Bianchi: ESPN’s ’14 Days in Gainesville’ took me back to a time when fear and football collided

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There are certain moments from your life that don’t feel like memories. They feel like places. You can go years without visiting them, and then something happens — a picture, a voice, an newspaper article or piece of television footage — and suddenly you are right back there.

That’s what happened to me while watching ESPN’s recently released “14 Days in Gainesville.” I wasn’t just watching a documentary. I was going home.

Home to Gainesville, Florida, in the late summer of 1990. Home to the town where I grew up, where I attended the University of Florida and where, as a young sports writer, I was covering the Gators during one of the most anticipated moments in the football program’s history.

Steve Spurrier was coming home; the favorite son, the Heisman Trophy winner, the coach who was about to change Florida football forever. There was a feeling around Gainesville that something special was about to begin.

And then something unspeakable happened.

That is what director Daniel Levin and the ESPN crew captures so powerfully in “14 Days in Gainesville” — the collision of two stories that never should have belonged together. One was about football. The other was about fear, grief and five young lives brutally  taken far too soon.

The first news came that two University of Florida students, Sonja Larson and Christina Powell, had been murdered. Then Christa Hoyt. Then Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada.

Five young people. Five families shattered. And an entire college town terrified.

It is difficult to explain what Gainesville felt like during those days to somebody who wasn’t there. This wasn’t some distant crime story on the evening news. This was happening in our hometown, around the hometown university, in apartment complexes where college students lived.

Nobody knew who was doing it, nobody knew where he was and nobody knew whether he would strike again. Students fled Gainesville. Parents came to get their kids. People pushed furniture against doors. Friends stayed together because nobody wanted to be alone.

And then came the murders of Paules and Taboada.

Taboada was a former high school football player, a big, strong young man who lifted weights. There had been this instinctive belief that maybe somebody like that could protect himself. Then he was killed, too. Whatever illusion of safety remained disappeared with him.

Gainesville was scared. Really scared.

And I was a young sports writer trying to cover football in the middle of all of it.

That is what came rushing back while watching this documentary: the sheer surrealism. We were going to football practice. We were writing about quarterbacks and offenses and Spurrier bringing his passing game to the SEC. Shane Matthews was emerging from obscurity to become Florida’s starting quarterback.

And yet none of it seemed important compared with what was happening beyond the practice field. Five young people were dead. The killer was still unidentified. A community was grieving.

And football season was coming anyway.

Sports can seem ridiculously insignificant at moments like that. And sometimes sports can become important precisely because they are insignificant. They give people somewhere to go, someone to sit beside, something to talk about besides the thing they cannot stop thinking about. For three hours, maybe they even give people permission to feel something other than fear.

That is where Spurrier and that 1990 Florida team entered the story.

“That was a sorry, sorry person who came into our town and did what he did,” Spurrier recalls now. “You never really get over something like that. As a football team, we just wanted to give people a little bit of relief amid such an awful time.”

Nobody should romanticize what football could accomplish. A football game couldn’t bring back Sonja, Christina, Christa, Tracy and Manny. It couldn’t erase the pain of their families or undo what had happened. But it could give a hurting town an afternoon together.

And Gainesville desperately needed one.

On Sept. 8, Spurrier’s Gators made their debut in a 51-7 season-opening rout of Oklahoma State. The Gators would go on to finish first in the SEC, but weren’t recognized as champions because of NCAA violations committed by previous coaching regimes.

“In my mind and in my heart, I will always recognize the 1990 team as champions,” Spurrier says.

We didn’t know then that Florida football was beginning the greatest era in its history. We didn’t know Spurrier’s Fun ‘N Gun offense would transform the way football was played in the SEC. We just knew that, for a few hours against Oklahoma State, Gainesville had something to cheer about again.

Football didn’t heal Gainesville. People did. Families did. Friends and neighbors did. Time did what time could. Football simply gave everybody a place to gather while that process began.

That’s why “14 Days in Gainesville” hit me so hard. ESPN’s best documentaries understand that the best sports stories aren’t really about sports. They’re about the way games intersect with our lives, our communities and our memories.

This one intersected with mine. Suddenly, more than three decades later, I was watching the Gainesville of my youth flicker across the screen.

At the end of the documentary, they asked me to describe that time.

“There are two things that bring a community together — tragedy and a great sports team. And at that point in time, Gainesville had both.”

Watching “14 Days in Gainesville,” I realized those two weeks aren’t just something I remember. They are something I can still feel. I can still feel the horror of seeing a deranged drifter Danny Rolling admitting to the murders and eventually being executed 16 years later; the sadness of family members  lamenting the lost futures of the young victims; and the strange, surreal exhilaration of a Saturday afternoon in The Swamp when, for a few hours, a frightened town sounded like itself again.

Mostly, I can still feel Gainesville.

My hometown.

And when I think back on those 14 days — on the five young lives that were lost, on the fear that settled over our little college town, and on a coach and a football team that gave everyone something to hold onto as Gainesville began to heal — I think about another Gainesville kid.

Tom Petty left home, too. But like so many of us who grew up there, Gainesville never completely left him.

And maybe that’s why, when I think about Sonja, Christina, Christa, Tracy and Manny and I remember a time, a team and town that will forever connect us, I keep coming back to the words T.P. put so beautifully:

“You belong among the wildflowers.”

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen.

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