On anniversary of Tony Sparano’s death, memories of coach alive in Jeanette Sparano
“It’s not that any days are particularly easy,” Jeanette Sparano is saying from her temporary quarters in Connecticut, where she plans to settle down after tough, lonely and, yes, tragic stays in Minnesota and Texas the past two years.
“But days like today, on his birthday, or our anniversary, days like that, or for my daughter on Friday when it will be three months since her husband passed, you just find yourself looking at the clock thinking this awful thing happened.”
On July 22, 2018, Tony Sparano, the former Dolphins head coach, former Raiders interim head coach, longtime NFL assistant coach, father, grandfather and husband to Jeanette, died of arteriosclerotic heart disease.
He was 56.
Only 56.
It was a blow to the senses then and it remains no less illogical exactly two years after it happened.
“I think people think it’s been a while so it’s not as hard,” Jeanette says. “...It does not ever get easier. You just get stronger. And you’re just able to ... like if I tried to talk to you this time last year, I could not get through this conversation.
“But I think you get better at, ‘Well, I’ll just bottle it and cry later.’ It’s still awful because he’s not here. I had someone say to me, ‘I can wait until you get back to the old you.’ And I thought, that person doesn’t exist anymore unless you’re bringing Tony back.”
Tony and Jeanette met in high school when she was 13 and he was 17 in 1978. Although they were married 34 years, Jeanette rightly says they were together 40 years because once they met, there was no one else, nothing else, nowhere else.
It was only them and the rest of their lives.
“He was my first and only boyfriend,” Jeanette says. “Through the years, no matter how hard he worked, how much of himself he gave to his teams, his players, he never, ever made me feel like I didn’t have all of him. Never made me feel like the kids and I weren’t his first and only priority.
“That’s an incredible thing, really. It mattered to me that no matter what room he walked into anywhere in the world, no matter what people were in that room, that he knew there wasn’t a man who was as loved by his wife as he was.
“And he always made me feel the same way. Loved, respected, liked, appreciated. And safe. I knew he had my back. Always, since 1978. He was my entire world and my everything. It’s always been him since we met, and it will only be him until I see him again.”
So how does anyone move on from this? How does anyone find sunshine when the shadow cast seems to be everywhere?
“I’m not going to let everyone know I’m totally falling apart,” Jeanette says. “He would be like, “’What the hell are you doing? You’ve got to get it together.’ That’s what we’re trying to do.”
If you know the details of Sparano’s passing and what has happened to the Sparano family since, the assignment of moving on would sound daunting, perhaps impossible. Because the story is filled with frustration and second-guessing and pain and, yes, anger.
It begins where Sparano, after years of traveling the NFL coaching circuit wanting to regain the reins of his own team, finally stopped striving for another head coaching job. It begins when he arrived as the Minnesota Vikings offensive line coach in 2016.
“He was having so much fun the last two years he coached,” Jeanette says. “The stress was gone for him. He said, ‘I know I could do it, I know I’m a good motivator, I know I’m a good head coach, but I’m not after that anymore. I’m not chasing that anymore.’ He was having a really good time his last season.”
The summer of 2018 was especially good. Sparano lost 30 pounds to get healthier and look good in wedding photos because his daughter Ryan Leigh was getting married. After that there was a trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and a week with the grandchildren at Disney.
By July 19, a Thursday, Tony and Jeanette were thinking of football again as the Vikings were about to open training camp the following Monday.
“I said to him, ‘All right, you have to take it easy, you’re going to camp in a few days,’ “ Jeanette says.
When that conversation ended, Jeanette went to attend to some laundry. She eventually returned to the kitchen to witness Sparano leaning on the center island, holding his chest.
This is how Jeanette describes what happened next:
“I asked him what happened and he said, ‘I’m fine. It feels more like a muscle pull.’ And I said but your chest hurts and he said, ‘Not like that. Not like a heart thing. It feels like I pulled a muscle and my arm hurts.’ “
Jeanette implored the coach to go to the hospital because those are signs of a heart attack and even as he was disagreeing, Sparano threw up.
“And that’s 100 percent a heart attack sign,” Jeanette says. “So we got in the truck, we went to the hospital, we called the trainer on the way, he had people waiting.”
Sparano was taken to Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, Minnesota, — a facility that prides itself on its cardiac care.
“We were in the hospital for a day-and-a-half,” Jeanette says. “They did an [echocardiogram]. They did an [angiogram]. They did a heart ultrasound. They did every single test known to man.
“The first day we were there they told him, ‘You are a ticking time bomb, thank God you’re here. There’s no way you’re not going to need a bypass.”
Sparano’s troponin protein level was measured. These proteins are released when the heart muscle has been damaged, such as occurs with a heart attack. The more heart damage there is, the greater the amount of troponin there will be in the blood.
Jeanette says her husband’s level “was through the roof.”
But between tests, Sparano was talking to Jeanette about training camp opening Monday morning.
“I said, ‘Anthony, I love you but I swear to God if I hear one thing about football, I’m going to lose my mind,” she says. “I don’t care about the Vikings. I don’t care about football. We need to make sure you’re OK first.”
The next morning, another ultrasound. And then this:
“The cardiologist, the same guy who told him he’s a ticking time bomb, comes in and says, ‘Hey, Mr. Sparano, it’s a miracle. You’re fine,’ “Jeanette says. “And I looked at Tony and he looks at me and says, ‘When did anything reverse that quickly in our favor? We’ve had some things reverse quickly but not in a great way. So I argued with that doctor for an hour and a half. I argued and argued.
“How did we go from this to that? And he says, ‘I understand you’re hesitant, but we’re discharging him.’ And I said, ‘We’re just going to leave? We’re not doing anything for him? He had a heart attack yesterday. He was going to need a bypass yesterday and today’s he’s fine? This doesn’t make any sense.’
“And this cardiologist at the quote-unquote No. 1 heart center in Minnesota, which you can imagine what I think of that, kept saying, ‘I don’t even want to call it a heart attack, it was that minor.’ And our team doctor kept saying, ‘No.’ And he looked at Tony and said, “Tony, this is serious.’
”I just kept arguing because it seemed insane to me. And Tony finally looked at me and said, ‘Babe, no offense, but if this guy had said I needed a bypass and I argued, you would have said, ‘He’s a doctor.’ You’ve been arguing with him for an hour. What are we going to do? Set up camp here? They said I’m fine.’ ”
Sparano was discharged.
And 44 hours later he was dead after another heart attack.
The Sparanos were headed to church that Sunday morning and after making the bed, Jeanette came down the stairs to meet her awaiting husband and leave. Tony Sparano was laying on the floor.
“He used to lay on our hardwood floor,” Jeanette says. “His back hurt and he would lay on the floor when his back was tight to stretch his back out. And I thought his back hurt when I first saw him.”
Jeanette was in the staircase when she first saw her husband on the floor but by the time she reached the landing that led to the home’s first story, “I knew we were in trouble,” she says.
“I did CPR until the paramedics came. And they tried. To their credit, they tried very hard to help him, but they weren’t able to.”
Sparano passed away in his kitchen. And the scene was as chaotic as it was tragic.
“Our house was filled with people,” Jeanette says. “There had to be 40 people in my house at that point, just paramedics and cops and two firetrucks. We lived on a golf course on the fifth green and now people are standing on the fifth green looking into our house. It’s just crazy.”
A police officer who was trying to attend to Jeanette told her, “You need to call your kids now.”
“I didn’t realize until much later that she was afraid somebody would leak it and they did,” Jeanette says. “I had gotten to call my three kids and told them what had happened, and I had gotten to Tony’s dad and my mother and then it popped up as an alert on my phone while I was still sitting next to him.
“I don’t know. I feel like I’ve tried really hard to defend him in all of this. But I couldn’t protect him. I tried to do that but I couldn’t.”
An autopsy following Sparano’s death revealed his left anterior descending artery was 95 percent blocked.
Jeanette Sparano was a fierce defender of her husband during their time in South Florida. And she tried to continue that role after his passing. She hired a lawyer to investigate the hospital and its liability in Sparano’s death.
“I’ve been trying for two years to get answers,” Jeanette says. “And I’m not getting anywhere. And not to sound like an idiot, but you know how the world works. He went in there with the Vikings. It shouldn’t matter, but ... If someone with the backing of a powerful, professional business cannot get good care, what hope does the girl working at the small grocery store have?
“This isn’t about money. I got an attorney because it was really important to me that no one else should go through this because he should be here. He should have had a bypass that week. We would have been home for a month. He would have been out enjoying his life now. He was only 56.”
The story would be sad enough if it ended here — if there were no other catastrophic events to plague the Sparanos after losing their patriarch at such a young age.
But it doesn’t end here.
After losing coach, Jeanette wandered for a year. Although she remained in Minnesota, she took one trip to visit her eldest son Tony who coaches with the Jacksonville Jaguars. She visited Andrew, who coaches junior college football in California. And she visited Ryan Leigh who moved to Texas with her new husband.
It was an existence but not a life. So last year Jeanette moved to Texas to be close to her daughter and new son-in-law. “It’s always the best when I’m with our kids,” Jeanette says. “That’s always when I feel the most normal I’m going to feel.”
The problem is normal sometimes includes terrible surprises. And there was more of that last April when Ryan Leigh’s husband died at age 27 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“It’s been unbelievable and horrible,” Jeanette says.
This week certainly has been that because Tony Sparano passed away two years ago on Wednesday. And Ryan Leigh lost her husband three months ago on Friday.
“People are uncomfortable around grief,” Jeanette says. “They don’t know what to say. Very few people bring him up because they’re afraid you’ll get emotional. Or if you get teary-eyed they say, ‘I didn’t mean to make you sad.’ I didn’t forget he’s gone. I’m just grateful you didn’t, either. That you didn’t forget he was here.”
And so remember Tony Sparano. Remember him as Jeanette Sparano does:
“He really was just the most amazing, kind, funny, thoughtful, most incredible faith-filled person,” she says. “He read his Bible for an hour every single day, but he just wasn’t the kind to have the preacher or the priest on the sideline because he never did anything for show. That would turn his stomach. He lived his life the right way and cared about people.
“He was just the best. He really, really was.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
