Rashaan Salaam snapped awake in the middle of the night with a burn in his chest. Even hundreds of miles away and playing in the NFL, he ached for the warmth of a family. His college position coach, Ben Gregory, died that April night in Boulder in 1997 of a heart attack. And, Salaam later said, he could feel it in Chicago.
Through an unlikely climb from small-school eight-man football, to Heisman Trophy winner with the University of Colorado, then to the NFL, the one steady piece of Salaam’s too-short life was a relentless attachment to the people who let him be Rashaan.