Tre Mason is lost and needs to be found

Los Angeles Rams running back Tre Mason is lost in the shadows, desperate to be found.

The first weekend of the 2016 NFL season has come and gone. The Los Angeles Rams made their big city debut on Monday Night Football in Santa Clara, Ca., against the 49ers, and Tre Mason was not there. It’s a wonder where Mason is at all these days. Even when his physical location is known, which is becoming less and less frequent, he is not fully there. He is vacant. He is lost, and he doesn’t seem ready to be found.

Rams officials have repeatedly stated that they have not been in contact directly with Mason since the 2015 season finished. It has been reported that Mason changes his phone number so often that it has become nearly impossible to track him down. And since last season ended, Mason’s personal avalanche began.

Most recently another arrest warrant was issued for Mason on September 9 after failing to appear in court on September 7 for a mandatory court date before a judge after he was stopped for driving with a suspended license in Palm Beach, Fl., on August 13. Over the last several months, he has frequently gone missing, vanishing amid a swirl of question marks so often that he himself has become a question mark.

Mason’s health is more important than anything else — his successes as an Auburn Tiger, where he rushed for 2,979 yards and 32 touchdowns in three seasons (1,816 of those came in 2013 alone, which surpassed an Auburn record held by Bo Jackson), his fledgling career as a Los Angeles Ram after two serviceable NFL seasons, all of it. Mason is technically still a Ram, on the team’s reserve/did not report list. But, forget that.

This is a 23-year-old young man with a life ahead of him, as long as he remains here to live it. And as of right now, that is the headlining question—will Mason make it out of this mess, and if he does, will his mental and emotional state be healthy enough to live a productive life on or off of a football field?

On the morning of September 12, ESPN Rams reporter Alden Gonzalez appeared on SportsCenter Coast to Coast with anchor Cari Champion. He ended their on-air conversation about Mason with this: “I’m not sure that anybody truly knows what happened with Tre Mason.”

It’s safe to question whether Mason knows what’s happening inside of Tre Mason. The situation he finds himself in is equal parts alarming, perplexing and sad.

And while not a central character, football does play a prominent role in this developing story. Mason’s mother, Tina Mason, has said of her son that “he’s 22 in a 10-year-old’s mindset right now. … Tre’s not himself at all.” This was stated to police officers who arrived at her home on July 27 to ticket her son for illegally riding his ATV around the neighborhood. She went on to cite Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, which more commonly known as CTE and popularly linked to the NFL for players who sustain brain damage. She believes to be the root for her son’s sudden behavioral changes.

In audio obtained, Mason’s mother goes on to tell the police officers: “You can say he should be playing football, but this is not what it is. After the off–season we could clearly see the change. Like, completely.

“As much as he’s accomplished, as hard as he’s worked, as much as he’s built his character, in record-breaking time it’s going downhill because of what’s going on. “He doesn’t even know. He’s not conscious enough.”

It is disturbing audio—a despondent Mason, a worried mother and two police officers criticizing Mason among themselves for not being in training camp and “blowing his career away,” when the real concern should helping Mason understand the reasons behind his absence in training camp and or being seemingly aloof toward what was once his dream.

Treasure hunts are tricky this way, and life is nothing if not a long and drawn out treasure hunt. Sometimes, achieving a professional dream can seem like you’ve unburied it all—supreme professional achievement has precedent in Mason’s family, as his father Vincent Mason is “DJ Maseo” and a member of the Grammy Award-winning hip hop group De La Soul. When Mason was drafted by the then-St. Louis Rams at 75th overall in 2013, he probably felt like he had it all. But what appears as diamonds in the outside world is nothing more than zirconia when you haven’t truly dug up what lives inside your heart.

Tre Mason is sick. He is not a punchline, somebody to merely be brushed aside because he is not entertaining us anymore or a convenient sideshow. Mason was admitted to a hospital, also in late July, for evaluation after his mother called South Florida police concerned again about her son’s erratic and unhealthy behavior—in Tina Mason’s words, “acting unusual and making irrational statements.”

On The Dan LeBatard Show in late August, the question was thrown out there about whether we as a society have gotten to a place where any erratic mental or emotional behavior in a professional football player is immediately attributed to CTE, which is a very fair question to ask but also a very dangerous slope to go down.

CTE carries with it symptoms such as cognitive impairment, depression, impulsive behavior, emotional instability, difficulty carrying out tasks, and more—all of which Mason is exhibiting. It is very well possible that Mason does have CTE and is experiencing its wrath at a startlingly early age, but there is no way for us to know that for sure. Given the technology and science we have right now, doctors can’t confirm nor deny with 100 percent certainty the presence of CTE in the brain until somebody is dead.

The why or the what shouldn’t be the main concern, anyway. The bottom line is that Mason is exhibiting behaviors long-connected with someone lost in a mental or emotional illness. If Mason, people in his inner-circle or everybody following this story only care about whether Mason is yet another name on the list of football players who ended up specifically with CTE, then we are missing the point entirely.

The focus should be on how. How can he be helped? How does assuming Mason, or any current and former professional football player, has CTE without confirmation feed the stigma surrounding people who have a mental illness for no outward reason? How can doctors work to perhaps be able to diagnose CTE in the living? How can a professional psychiatrist or therapist diagnose and then treat him properly for whatever disorder he is found with certainty to be struggling with?

These questions, of course, are deep and tangled and take time to answer. Most of the questions enveloped with Mason and his situation are for Mason to look inward and answer for himself. But he will need to accept help.

And so, all there is left to be said right now is simple.

Lean into the ones who love you. Have the conversations with those reaching out to you. Believe them when they say they care about your well-being and believe in your own worth enough to want to beat this, whatever the root of this reveals itself to be.

Don’t get well for the Rams or to entertain thousands of other people by running a football. Get well because you deserve a healthy, fulfilled life.

Get well so that you can run as freely in life as you once did on a football field.