Mills represents best of Panthers
SCOTT FOWLER
Mon, Apr. 18, 2005
Sam Mills died Monday. When he did, he took with him a piece of everyone who has ever cared about the Carolina Panthers.
He represented the best our hometown NFL team has ever given us -- as a player, an assistant coach and a human being.
Mills, 45, finally succumbed to intestinal cancer. But Mills, a pro linebacker for 15 years, fought it hard. Doctors told him in August 2003 that he would live three to 12 more months. Mills said that during the 2003 season, which would end with the Panthers in the Super Bowl, he was hoping just to make it to New Year's Day 2004.
Yet he ended up living for 20 months after being told he had cancer.
When the doctor first gave him the diagnosis, Mills said: "Are you serious?"
Then he started to cry, just as so many of us have over the past 24 hours.
"Keep pounding" was Mills' mantra -- the one eventually made into a bracelet, the mantra he explained to the rest of the Panthers in an emotional speech before their 2004 playoff victory against the Dallas Cowboys.
Mills was a private man. But he opened up his life more after the diagnosis, especially to fellow cancer victims. Even as the brutal chemotherapy lightened his skin and drained his energy for days at a time, he continued to coach.
But to remember Mills just for his dignified struggle against cancer is far too limiting a portrait.
He had a fine sense of humor. He loved locker-room banter, even when it focused on his lack of height (5-foot-9) or his lack of hair. He could make fun of himself. A five-time Pro Bowler, during his playing career Mills would sometimes refer to himself as a player who was "short, balding and can't see very well."
Mills was also a good husband to Melanie and a good father to his four children. He wanted to be a defensive coordinator and ultimately an NFL head coach. He could have done either job well if the cancer had backed off and given him a fair shot.
I respected Mills as much as anyone I've ever written about. He treated everyone well, win or lose, from security guards to team owner Jerry Richardson. The Panthers made one of their finest gestures by inducting him as the first (and so far the only) Panthers player in their Hall of Honor.
As a player, Mills was a master of the big play at the right time. He also could knock 260-pound running backs straight onto their shoulder blades.
Mills' most famous play as a Panther helped produce Carolina's first win ever in 1995. After an 0-5 start, the expansion Panthers were playing the New York Jets in Clemson. Jets quarterback Bubby Brister tried to throw a shovel pass, but Mills blitzed and no one blocked him.
Mills intercepted the pass, trudged toward the end zone and scored. Carolina rode the momentum to victory.
"The players today always tease me about that run," Mills said years later. "They say, `Man, you were running slow.' But I say, `Hey, I got there.' "
At the time, Mills' teammates teased him, too. Said then-Panthers quarterback Frank Reich back in 1995, noting there were 22 seconds left in the first half when the play began: "I thought he was trying to do two things: score a TD and run out the clock."
Mills didn't play his first game as a Panther until he was 36 -- a little late for a legend. By then, he had already been a star linebacker in the United States Football League and for the New Orleans Saints.
But Mills was an underdog for much of his life. He was the first of his parents' 11 children to earn a college degree. Undrafted out of Division III Montclair (N.J.) State, after college he first got a high-school teaching job in New Jersey, teaching students photography and woodworking for $13,600 a year.
He finally found a job in the USFL, and from there went to New Orleans and then to the Panthers in 1995. He started every game for three years at Carolina, then retired and quickly began his career as an assistant coach. He worked on the staffs of all three of Carolina's head coaches -- Dom Capers, George Seifert and John Fox.
Mills coached his final two seasons while he was sick, guiding the careers of young standout linebackers like Dan Morgan and Will Witherspoon, and coaching veteran Mark Fields as Fields missed a season with Hodkin's disease, then returned to play last season. All the while, Mills battled his cancer constantly and quietly.
"I just made the decision after I got diagnosed that I was going to fight it all the way," Mills told me in an extensive interview a year ago. "That's the way I was built: to fight."
That talk was one of the last in-depth interviews Mills would ever give about his life. It was originally conducted for a book I was writing about the Panthers, but Mills understood and agreed that parts of the interview would also appear in the Observer.
We sat for nearly three hours that afternoon, eating and talking at Jillian's. Mills was relaxed and funny. It was one of the best days I've ever had in this job.
The eldest three of Mills' four children are in their 20s. The fourth, Sierra, is now 7 years old. Mills told me a story about her that afternoon.
Not long after the cancer diagnosis, Sam and Sierra Mills went to Concord Mills and parked way off from the entrance. That started a discussion about exercise and its benefits. Mills recounted the conversation to me like this:
"Daddy," Sierra said, "you always told me you work out so you can live a long time and be around for me."
"That's true," Sam said.
"Well, how come they're saying you won't live a long time now?" Sierra asked.
Sam smiled.
"Oh, baby," he said. "Dad's going to be around."
And he will be around. For me and for you and for anyone else who cares about the Panthers.
We will see his statue. His name. His No. 51.
We will say a prayer for his family.
And we will always remember Sam Mills, the truest gentleman the Carolina Panthers have ever employed.
