Til death do we play: The Al Lucas Story
On his right arm, Lenny Lucas has a tattoo with an outline of a football and “is life” written beneath it.
On his left arm is an inked memorial to his younger brother Al, who died playing the sport.
“There’s nothing really nice about football,” said David Lucas, father of Lenny and Al. “It’s a violent game. You look at it, even when you play football, you always know that could be that injury, but you never think it could happen to you.”
One Sunday in 2005, the Lucas family was three time zones away from Al, who lay motionless on the field of the Staples Center in Los Angeles
Football is life, but it can also be death.
The beginning
The Lucas brothers played for Northeast.
Lenny, a tight end, was recruited by Troy. Not wanting to navigate two football schedules, the Lucas family offered Troy a package deal: both brothers or neither.
“Me and my little brother, we did everything together,” Lenny said. “From sports to going to school to campaigning with my mother and father.”
The duo developed into quite the tandem for the Trojans. Their mother Elaine Lucas remembered a short-yardage play call, “Big Team,” where Al, who played defensive line by nature, would flip to offense. Lenny would be the lead blocker, and Al, acting as a running back, would barrel his way into the end zone.
Elaine beams with pride as she talks about how good they were. David repeats how Al weighed “375, ran a 4.7 40.”
His NFL Scouting Combine results say he was just shy of 300 lbs and ran a 40-yard dash in 5.0 seconds flat. But, as his dad and Troy strength and conditioning coach Richard Shaughnessy tell it, his time would’ve been comparable to Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, whose 40-yard time at the 2011 combine was 4.84 seconds.
Lenny admits his brother had a better work ethic than him in football.
“I tell the story about him all the time now to the linemen coming in that they’ve got no idea,” Shaughnessy said. “We still don’t have anybody that is the lineman he was.”
Al grew close with Shaughnessy as he grew bigger and stronger, spending extra hours in the weight room.
Al’s efforts earned him two-time All-America honors; the 1999 Buck Buchanan award, given to the most outstanding defensive player in the FCS; and a post-mortem induction into the Troy Sports Hall of Fame this past April. The NFL draft loomed, and, in many opinions, Al was supposed to go in the first three rounds.
He waited in front of the television as name after name was called. A pair of Penn State players were taken first and second. Tom Brady was taken 199th, still no Al.
He went undrafted due to concerns with his bowed leg — his “strong leg” if you ask Lenny.
“My brother, he was one of those types of people that if you told him that he couldn’t do it he was going to make sure you regretted saying that,” Lenny said.
Al was signed as a free agent by Pittsburgh only to be cut shortly after. After a few long months back home in Macon, the Carolina Panthers called him for a workout. He was told to bring one set of clothes.
I tell the story about him all the time now to the linemen coming in that they’ve got no idea. We still don’t have anybody that is the lineman he was.
Richard Shaughnessy
Troy University coach“He got to Carolina, and they wouldn’t let him come back home,” David said.
Elaine packed his clothes, and David packed his Ford Bronco. Lenny, who had been on and off with the Minnesota Vikings, moved to be with his brother. Al signed with the Panthers and was there for the 2000 and 2001 seasons. Once the team ousted head coach George Seifert and hired John Fox, Al’s time in Charlotte was over.
In 2003, Al was picked fourth in the NFL Europe draft. But instead of go to Frankfurt, he decided to try his hand at arena football. In his rookie season with the Tampa Bay Storm, Al was named to the AFL All-Rookie team and won an ArenaBowl championship (the AFL equivalent of the Super Bowl).
He signed a three-year contract with the Los Angeles Avengers and headed west — with Lenny, of course.
“He brought me everywhere he was,” Lenny said. “If I wasn’t on a team or playing, he would literally bring me with him.”
For the Lucas brothers, football is life.
A football family
Lenny was born in the summer of 1977, Al in September 1978.
Due to too many absences from a compilation of illnesses, Lenny was held back in the second grade, which put him in the same class as his younger brother.
“Everybody thought we were twins,” Lenny said. “But I was the oldest. I had to make sure I let everybody know that.”
Elaine admits to dressing them alike as young boys.
The Lucas boys grew up in a political household. Elaine was elected to Macon City Council in 1983 and still holds office as the Macon-Bibb County District 3 commissioner. David was sworn into the Georgia House of Representatives in 1975 and was elected to his current state Senate seat in 2012.
They were born a family of football.
Nearly every male in the family plays. David played at Tuskeegee, followed by a short stint with the Washington Redskins. Lenny and Al’s older brother, David Jr., has a Super Bowl ring with the Dallas Cowboys. Nephews, uncles, ex-husbands all football players.
Lenny’s oldest son plays tackle for Carol City High School in Miami, and his 3-year-old son barely missed the cut-off birthday to play in a league in Macon.
For the Lucas family, football is family.
A ‘freak accident’
April 10, 2005: the date tattooed below Al’s face on Lenny’s arm.
The Avengers kicked off at 3 p.m. in Los Angeles. Less than five minutes into the first quarter, Al tackled New York Dragons kick returner and former Georgia defensive back Corey Johnson.
“It’s weird, but one night we were talking about how we wanted to die, or whatever,” Lenny said. “And we actually said if I’m going to pass away, I’d rather pass away on the football field. It’s just ironic that he would pass away from a hit that didn’t seem that serious.”
Lenny, who at the time was playing for the Macon Knights, an AF2 team that lasted five years, wasn’t watching the game. Live streaming was in its infancy, and the Lucas family couldn’t get the game to play at David’s office. An arena teammate called Lenny with the news.
Shaughnessy was at his now-wife’s house watching football when he got the call from Eric Sloan, a defensive back at Troy and groomsman in Al’s wedding.
“I was just devastated,” Shaughnessy said. “I just started crying. I had never lost a player until then. That was really, really hard for me. I had talked to him not long before that, and he was telling me how good he was doing and how he liked it there. He was going to send me a jersey and all of that.”
Shaughnessy still has a hard time talking about it. Coaches are rarely known to be short of words, but he seems to be unable to piece together his thoughts through his emotion.
It wasn’t a concussion. It wasn’t a hard hit. A “freak accident” Al’s dad called it.
“You couldn’t duplicate it,” David said. “The way his neck was down, the amount of pressure and force. It just happened.”
Al, 26, was pronounced dead hours later at the hospital, but his brother and dad assured that he died on the field. According to his obituary in The Telegraph, the Avengers stated it was the result of a presumed spinal cord injury, the same injury that took the life of NASCAR Dale Earnhardt, according to Shaughnessy.
For Al, football was death.
There’s nothing really nice about football. It’s a violent game. You look at it, even when you play football, you always know that could be that injury, but you never think it could happen to you.
David Lucas
Al’s presence lives on
Lenny did not go to Los Angeles to help clean out his brother’s belongings.
“They wanted me to go, but I can’t. ... I don’t know. ... My mind was somewhere else,” Lenny said. “That was my best friend. Not only my brother. We did everything together.”
Al’s wife, De’Shonda, and his parents brought Al and his things back home. Among them was a stockpile of shoes he had been saving for local high school football players in Macon.
A week or two later, Lenny got a package in the mail. It was a pair of shoes for him.
“That was real weird,” Lenny said. “My dad stole them. He wears them all the time now. They’re about turned over.”
Just like with those shoes, Al’s presence lives on. He is a poster in his mom’s office, watching over his parents as they talk about his life. He is a scholarship fund that helps Middle Georgia student-athletes achieve their collegiate goals. He is a baseball field at Central City Park.
Lenny can’t even remember everything that is named for him at this point.
In 2013, Northeast renamed its fieldhouse to honor Al, who devoted much of his spare time to his alma mater as a community coach when he wasn’t playing professionally.
“That really was our dream in life, but he is still doing it after passing,” Lenny said. “That just affirms how great he was. To me.”
Lenny quit football professionally once the Macon Knights folded. He now finds joy in watching his sons play.
Neither his parents nor Lenny blame football for what happened. Elaine and David talked about Al’s death as a conversation starter for football safety but not as a cautionary tale. And Lenny reminisces on his playing days — especially those with Al — quite fondly.
“That was the sport that me and him loved,” Lenny said. “And we lived our life by a football code. The things you do in practice to prepare for a game and everything else, you go through life doing the same things.”
For Lenny, football is life.
This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 2:56 PM with the headline "Til death do we play: The Al Lucas Story."