Mystery: Deadly Lessons

At Scotty’s funeral, moved to St. Vincent de Paul in Richboro because the Glovers’ church, Advent Lutheran, couldn’t handle the busloads of kids who were coming, Vivacqua spoke to the hundreds in attendance. He doesn’t usually cry — he’s not built that way — but on that chilly day, he did. He cried, and through the tears scanned the crowd of sobbing, shell-shocked kids, some of whom were his current wrestlers, dressed in suits, their funeral best, and he said, “Scotty was a great kid, but he made a mistake. This is not the way to do it. Let’s not do this again.” He was authoritative and forceful in the way he said it. He thought that got through.

Let’s not do this again.

Yet early in the 2007-’08 school year — during Council Rock’s Suicide Prevention Week — Vivacqua’s cell phone rang again. Another one of his wrestlers had tried to hang himself. The school plunged back into panic. Vivacqua was beside himself. “I feel helpless,” he told me soon after. “And now I’m just numb.” After Scotty Glover’s death, Vivacqua found himself the object of some finger-pointing — was he pushing his kids too hard? Was he missing telltale signs? Was his highly regarded program ignoring the fragile emotions of its athletes just to put players on the mat? In interviews with me, the administration rose to Vivacqua’s defense, pointing out that if you condemn the wrestling program, you have to look at other sports as well. Will you start questioning the football coaches because some of their players are in therapy? Does the boys’ volleyball team become the center of scrutiny because one of its members committed suicide?

Tom Vivacqua wonders, though, whether a switch was flipped back in 2003, when the first of his wrestlers killed himself. “Most of the guys I have now were in junior high when that happened,” he says. “They looked up to him. He was a god.”

The second attempted suicide, in the spring of 2005, was the same story: outgoing, extremely popular jock who, although troubled, seemed an unlikely candidate for self-destruction. Then came Scotty. When I first spoke to Vivacqua last April, just a short time after Scotty’s death, he was still reeling. Even though it was our first conversation, he unloaded, and spent half of the phone call just yelling into the receiver, almost unaware that somebody was on the other end.

By the time I meet him, almost a year later, for beers at the Friends Bar and Grill in Newtown, he’s more reserved, but still puzzled by how to feel, how to act, what to say. He admits to being the type of guy who “blocks things out.” He doesn’t dwell on feelings. Some of the in-school counselors have suggested he talk to somebody, but he’s not there yet. He’s dealing with the losses, the sadness, in his own way. For now, after all of it, after the latest incident in the fall, he says, again, that he’s just numb.   

“What are the smart people saying?” Vivacqua asks me, sipping a beer, hoping for somebody — anybody — to figure this all out, to tell him what to do before he has to endure another phone call.

Let’s not do this again.

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