'Our player is gone'

It’s with great consternation that we note the death of Andre Waters. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Waters was the tough guy and battle-axe for the greatest defensive unit ever assembled. Notice that the superlative was not prefaced with the word “arguably”?

Waters will always be that player we will always talk to out friends about and laugh with both joy and awe at not just the outrageousness of what he did, but at the fact that he actually had the balls to play the way he did.

If playing dirty was an art, Andre Waters was Jackson Pollack coming at you with a mess of lines and shapes and colors that look so schizophrenic but actually reveal a lot of depth and beauty.

Nevertheless, it saddens me to learn that Waters had problems that were deeper and more confounding than regular superficial things and it’s even worse that he could not get the help he desperately needed. As I wrote, Waters will be one of those athletes that people always talk about for his play, verve and antics. Better yet, people like me were lucky to get the chance to watch him play and I hope that there was a chance that Waters knew that there were a lot of people who thought the same.

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