeline of football players who revealed themselves as gay.

“The NFL handled (the Sam coming out) with class and care,” Hester said. “With Roy, they handled that like he was garbage.”

There is nothing left of Simmons’ life now but the lessons it may offer. Those who knew him — or knew a part of him — will tell you one thing: A secret shared can be a load lifted.

“I wish I could have carried more of his burden,” said his brother, Gary.

“I didn’t know I had a close friend who was gay until Roy came out,” said Hill, his teammate, who last saw Simmons years ago, after he had appeared on Donahue, at a reunion softball game in Atlanta. “OK, he’s still the same guy. You like him for the same reasons you liked him before. This was just a part of him we didn’t know.”

Had Simmons only known and trusted the power of friendship. But how could he, given the time in which he grew up?

“It makes me sad that he didn’t have a happy life. He deserved a happy life because he made ours so happy,” Jackson, the frat brother, said.