RIP to the dirty dirty

[ice grillin you]

moneys not an issue...ill do it for free i just have to do some ive already promised and am having a hard time not being lazy to get those done...it truly is a pain in the ass

i was thinking about getting a laptop with a burner that will do it faster than real time and then selling the copies on ebay and other places to pay for the computer

[PhillyPhreak54]

Thatd be a good idea...you could make a killing selling those things.

[ice grillin you]

yeah i know....i also have the body bag and bounty bowl games

[hbionic]

Whatever happened to that 'Chuck' guy that used to come on here and pimp Eagles games on DVD?

[ice grillin you]

i was just about to say im sure im far from the only person that has these...others have them and a lot more and im sure they are relatively cheap...id suggest a google search

[RezRob]

  Respect for a player I'll always think well of. Man I loved that D.

[Father Demon]

i was just about to say im sure im far from the only person that has these...others have them and a lot more and im sure they are relatively cheap...id suggest a google search

IGY is growing up..        I remember when the young lass didn't know what the google was.

[TexasEagle]

yeah i know....i also have the body bag and bounty bowl games

I'd love to have those.

[TexasEagle]

RIP Andre... you were a great one.

*sigh* I so miss that Defense...

[PhilLeeD]

Long Live the Gang Green!  Give me a Killer Defense and a mediocre Offense any day!
Andre, Jarome, Reggie...somebody better check on the rest of those guys!

Seth Simmons, Clyde Simmons, Wes Hopkins, Byron Evans and Eric Allen.  Better say some prayers for these guys.

Ahhh, to have a defense like this to root for again. 

Andre Waters
"He scared everybody -- receivers, running backs, quarterbacks. He was a tough guy. He believed in the theory of reduction: If you keep hitting people, they don't want to get up."

[ice grillin you]

He believed in the theory of reduction: If you keep hitting people, they don't want to get up.

thats great and should be someones sig

[Rome]

Waters' mom on suicide: 'He let the devil fool him'


Early Monday morning, former Eagles safety Andre Waters died from a single self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

Yesterday, his mother spoke of her son and alluded to the personal problems that led to the suicide in his Tampa home.

"[When he called] we would pray and stuff whenever the devil got on him," Willie Ola Perry told the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.

Referring to her son's suicide, she said: "He let the devil fool him."

Perry told the newspaper she often quoted scriptures to Waters, and said she suspected he was unsettled.

"I told him he was running from the Lord," Perry said. "I felt he had a call on his life and wouldn't yield to it."

Perry, said her youngest son did not use drugs, nor did she ever recall him drinking alcohol.

Waters, 44, was one of 11 children, and, according to Perry "was respectable and liked to help people."

In 2004, Waters helped found the Carolina Football Development League to help troubled youths. League board member Bill Thomas said one of the teams - the Raleigh Eagles - was named after the NFL team Waters played for from 1984 to '93.

Thomas said that Waters, a native of Belle Glade, Fla., was with his girlfriend before committed suicide.

"She had left, and when she returned, she heard a gunshot inside the house," Thomas said.

Waters leaves behind three children and will be buried in his hometown, his mother said.

He played 12 seasons in the NFL. Besides his years with the Eagles, he played with the Arizona Cardinals in 1994 and '95.

He was a tenacious player who received the nickname "Dirty Waters" because he played tough and tackled hard.

Perhaps his most memorable game was a Monday night clash against Minnesota when he twice went after the knees of quarterback Rich Gannon. He was fined $10,000, which at the time was a hefty amount.

After the NFL, he coached at several colleges and was the defensive coordinator at Division II Fort Valley (Ga.) State at the time of his death. He also held coaching positions at Morgan State, the University of South Florida, Alabama State, and Saint Augustine's College.

[PoopyfaceMcGee]

My mom claims the devil's after her also, but she's really just nuts and needs to be medicated desperately.  Holla.

[Diomedes]

Andre was obviously mentally ill.

Not because he killed himself...that's a noble act.  All this Devil voodoo is what I'm talking about.  Only an idiot or a crazy person beleeeeedat, and Dirty Waters wasn't an idiot.

[PhillyPhreak54]

The Mysterious Death of Andre Waters

BELLE GLADE -- The clouds, gray and wintry, rolled in from the Atlantic on a recent afternoon and formed a melancholy canopy above the vast sugarcane fields by the southern banks of Lake Okeechobee.

Outside an old red-brick Baptist church, across the street from a mission to feed the needy and homeless, a small crowd began to gather in the parking lot tucked away from the bustle of Main Street's holiday traffic. Inside, the body of man who once thrived before crowds of thousands lay at rest in an open casket.

There was a trace of a smile on the face of former NFL star and college coach Andre Waters, the way his grieving family and legion of friends and former colleagues always remembered him. He looked calm and at peace, wearing a neatly trimmed goatee and a nice brown suit.

There was no hint of the violent, tragic end to his life on Nov. 20, four days before Thanksgiving, when authorities say he put a small-caliber gun to his head inside his North Tampa home and squeezed the trigger.

"He was so wonderful," said his mother, Willie Ola Perry, greeting a handful of visitors at the front of the church. "And I know he had them last seconds with God. He's somewhere with the Lord now. I truly do believe that." But he left behind a mystery.

Why would a man - a widely respected coach, a beloved mentor of young athletes, a devoted father of three - take his own life when he seemed to have so much to live for? What was going wrong in his life, unseen to so many, that would make him want to end it?

There may never be an answer. But perhaps, not so far beneath the surface, there are clues.

"It's such a loss"

When the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office releases its report in the next month or so, more might come to light.

For now, the department offers no new details - other than its initial findings about the gun and a still-unnamed girlfriend who found his body - pending the completion of a toxicology report. There has been no word of a suicide note.

Yet in numerous interviews conducted by the Times in the past two weeks, a picture has emerged of a person who projected an upbeat demeanor but concealed bouts of depression; a person who was engaged in a prolonged and emotionally draining court fight involving custody of his daughter; a person who harbored some deep-seated feelings of frustration about his career.

What puzzles so many people contacted by the Times is that Waters, 44, appeared to be in excellent spirits and making plans when they last spoke to him.

"Everything seemed well with him to me," said a nephew, USF running back Aston Samuels. "I talked to him right before he came back down to Tampa and he was laughing that big laugh of his and joking with me. So it's just a question mark."

The same sentiment was expressed by his former coach with the Philadelphia Eagles, Buddy Ryan.

"I had just talked to him two weeks before," said Ryan, retired and living on a farm in Kentucky. "I'm going to be coaching a college all-star game in Las Vegas and I was going to get him to come out there and coach the defensive backs. He and I were laughing on the phone and talking and all this. Two weeks later I hear he took his life. I had no idea he had any emotional problems."

Ryan gave Waters his first break. Waters made the Eagles in 1984 as an undrafted free agent out of the obscurity of Cheyney State in Pennsylvania, a rookie who stammered when he spoke to the media. But when Ryan became coach in '86, he immediately noticed the special-teams player who hit with a ferocity that far exceeded his 5-foot-11, 190-pound stature.

He would become the starting strong safety and one of the pillars on bone-jarring Philly defenses, a popular team leader and a postgame quote machine for reporters. On the field, he earned the nickname "Dirty Waters" for his aggressive style, though he insisted he just played the game hard. Off of it, he was known to people around him as a gentle, upbeat and giving man.

"It's such a loss," Ryan added. "He was a great leader and a great student of the game, and he was one of the first guys I had there in Philadelphia to build the team around."

Former Eagles teammate Mike Golic, now an ESPN radio personality on Mike & Mike in the Morning, noted sadly that Waters was the third major loss in the fabled Eagle defense. Lineman Jerome Brown of Brooksville died at 27 in a car accident in 1992 and end Reggie White of cardiac arrhythmia at 43 in 2004.

"It was a shock for Jerome Brown, a shock for Reggie White and the same way for Andre Waters," the former defensive lineman said. "With Andre, that would be the saddest in that you wonder what has to be happening in somebody's life going that bad to make you do something like that. It's troubling. He was such a great person. Always laughing. Always there for the kids."

Holding pain inside

In death, Waters had come full circle - back in the hardscrabble Belle Glade neighborhood of his childhood near the endless tracks of the Florida East Coast line, an at-risk enclave where hopes and dreams are so often derailed.

At the wake, only a day after Thanksgiving, talk focused on Waters as a person and not whether anyone could have foreseen such a devastating turn. A handful of his 11 siblings stood by his casket, smiling one minute, crying the next. In the pews, the silence was broken by bursts of wailing. As dusk became darkness, mourners continued to stream in.

There was a former football teammate from Cheyney State, Michael Steward, now coaching high school ball in Washington. The Eagles sent retired receiving greats Mike Quick and Harold Carmichael to represent the team; other ex-Eagles would come for the funeral a day later. Waters' longtime agent from Philadelphia, Jim Solano, flew in. And all around the church were nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles and countless friends, all dealing with the sudden loss as best they could.

Later, in the parking lot, one of Waters' nieces, 22-year-old Terrica Walker, offered a unique perspective about her uncle. She was close to him and often caught herself referring to him as "my dad" in conversations with friends.

It was Waters who encouraged her to enroll at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, N.C., during his four-year stint as a defensive coach ending last year. He let her save money by living in his house, and she stayed with him three years. She noticed something: He battled with depression.

"I saw him suffer in silence and I saw him struggle to find peace and find rest and that was what I was praying for him to get," she said. "Even the Sunday before (it happened), I knew he was depressed. This isn't something that just happened. I mean, he'd been struggling for years and he was trying.

"He would see a lot of pain in the world - often with kids who were broke that he tried to help - and he suffered from that. He searched for answers left and right. People will say it was for this reason or that. There's no one reason. He couldn't pinpoint it."

Walker says her uncle never took medicine for depression or sought professional help, though she says he insisted she see a psychologist at one point when she was depressed. But he wouldn't help himself.

"I was right in his midst for three years and every morning he would wake up with this big sigh, it never failed," she said. "He would try to cover it up because he didn't want to bring everyone else down."

A nephew nearby, 16-year-old Avon Waters, joined in the conversation. A high school football player in Atlanta, he stayed with his uncle during summers to attend football camps. He remembers that his uncle immersed himself in the Bible. "Every morning, it was read the Bible, go and run," he said. "Then come back and read the Bible again."

The teen said he got a call from his uncle on Nov. 17: "He was like, 'I'm down.' So I sung the church song we always sang - 'Hold out, just a little while longer.' And he started laughing, and I said, 'See man, you ain't down.' And he said, 'Well, if I ever do go, just dedicate the season to me.' But I never thought he would do anything like this."

Walker says she talked to him on her birthday one day later. "I called him because I knew he wasn't doing well and I said, 'How you doin', uncle Dre?' and he was like, 'I'm all right.' But I knew he wasn't. I could hear it in his voice. I said, 'You know I love you.' He said, 'I love you, too.' He wished me happy birthday. And I just told him to take it easy."