We interviewed Tommy Edwards for almost an hour in preparation for the article “For Tommy Edwards, Things Come Full Circle.” We included a lot of the material from the interview in the article, but we thought you might be interested in reading the entire interview. Questions are not included, but Tommy’s responses are, in the order in which he said things. (In the article, we rearranged some of the order of the comments for better editorial flow.)

Full Text of the Interview …

Some things that happened to me when I was pre-school age, or even pre pre-school age, just some emotional and psychological trauma, and I dealt with a number of issues when I was going through school.  I’m dyslexic, and I had a difficult time learning to read, and I always felt like somewhat of an outcast, somewhere outside the circle.

 

I began to gain some recognition through track and football in high school.  All of a sudden that opened a lot of doors, socially, for me.  Once I got to college, I led the typical life.  I went out and partied on weekends, and some weeknights when I had time to.  The pressure of college, some things happened.  I had a girl threaten to commit suicide in my room my freshman year the night before my final biology exam.  I called an RA, and they talked her into visiting the infirmary and talking to a professional. 

 

I woke up at 5 in the morning at her bedside, and then ran back across campus to take an exam, and then no one really checked back with me to see if I was affected in any way.  And I had mono that first year during my freshman season for like two months.  It had gone unchecked because I kept getting diagnosed with strep throat.  My physical health really took a strain going to practice every day, and working out.  I was redshirting that year, but we were going through a full lifting regime moreso than the guys who were actively playing, and we were practicing every day against the first string as part of the scout team.

 

Finally I went in and asked them to test me for every bad thing that you can have, and sure enough I had mono.  That was a couple of weeks before the end of the season, and I had to stop practicing.  I basically went back to Radford and stayed at my parents’ house.  When I wasn’t in class, I was on the couch.  Had my spleen burst because of contact, I could have died, so it was something that needed to be done.  It was pretty much doctor’s orders.

 

I came back after winter break and I had lost pretty much all the weight I had put on.  I had put on like 20 pounds in the time leading up to the mono, and it had all come back off.  By the time spring ball rolled around, I was 215.  I had dropped down to 190.  So I had put 25 pounds back on.  I never felt like my metabolism really rebounded.  I think during that period of time that my brain chemistry was just really stressed

 

That summer I was an orientation leader at Tech.  I was just starting to deal with depression, and it got pretty bad at different periods that summer.  I didn’t have the same get up and go that I had had my whole life.  I slept a lot more, and I rationalized this as going through the after affects of really pushing my body through the mono and not really given myself a chance to really heal and get over it.  I had a real desire to get back into the weight room early, and the doctors okayed it.  I really wanted to get my weight back up to be competitive and try to win a spot.

 

I came in my r-freshman year, and I was basically third on the depth chart.  I had a good game my first game, I think we played Arkansas State (editors note: it was actually Bowling Green), and I scored two touchdowns.  Then we went up to Pittsburgh and I had four touchdowns in that game, and all of a sudden I was leading the nation in scoring and was in the national headlines and all eyes were on me.  That created some added pressures and things that I hadn’t anticipated.

 

I started experiencing some anxiety.  I didn’t have any idea just how public my life had become at that point, and how scrutinized every move I made would be.  That season went on, and I had some great games.  I think I was the second leading rusher.  I ended up with 11 touchdowns total including the bowl game that year.  There were some frustrating moments.  I just wanted to play more and contribute.  I hadn’t been one to ride the bench, and it was frustrating to get to the point where I felt like I had earned a spot. 

 

I kind of got put into that [goalline specialist] role, and I wanted to contribute in any way I could, but it was just frustrating to not have an opportunity.  I was not only the goalline specialist, but anytime they felt like there was a tight situation, I was called upon.  There was a lot of outside influence, people just speculating why I wasn’t playing, and it just became frustrating.  My mental state, my emotional state, at the time was somewhat….not perfect.  Having people speculate and create negative ideas really weighed into my mental health and really caused me to start questioning the loyalty of my coaches, when they were doing the best job that they could.

 

It really was amazing, looking back on it.  There were just too many influences, and I kind of got swept into it.  I’ve known Frank [Beamer] for most of my life, and Billy Hite was my roommate at football camp when I was 10 years old and we’ve been friends since then.  I had people drive a wedge between me and the people I put my trust in.

 

I got there late [to football camp], and they ended up putting me in a room with a coach.  We’ve been friends ever since then.  I went to football camp there for eight consecutive years.  I really felt at home there.  As my mental state deteriorated into anxiety and depression, all these other influences really made me question things.

 

Going into my sophomore year, things just got worse.  My depression got worse, my anxiety got worse, and I was throwing up every day before practice and during practice, like it was uncontrollable, like gag reflex.  I was really embarrassed, because P.J. Preston had gone through basically the same thing and had left.  There was all kinds of speculation as to whether he was on drugs, and I didn’t want to be scrutinized in the same way, so I just didn’t say anything to anybody.

 

The worse the anxiety got, the depression got eventually worse that year.  At the end of that year, I got into a fight at a fraternity house.  One of my friends got jumped by a bunch of guys.  I ended up getting arrested.  I really started to question who I could trust around me, and I started drinking more, and that contributed to the depression and anxiety.  I just became more and more unhappy. 

 

We also got a different offensive coordinator my sophomore year.  I think it was Gary Tranquill.  He kind of took everything that we did that worked and got rid of it.  It really caused Maurice [DeShazo] to have confidence issues.  Rickey Bustle had really developed Maurice, and when he left it really caused a lot of us to second guess.  The level of talent and the teamwork that we had developed the year before, and just the confidence, it all carried through and we were able to overcome a lot of those hurdles through the coaching change.  In the end he [Tranquill] left before the Gator Bowl, that was really detrimental to that game.  It really pulled the rug out from underneath us so to speak.

 

It was at the end of my r-freshman season that the fight happened, and the summer heading into my redshirt sophomore year was really embarrassing.  I had always kind of prided myself on being a pacifist, and I just reacted and tried to help my friend.  All those years in the weight room, and all those years on the field learning to react kind of took over, and I kinda banged some heads.

 

It wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt anybody, but trying to get into the middle of the pile of people stomping my best friend at the time.  I was charged with malicious wounding, which was grossly over-exaggerated.  The first thing they did in court was to drop that to assault.  The charges were eventually dropped and I had to do some community service, but it was just really publicly embarrassing.  That really sent me into a spiral that summer, and I started drinking more and more to try to cope with the embarrassment and anxiety.

 

I felt less comfortable in public settings or around crowds because of the potential that something could happen where I might be blamed.  I became more of a recluse that year.  That’s when the depression just got really bad.  I started having suicidal thoughts.  There was more than one night where I sat on the edge of my bed with a shotgun in my hands.  Really the one thing that kept me from going through with it was thinking of my family and how it would make them feel.  I didn’t want them to question anything they had done.

 

I had an aunt that worked at Tech, and she somewhat intervened into getting me into some therapy.  I couldn’t even bring myself to go to my therapy appointments unless somebody came and picked me up.  I was incapacitated to the point where all I wanted to do was sleep 24 hours a day and do nothing.  That was the second semester of my r-sophomore year, and I pretty much stopped going to class.  I took some incompletes and I failed a couple of classes.  I was able to make some of them up.  My family practitioner prescribed me some anti-depressants which actually made the situation worse.

 

I was later diagnosed, in the last couple of years, as bi-polar.  So when I wasn’t depressed, I felt great.  I just acted irrationally.  My party antics sort of took on a legendary kind of status.  I heard somebody telling a story a couple of years ago in Blacksburg.  They were telling a story about me, and they didn’t know it was about me.  They were telling me the story.  They were talking about “Touchdown Tommy”, and that in a way took on its own alter-ego.

 

I didn’t feel like that person inside.  I’ve always been an artist and a very creative person, with intellectual pursuits and interests.  But I had become this kind of cartoon character in people’s minds.  When I was in a public setting, especially when I was manic, I lived that and I really pushed that to the extreme.  I just wasn’t right.  I was sick.

 

I was the therapist a few times, but that wasn’t through the university.  That was independently set up by my aunt.  I wasn’t in a healthy enough state of mind to even go to my appointments.  Eventually the therapist said I can’t schedule any more appointments.

 

In the spring, I pretty much quit going to practice.  I had a meeting with Frank, and he asked me what was going on and where I had been.  I was incapacitated to the point where there were times where I just couldn’t get out of bed.  I tried to explain the best I could what was going on and I told him I needed some time to try to figure things out.  I was told that that wasn’t an option, so I started looking at other options.  My family was really pushing for me to transfer and go somewhere else, and to not forego the opportunity of using a scholarship to play football.

 

Even after the Gator Bowl, players were talking to me about transferring.  George DelRicco came up to me and told me I should consider transferring to Marshall or some 1-AA school where I could really shine.  A number of things like that kind of built up in my head, and eventually I said that’s what I’ll do, so we asked to be released and I started looking at other schools.

 

One of my roommates, Cody Whipple, suggested I look at Boise State.  They were 1-AA National Runner-Ups that year.  Their tailback was having some trouble and I could possibly walk into a starting position there with a really good team.  I had two relatives that lived in Boise. 

 

I got out there, and we were going through two-a-days, and I had an emotional breakdown after a practice.  I was trying to talk to my coach and try and communicate what I was going through and that I was having an anxiety attack.  I thought I was having a heart attack at one point.  He didn’t know what to do or how to react to somebody just breaking down and crying on the field. 

 

The whole summer leading up to that I had gone through more depression swings.  It was exasperated by drinking too much and partying.  The coach out there basically walked me in to talk with the trainer.  The trainer was sympathetic and they had a physiatrist/psychologist that worked with the athletic department there, and I went to visit him.

 

I talked to him for five minutes, and he had a doctor come in and write me a prescription for Prozac and sleeping pills.  The Prozac made me feel like a zombie and the sleeping pills made me feel like I was on speed.  When I called to tell them what was going on, they told me to just take two.  That didn’t work.

 

Not long into the season, I had a shoulder injury that sidelined me for about half the season.  During that time I just really started questioning whether it [football] was something I was interested in pursuing.  I decided I did want to, and then we got into spring ball, and I finally just decided that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.  The things that made me happy in life were art and music.  I called my family, and they thought I was making an irrational choice.  They thought it was drugs and all kinds of different things.  It basically came down to me trying to find some self-preservation.

 

I left there and came home to even more scrutiny.  My family wasn’t happy.  They thought I was really throwing away an opportunity.  My sister had moved to Boise and ended up marrying one of my coaches who was a GA at the time.  He had some attempts with the NFL, and was the MVP of the World Bowl.  He and my sister eventually divorced.  His agent was trying to get me to go to the Combine and try to continue, but it just wasn’t something I was interested in.

 

I found out after my last season at Boise that I had a vertebrate in my back that was broken in three places.  I had damaged the vertebrate in my neck.  I just didn’t feel like it was worth it to me. 

 

Growing up as a kid I had never had a huge focus in watching sports.  I had always participated with my friends, but I just did it more as a social outlet than anything.  I came to the conclusion that I was living everyone else’s dream, except my own. 

 

I’ve still had to deal with the chemical fluctuations as an adult, and sometimes they’ve been more detrimental than others.  Especially after my head injury, some things really came to light.  I kind of understood myself better, as far as what’s good for me and what’s not. 

 

A couple of years ago I met a retired psychiatrist who became a friend of mine and became my mentor.  He basically diagnosed me and we worked towards non-pharmaceutical treatments through nutrition and activities, and it’s been an amazing journey.  Difficult at times, but it’s really helped me understand myself, my life, and what’s valuable in my life.  It’s brought me to the point where I want to reach out to others and help them.

 

I want them to better understand mental illness, and to understand what kind of options are out there as far as treatment goes, beyond and including pharmaceutical treatments. 

 

I was visiting in Christiansburg [on April 16].  We had heard the sirens, and we thought maybe there had been an explosion at the arsenal or something.  I turned on the TV at lunch, and it said “33 dead at VT”.  I immediately got sick.  I didn’t know how to respond.  My way of dealing with things is through art, and music and poetry.  Words started coming into my head that expressed how I was feeling.

 

I ended up being in a car for the next two days driving, and had a lot of time by myself.  I came up with a couple of more sounds, and that’s where the Heart of Virginia Foundation kind of formed.

 

I just wanted to help somehow.  I just wanted to help ease the pain.  I wanted to help raise money in some way, and that’s where the idea of a benefit concert came from.  In the following days, I started calling Senators, Congressmen and local media.  I ended up doing a little piece with Channel 7 with Mike Stevens.  I called them to see if they wanted to use some music that I had written.  We ended up doing a little interview, and it was from that point forward that I made the decision to drop what I was doing in San Diego and pack everything and move across country to start this.

 

I started calling up all my contacts, and I felt there was enough interest from the entertainment world and the folks that I knew to help me feel like it was a legitimate idea and that there would be some support behind it.  I ended up moving back home.  I moved back with my parents for a little while, and then I moved to Roanoke not long after that just to be a little closer to kind of a metropolitan area.

 

I’m still into art, and I’m still performing my music.  I’ve got a couple of regular places where I play.  I live with my girlfriend and her son.  I try to keep things as lean as possible as far as expenditures.  We had a couple of applicants right away that were willing to sponsor us on the idea and put a little money into it.  We’ve been basically running on fumes and a shoestring budget.  At crucial points where I feel like I just want to throw my hands up and quit, somebody would step up and kind of breathe life back into the project.

 

It’s been an amazing process, having to surrender my own timeframe schedule.  Sometimes I try to force things to happen, but then I have to stop and take a break, and let it come to me.  And it has.  I knew the initial ideas and concepts were massive undertakings.  I had put together and produced shows in Southern California, and it was nothing compared to the scale of what we’re hoping to be able to pull off in the next year, or year and a half.

 

Between trying to book bands, taking endorsements, performing my own music, producing and selling art, I feel like I’ve had 15 irons in the fire.  It’s been somewhat thankless at times.  Initially when we went out and tried to gain support, there was a lot of skepticism in what we were doing.  Even moving across the country, my car broke down 10 times and costing me like $6,000, which was $6,000 more than I had planned on.  It took me almost five weeks to drive from San Diego and Virginia.

 

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.  The more it happened that way, the more passions I felt to make this happen.  That’s my dream [to have the concert in Lane Stadium].  We haven’t at this point made the arrangement with the university.  We need to do some research to figure out who to talk to and how to talk to them.  We are getting our budget together, our basic budget, and the actual foundation created. 

 

We approached Russ Whitenack at the Monogram Club, and they agreed to be a University sponsoring entity.  We’re also looking at alternative sites.  If Tech doesn’t want it to be in Lane Stadium, we’re essentially looking at doing it in Scott Stadium at UVA, or Richmond International Speedway or Bristol, but we’d really like to do it in Blacksburg, because it’s the epicenter of the tragedy.

 

We want to create a positive perspective for the world of what Virginia means to us, especially after the negative aspects and controversy were placed by the national media.  That’s a trend in our society that actually contributes to more school shootings and more acts of violence.

 

I can remember after one game in either my freshman or sophomore year, and a bunch of kids were lined up to get my autograph.  I really hadn’t done much during the game except play special teams.  I didn’t even get a snap at tailback.  My personal self worth was so diminished at that point that I didn’t feel worthy of the attention of these kids.  I felt that my life off the field was in such disorder and disarray that I didn’t feel like they should respect me, or that they should want my autograph.  I just wanted to crawl in a corner and die.

 

It’s amazing to look back and put it into words.  At the time I couldn’t.  I just felt numb and sick and disturbed.

 

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