The Glue Guy
Every successful team in sports has a stereotypical “Glue Guy.”
This is the person who anchors the team. The person who keeps things together — either by a particular skill or just a general feel or magnetism for the people around them.
Penei Sewell — great glue guy for the Detroit Lions right now. He’s the heartbeat of that team.
The Miami Heat had Udonis Haslem stapled to their roster through the many ups and few downs over the last 20 years. For the culture — big time glue guy.
Michael Jordan’s Bulls were no doubt great — Horace Grant? Glue guy that made that squad hum well into all of those early titles.
I’m not on a sports team. I played one year of soccer in high school and that was enough for me.
But I did have a team as many kids do. You grow around the group of friends that carry you through high school and — depending on who you are — into college and your early adult life.
Those teams have glue guys too.
A tight-knit group that goes through all sorts of things together that — even as some start to go off and chase their careers elsewhere — can still maintain that core thanks to that glue guy holding things together.
Communication lessens but the glue guy often keeps it rolling in steady enough to make everyone feel just as connected as they always were.
He’s loved by all and can probably never be appreciated enough.
Three years ago today, we lost that glue guy.
Nobody knew they’d talked to him for the last time, but they had and he was gone.
Everyone rallies around to grieve and reflect, but at least for me, nothing ever felt the same.
I moved away to pursue a career almost six years ago, all with the expectation of coming back with a little money and a little experience to pursue it further back home.
That didn’t happen — which is fine, I’ve accomplished a lot that I didn’t really move 900 miles away to accomplish.
For the first three years of my time away, I’d visit as often as I was financially able to. It wasn’t until we lost our glue guy that I truly regretted not just doing it more anyway no matter the cost.
Here we are three years after his passing and the magnetic pull he always had on everyone around him has never felt weaker on my end.
People grow up, build families and settle more and more into boring adult life all the time. It’s inevitable.
But he wasn’t able to do that with us, and his absence has made it harder to feel like I’m doing any of that at the same time as my old team.
There are occasional one-on-one texts. There’s a group chat that lights up a handful of times each year, but, to no one’s “fault” it’s all just a fizzling thing that I don’t know what to do with anymore.
It’s a thing to work on in therapy for sure, but I keep telling myself I’ll take some sort of action to reclaim some level of correspondence. I don’t know what it is but I’ll figure it out.
Our glue guy would know what to do.
Miss you, Brad.
