Funeral for ex-Michigan State football coach had surprise visitor: Former player he once ordered to stay away

Nate Atkins | Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Roosevelt Wagner waited in the front seat of his white Infiniti at Spartan Stadium in the cold, contemplating whether he had the strength to walk inside.

He was back in a town he swore he’d never see again, back at the stadium where his dreams turned to anger. This was the opposite of a homecoming. This was a player coming back after his coach told him never to return.

Now, that coach was dead.

It was Jan. 18, a week and a half after former Michigan State football coach George Perles died following a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s disease. His family, friends and former players were gathering that Saturday morning at the stadium to celebrate his life.

Wagner was a mammoth offensive lineman on some of Perles’ last teams from 1988-1990. He was also the man Perles once believed was trying to take his life.

“I was gonna kidnap him and take him and shoot him somewhere in all them woods in Mason,” The Detroit News quoted Wagner as saying in 1994. “Wouldn’t nobody ever found the body.”

Wagner denied saying it, but Perles took out a restraining order anyway, and Wagner stayed away. But now he was back. Wagner’s own wife struggled to understand why.

“Why the hell are you going back to East Lansing?” he remembers Rebecca Wagner asking. “They don’t want you there.”

His heart raced as he pictured the people inside the stadium, the ones Perles loved. None of them knew he was coming. Maybe none of them would know if he just turned around and left.

The restraining order

Perles once paid $6,000 to shut Wagner out of his life. In the fall of 1994, he sent two police cars from Lansing to Ravenna, Ohio, to serve his former lineman with the restraining order.

Perles later said he didn’t fear the threat – “What was I going to do, look around corners for the rest of my life?” he wrote in his autobiography, “The Ride of a Lifetime” – but Perles’ wife was worried. After all, the quotes attached to Wagner in the Detroit News were hard to ignore.

Wagner denied saying them at the time. He denies saying them now.

“That wasn’t true, and that’s not how I said it,” Wagner said recently. “Now, mind you, dude, I’m riding around in a $50,000 hunter green Cherokee Limited, Michigan State green. I’ve had it tricked out like how you see those lowriders in L.A. tricked out. Do you honestly believe if I’m stalking the coach in this tricked-out mobile, somebody’s not going to see?”

He remembers the interview. It was late and he’d been drinking, and he was still fuming after going undrafted two years prior. He felt Perles was the reason. Somehow, this was the result.

He’s reminded of a line Perles used to say all the time: “There’s your truth, their truth and then the truth with God.” But Wagner knows he said plenty else that caused real damage.

Also in 1994, he approached the NCAA with a tape-recorded phone conversation he had with Michigan State associate athletic director Clarence Underwood. Wagner claimed the school committed a laundry list of violations, 68 in total, ranging from players receiving car loans to having their grades changed to getting set up with agents. The call, he claimed, would show evidence of a cover-up.

The ensuing investigation yielded certain truths. MSU admitted to four major charges in the areas of academic fraud, improper benefits and lack of institutional control.

Perles was already fighting for his job. The previous spring, Michigan State president M. Peter McPherson had said the coach would need “an outstanding season” in his 12th year to continue. The team started 5-6.

The NCAA found Perles was unaware of the violations that took place, but McPherson called him an “inattentive manager." With one game left in the 1994 season, Perles was fired.

'I was out of control'

They met at the peak of their lives. It was 1988. Perles was fresh off his first Big Ten title. He'd just won the Rose Bowl over USC and smoked a cigarette in the postgame locker room as then-Gov. Jim Blanchard told him, “It’ll never get better than this.”

Wagner was in his third year ever playing football, a country boy given a shot at college he never thought he’d see.

It came from Nick Saban. Michigan State's defensive coordinator visited Wagner's high school in northeast Ohio in a long trench coat, and when he held out his hand, Wagner thought he looked like the character from "The Godfather," making him an offer he couldn't refuse.

But before Wagner arrived on campus, Saban, who declined through a spokesman to speak for this story, departed to join the NFL's Houston Oilers in the spring of 1988.

That's when Wagner met Perles. The coach saw Wagner as a bundle of potential who needed to learn the game. Wagner ballooned to 360 pounds as a redshirt freshman, so Perles moved him to the offensive line. It didn't take long for his ego to grow as well.

“I was out of control,” he says now.

But his coach kept hitting the accelerator. Perles forced Wagner to run from one sideline to the other and back after practice, telling him he had to repeat any laps on which the coach beat him. Perles was racing from a golf cart.

Wagner's thrills came at a local bar, where he said he and his teammates would spend off days from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. drinking whatever they pleased. They would then show up to 6:30 a.m. workouts to find buckets lining the practice field. The more they puked, the louder Perles screamed. The bigger they were, the redder his face turned and the closer he’d crowd into theirs.

“He may kill a fly with a 10-pound sledgehammer instead of a flyswatter when he got on you,” said his son, Pat Perles, who also played linebacker for him, “... but he never gave up on a kid with a good heart.”

After Wagner's third season, he received a visit from an agent who was offering $125K on a black American Express card if Wagner entered the NFL draft. Wagner wasn't in a position to turn down much of anything free. He had also just gotten a graduate student pregnant, and the baby was due to be born just after the draft.

So he took the money. And then he went undrafted.

And then a complication took place during labor. The baby's umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck, limiting oxygen to the brain. He was born with cerebral palsy, and the doctors said he might not have long to live.

They named him Christopher.

Wagner did not play football in the fall of 1991, fearing he’d be ruled ineligible for taking the money. After training on his own, he declared for the 1992 draft, now even more desperate with a child who needed a wheelchair and special car seats.

He went undrafted again, and that's when he flew into a rage. He blamed Perles, convinced his former coach was bad-mouthing him to NFL teams. He packed up his green Cherokee Limited and bolted from East Lansing.

He told himself he'd never come back.

Back where it started

But now he is back.

When the news flashed across the screen in January that Perles had died, he felt a pain he hadn’t before.

“The thing about being close to death is you have regrets, people you hurt, things you wish you could have said,” he said as tears welled in his eyes.

He survived four days in a coma once. He spent others sleeping in his car. He’s lied awake in jail hoping to see the light of day again. He’s pulled the trigger of a gun wanting to see nothing again, but the bullet jammed.

He’s surprised he made it back here, to East Lansing, to Perles’ funeral. As much as he tried to push those years away, cutting off communication with teammates and refusing to watch an MSU game for 25 years, he never did get the voice of the screaming coach out of his head:

"Keep your circle small."

"Football doesn't last."

"Work hard, keep your mouth shut and good things will happen."

The lessons have taken decades to come into focus, but he now sees them as the forces that have pulled him back.

“God’s got something for me to do,” he says. “There’s somebody’s life I’m supposed to touch. To be here talking to you, it might be some knucklehead like I was at 20. Maybe it’ll change his life.”

He wishes he’d listened 25 years ago, when his career ended so abruptly. Instead, a bottle of Hennessy at 11 a.m. and another at 5 p.m. each day helped create a desperate blur that became his life.

In 1996, he gave a ride to a man whose car had broken down on the highway. The man, who had a briefcase, told him to call if he ever needed any help. It turned out the man was running a drug ring in Florida, and though Wagner says he didn’t partake in sales, he did offer advice about how to invest the money. The Drug Enforcement Administration wiretapped his phone. He went to jail for a year.

In 2005, he arrived to another car on the side of the road to find his brother, DaMone, covered by a sheet in the front seat, dead from a head-on collision.

He slipped into a depression, pushing through with more cups of Hennessy as he detailed cars for a living and let his worlds mix. A few days before Christmas in 2018, he checked into rehab.

He left East Lansing in a rush after things he didn’t say, or didn’t mean to say, but he never cleared them up with the people he hurt.

Celebration of life

As Wagner was looking to regain a grip on his life, Perles was finishing his. With the Parkinson's taking control, he stepped down from the Michigan State Board of Trustees in November 2018. He was struggling to put his arm around people anymore.

Perles never spoke to Wagner after the restraining order, but he did think about him. In the autobiography he wrote along with journalist Vahe Gregorian in 1995, Wagner appears on the very first page.

“The tough-guy exterior really melts away quickly if you spend time with him,” Pat Perles said. “He had a sincerity, a transparency to him unlike anyone I’ve ever met.”

He decided this would be the side of his father he’d share when he passed. They'd call it a celebration of life. Perles died in an assisted living facility on Jan. 7 at the age of 85. In the following days, Pat invited as many players as he could to come back.

He had no idea which ones would show.

It's just football

The doors of the elevator in Spartan Stadium slid open, and Wagner stepped back into a version of his younger self. His 6-foot-5 frame hid nothing, nor did his eyes as they locked onto the teammates he ran out of a tunnel with all those years ago.

For a moment, it was as if they hadn't aged at all.

"He looked the same, honestly," said Tico Duckett, the running back who carried the ball through the holes Wagner created. "I didn't know he was in such a good place."

Some of them told Wagner they feared he had died. But here was "Big Rose," in the flesh, running them through the two children he has at Kent State and the garage he details cars in and the homemade BBQ sauce he hopes to sell in Lansing grocery stores this year.

“I think coach was sitting there at the stadium,” Wagner said later that night. “I think he’s smiling in heaven right now, like, ‘That damn Rosie was a pain in my ass. But I did touch something in him.'”

Wagner no longer turns to a bottle to numb the pain. The aches in his shoulders and knees remind him of Perles screaming on a golf cart, and that image makes him laugh.

He raised a son named Gage who played his same position at his same high school before also going to college on scholarship. But when Gage Wagner told his father he wanted to quit the Kent State team to pursue a medical degree, his father didn't put up a fight.

It’s just football, after all.

Another son, Christopher, is 28 now. He was the child born with cerebral palsy after the 1991 draft. He now travels the country with his mother, lighting up the rooms he enters with an ever-present smile.

"Christopher was born to humble me as a man, as a person, as an individual,” Wagner says.

“I believe this to this day: I wasn’t supposed to go because God knew had I went to the NFL, I’d be dead right now."

His visit back to his coach’s funeral was about realizing where he is but also where he’s not.

He’s already planning his next trip back. For the spring game on April 18, he’s driving the food truck for his Smokin’ Rose BBQ. For the men he played with, he’s preparing a spread that would make their old coach proud: brisket, baby-back ribs, pulled pork, chicken breasts, macaroni, peach cobbler.

The bitterness with Perles is gone, but he does have one regret.

“I wish I came back earlier,” he said, “to tell him thank you.”

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@mlive.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.