Broncos' Larsen enduring emotional ride

Niece's death, son's birth come while trying to make team

By Lee Rasizer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 5, 2008 at 9:49 p.m.

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Photo by Brian Lehmann © The Rocky

Rookie Spencer Larsen, center, talking with Hamza Abdullah on Tuesday, has made a positive impression on the Broncos despite having to deal with his son's early birth and niece's death.

It makes for a nice T-shirt slogan.

Football is life.

But it's untrue.

Experiencing death is life.

Celebrating birth is life.

And playing football while those affirming and devastating extremes are happening simultaneously only demonstrates how trivial the game can be in the broader scheme.

This is rookie Spencer Larsen's life.

His second son, Gunnar, was born Friday - the same day his 2-year-old niece, Kamber Ann, the victim of an accidental drowning in Mesa, Ariz., was buried.

Larsen took two trips home to deal with the spectrum of sorrow and joy in the first week of Broncos training camp.

On the field, he has struggled, understandably, to keep the edge necessary to attempt to stick in the NFL as a middle linebacker, given his personal story.

"What's really hard is putting so much importance into something when there's people grieving so much," Larsen said of his sporadic on-field work. "Myself included."

It began as an ordinary start to summer workouts.

Larsen, a sixth-round pick out of the University of Arizona, practiced July 25. He called his wife, Ann, afterward to check in, figuring that, only eight months into her pregnancy, he would be able to concentrate on the task at hand with limited disruption during the coming weeks.

But the harrowing news came the next day.

Kamber, the third of his brother Ethan's four young daughters, was alive but in dire straits as she was transported to the hospital.

A panicked Larsen prepared to jump on a plane, with the Broncos' blessing, to offer his family support.

But a few hours later, Kamber was gone.

The baffling circumstances only added to the despair.

"She was playing outside with the hose, and my brother went out and told her, 'Hey, don't come out here anymore,' " Larsen said. "But the gate was completely blocked out in the pool area. So it's still a mystery to this day how she got through the gate. No one knows. Speculating only makes it worse."

Larsen described Kamber as the "life of the party" at every family get-together he had attended.

The child's innate curiosity still resonates in his mind's eye.

"She'd go out and get into everything and had no fear of stuff," Larsen said with a smile. "That's just how she was - a lot of fun."

It wasn't exactly business as usual as Larsen came back to Dove Valley for practice last week. Focusing proved very difficult in what's heavily a mental exercise, especially for a first-year player.

But because it's his chosen

livelihood, the linebacker made the difficult decision to skip the funeral and attempt to narrow his focus as best as possible on the field.

Then came the second panicked call.

This time, Ann had gone into labor, one month before her anticipated due date. And the funeral for Kamber was that very morning.

Larsen landed in Phoenix an hour late, missing Gunnar's entry into the world. But just seeing the newborn's face for the first time was salve for the sorrow he had been feeling for several days.

"There's things that happen that are mysterious sometimes," he said in assessing recent events. "I'm very religious, and I think that, when there are those times when there's complete difficulty and tribulation, you will be picked up and given a ray of sunlight.

"That's kind of how I see Gunnar."

It isn't all darkness on the field, either.

Despite his travails, Larsen has made an impression on the Broncos coaching staff, which has walked the tightrope between grading the rookie fairly for his on-field performance and being respectful of his family situation.

Larsen, 24, has been running with the third team at middle linebacker behind Nate Webster and Niko Koutouvides and playing on special teams.

"It has to take something out of him," linebackers coach Jim Ryan said. "You take that into account when you see what he's going through emotionally. But you still coach him."

Ryan called Larsen a "great kid" and a smart player with solid instincts, adding that nothing he has seen this summer has changed the opinions that led the Broncos to draft him in April.

But Larsen is different now. As he recounted his story, he spoke about the strangeness of all he and his family experienced Aug. 1 - a burial and a birth.

Losing Kamber, he said, "is never going to go away" for his family.

But, in a small way, Ann and Spencer Larsen have made sure their niece's memory will live on.

Gunnar's middle name is Kamb. It's a nod to a small girl who exuded life and left the world too soon.

• August 5, 2008

  10:19 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  HBBeough writes:

  How does something that begins "Niece's death" make a nice t-shirt slogan?

• August 6, 2008

  7:32 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  intothelens writes:

  Are you kidding?? Try "Football is Life." Re-read the first two lines of the story....

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