Untimely Player Deaths
Several players on San Diego teams have had untimely deaths.
- Former Padre Alan Wiggins died from AIDS in 1991, former Padre Eric Show died of a heart attack in 1994, Mike Sharperson was killed in a car accident on his way to join the Padres from AAA Las Vegas in 1996, and Mike Darr was killed in a car accident at the age of 25 in 2002.
- Ken Caminiti died from a drug overdose in 2004, three years after his retirement from MLB. He won the National League's MVP award as a Padre in 1996.
- The 1994 Chargers defeated the heavily-favored Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1994 AFC Championship game. Within 18 months, Chargers running back Rodney Culver was killed in a plane crash in Florida and Chargers linebacker David Griggs died in a car accident. Linebacker Doug Miller was fatally struck by two bolts of lightning in July 1998 in Colorado. Center Curtis Whitley and defensive lineman Chris Mims both died in 2008, at age 39 and 38, respectively. Defensive lineman Shawn Lee and linebacker Lew Bush both died in 2011 of cardiac arrest. Star linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide by gunshot in his Oceanside home on May 2, 2012. In total, 8 members of the Chargers' only Super Bowl team have died.
Read more about this topic: San Diego Sports Curse
Famous quotes containing the words untimely, player and/or deaths:
“In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)