His finals over, Todd Doxey returned home to San Diego in mid-June. Trying to compete for playing time in one of the nation’s best defensive secondaries wasn’t going to be easy, and he knew it.
He came back to his hometown early in the summer, knowing off-season workouts and classes in Eugene might keep him in Eugene until Oregon’s first bye week.
But with hard work came excitement. He was going to arrange a trip to Eugene for four of his closest friends from San Diego, Ronnie Childs, Bryan Russell, JayDee Luster and Corey Trisby, to watch him play in the fall at Autzen Stadium.
They’d shake their heads and laugh when Doxey said it. It wasn’t that they doubted he’d find the field – he never had much of a problem doing that. No, they would smile and chide Todd because he was about to do what they’d always talked about: represent San Diego.
Best friends. Always.
At the end of his last night in San Diego, Doxey was dropped off at his house with Luster by Russell. An action they’d done hundreds of times before. Their last? It would have seemed absurd at the time.
“My last words I said to him,” Russell said, “I remember dropping him and JayDee off at home and he told me to be safe. I told him to be safe, don’t worry about me.”
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Well before Todd Doxey arrived in Eugene as a four-star recruit at safety from San Diego’s Hoover High last fall, he was the man who kept his closest friends, family and adults together. Nearly a week has passed since the redshirt freshman drowned in the McKenzie River after jumping off Hayden Bridge into cold waters, the last of a group of his Duck teammates, and the only one without an inner tube, to do so. Doxey passed away at 8:05 p.m. Sunday at Sacred Heart Medical Center after being in critical condition during the afternoon. They’d only known him for a year, but his Duck teammates mourned in the spotlight last week, powerful players brought to tears at a memorial service.
At Hoover, one text message last Tuesday started an impromptu memorial service that eventually swelled to more than 2,000 mourners at the school’s football stadium. Friends have sold more than $2,000 worth of T-shirts in his memory to help the Doxey family with funeral costs, and his Oregon teammates established the Todd Doxey Memorial Fund Friday to help cover costs, as well. On Monday, Doxey’s formal funeral is being held at The Rock in San Diego, a church with a capacity of 3,500 people. For skeptics who didn’t believe he really was the guy who was friends with everyone as those who knew him say, the massive turnout at the stadium – on one day’s notice – served as validation.
“It was amazing just to see how may people he meant something to,” Trisby said. “I knew that many people cared about him.”
For his friends of more than a decade back home, the sharp pain from his passing hasn’t quite left yet. Besides only his immediate family, these were the friends who knew him best.
It’s the ultimate hurt for friends who Doxey usually kept in fits of laughter. Childs, Trisby, Russell and Doxey all met a decade ago, four 9-year-olds at a Pop Warner football practice. He’d known Luster a year earlier from basketball.
The group immediately struck up a friendship with each other that continued through their graduations (all but Trisby graduated in 2007) until last week. Doxey and Childs played in the defensive secondary all four years together, while Trisby and Russell started at quarterback and running back. At wide receiver, Doxey was Trisby’s favorite target, setting the San Diego record for receiving yards.
Head basketball coach Ollie Goulston, a family friend of the Doxeys, started Luster and Doxey all four years at guard. The two were “like brothers,” Goulston said, and it showed on the court, where Hoover won 24 games the duo’s freshman year after winning 18 games total in its previous three. Their junior year, Hoover won its section title for the first time in 44 years.
The maturity and calm in Doxey, 19, that set him apart in the eyes of teachers, coaches and administrators was the genuine article.
Hoover director of athletics Ron Lardizabal called him “the calm in the storm” of Hoover, a school with 2,200 kids in one of the lowest socio-economic areas of San Diego.
“I can remember two or three incidents where a guy was going to be jumped on,” said Doug Williams, Hoover’s principal when Doxey attended the school. “He stood up and said, ‘No, it’s not going to go down like this. This one-on-10 stuff is not going to happen.”
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Ronnie Childs found out from a text message from Trisby. “You hear what happened to Todd?” it read. “It’s really serious.”
Childs thought his friend could pull out of his accident. He didn’t know the details, but he didn’t need to, either. The free safety to Doxey’s strong safety for Hoover football, Childs tried calling Doxey’s phone, but no one answered.
“Then I called JayDee to see what was going on, and I just broke down because we were just hanging out last time he was in San Diego,” Childs said, when he found out Doxey wouldn’t recover. He remembered the plans to see him play in person in Eugene they’d talked about. Even if he was playing behind returning first-team all-Pacific-10 Conference safety Patrick Chung, Doxey was going to turn heads this season, Childs said.
“We all said Todd was going to be the first one out of our circle who was going to make it big,” he said.
He thought back to the game he and Doxey played in the cafeteria growing up, where each person started with a quarter and went around the cafeteria asking for money. Whoever got the most bought the other lunch that day. Then he thought about JayDee, Doxey’s closest friend, who is on a basketball scholarship to Wyoming.
“I can’t explain it, he had a blank look on his face,” Childs said.
Luster was the first to get a tattoo of Doxey’s face and the words “My brother” and “Live through me” after his passing. All his friends plan on getting similar tattoos.
At the memorial at Hoover last week, Childs started organizing last Friday’s bonfire at San Diego’s Mission Beach for Doxey.
“He touched everyone and inspired everyone to be a better person,” he said. “It’s the least I could do for Todd.”
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After a phone call from Goulston, Trisby’s mom gave her son a call.
Doxey and Trisby met for the first time as competitors at that Pop Warner practice. They both wanted to play quarterback, but once he saw Doxey’s athleticism, he suggested wide receiver. It secured him the quarterback job until he graduated high school, and is one reason he says he is on a football scholarship at the University of Texas-El Paso. Trisby was named the “City Player of the Year” by the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper in 2008, a year after Doxey earned the same honor.
Not that Doxey’s transition to wide receiver didn’t come with some good-natured ribbing from his friends.
“When we were younger, Todd would be wide open, and he couldn’t catch the ball if his life depended on it,” Trisby said. “But when he would have quadruple coverage he’d catch it no matter what.
“We were like ‘Man you don’t never catch the ball when you’re wide open!’”
He tried to think of memories like that at the memorial to keep from crying. He knows Doxey wouldn’t want his friends and family to cry over his passing, but to keep laughing. It’s been hard so far to live up to those expectations.
Recovering from a torn anterior cruciate ligament, Trisby’s attention returns to football again. When he travels to El Paso this month, he’ll request to wear Doxey’s No. 9 jersey, the same jersey that Hoover has retired on the wall in its gymnasium.
He says that Doxey kept him in school, and urged him to go to college. Enrolling at UTEP this fall will be one of his many tributes to his friend.
“He’s my guardian angel,” he said.
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Ronnie called Bryan Russell. “Todd almost drowned,” he said. For
a moment there was relief. The next though: How much time would Todd miss from football? A few hours later, another call from Childs.
Todd had died.
“For a minute I didn’t want to believe it,” Russell, now a running back at Palomar Junior College in San Marcos, Calif., said. “When I went to bed, I just broke down. I couldn’t sleep these last couple of nights.”
He and Doxey had seen each other at a football camp weeks before their Pop Warner practice together. A fast friendship quickly followed, and all the friends competed “in life, football and girls,” Russell said with a laugh.
They played in the same high school all-star football game in Qualcomm Stadium, home of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers, after high school. Before they left for college, he said, “If I don’t make it I hope he makes it.”
Next year, a towel will hang from Russell’s football pants with Doxey’s name on it. On his body, a tattoo will have his face. Neither can do true justice for his friend, but they’re all he can do.
“There’s so many great things he has done, and how good of a person he was to everybody,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’ve heard this a billion times because it’s definitely true, but Todd was one of the type of guys who was a leader.
“I don’t think one person I knew that didn’t like him.”
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Friends always believe in one another’s strengths. Doxey’s friends believed in him because they were, as Trisby said, “his boys.”
Adults in Doxey’s life say he was rare, however, because of his ability to teach lessons to those even decades older around him. For Williams, now a principal at Dunbar High in Fort Worth, Texas, he was the type of unifying personality he needed at a high school where 40 different languages are spoken.
Fights, issues, whatever; Doxey was the mediator.
“I would know, right away, when he said, ‘I’m cool with them and he’s cool with me,’ it was over,” Williams said.
Lardizabal was his freshman football coach besides being athletic director. Barely a half hour after Doxey jumped in the water at 3:30 p.m. the day of Doxey’s death, Lardizabal was speaking at an event with a Hoover alumnus, and he brought up Doxey and “how impressive Todd was and how he was one of our great success stories,” he said.
“I get home two hours later and boom. I get the message,” he said, taking the call from basketball coach Ollie Goulston.
He had the chance to know him in school and on the field all four years, and said with Doxey, school always came first despite his athletic success. He marveled at the student, only 19, whose appeal cut across clique lines.
Spending time with the grieving family also taught Lardizbal the kind of leadership role Doxey had taken within his family, taking his cousins and three younger siblings out to baseball games, the beach and movies whenever he came back.
“Todd was telling them, ‘Hey I’m at college, you could do this, too. If I can do it, I know you guys can do it.”
Goulston had known Doxey since his future all-star was 4 years old, coaching a cousin. By 10, Doxey’s basketball teams were coached by Goulston. A family friend, he has been with the family for much of the last week. A year after Doxey graduation, the two still spoke every week, including an upbeat conversation the day before he died.
Driving back from a Los Angeles basketball tournament the next day, Goulston got the call from Doxey’s family.
“I just completely lost it,” he said, swerving across the freeway before pulling over to the side of the road, where he collapsed. “Todd was one of the rare individuals that made me better as a coach and better as a man.”
The memorial service and the community’s outpouring of grief for Doxey has helped him, the Doxey family and his friends recover. Whether it was a decade or his full 19 years, the time his friends and family knew Todd Doxey has made this last week one of the hardest of their lives, they say. It doesn’t matter how long you knew him, they say. If you met him, you instantly liked him.
“We were all fortunate down here to have met Todd,” Goulston said. “It’s just unfortunate that more people are not going to get that opportunity.”
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Andrew Greif
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