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Former BHS Standout, NFL Champion Dies at 46

By MATTHEW ARTZ
Friday April 09, 2004

Lawrence McGrew, a Berkeley High football standout who finished his NFL career a Super Bowl champion, died last Friday of a suspected heart attack. He was 46. 

McGrew was celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary with his wife Charyce at their home in Lancaster, in north Los Angeles County, when he suddenly collapsed. “We were having a good time, then he just walked over to my left and started to slump,” she said. “I could just tell by the way he was falling down that something was wrong.” 

The 6-foot 5-inch, 260-pound former linebacker was taken to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead. A representative for the county coroners office said a toxicology report had not been completed. McGrew suffered from high blood pressure, his wife said. The couple had two children together, ages 4 and 7. 

Charyce McGrew described her husband as a jokester, who never got caught up in his fame and remained totally devoted to his family. When he was on the road, she said, he would call 10 times a day. “I would pick up the phone and tease him and say ‘what do you want stalker?’ If he went two hours without calling, I knew something was wrong,” she said. 

McGrew spent plenty of time dialing his friends too, said Wendell Tyler, a former running back for the San Francisco 49ers. “He’d always get up early and call all his buddies and wake them up, he said. “You could expect a call from Larry ever day.”  

Harold Williams, a friend of McGrew’s since they attended the now defunct Franklin Elementary School in Berkeley together, said he could only remember two or three days that McGrew hadn’t called him since he retired from the NFL in 1991. 

The two met one Saturday while riding their bikes on competing paper routes. Williams was distributing the Berkeley Gazette and McGrew worked for the Oakland Tribune. They began talking and learned they both had dogs named Sparkly. 

“It was instant karma—we had the same off-beat sense of humor,” Williams said. The two spent their days playing sports and walking the trails at Tilden Park, sometimes jumping out from the bushes to scare people. 

At Berkeley High, Williams said, McGrew was a beloved cut-up. “We’d put on shows for people. People wanted to see us act goofy,” he said. McGrew, though, took football seriously. He lifted weights religiously and made second team all-county as a senior, despite suffering a broken ankle. 

After a year at Contra Costa College, he enrolled at USC where he starred on a team that won a share of the national championship his junior year. Artie Gigantino, the press secretary for the Oakland Raiders, joined the team as an assistant coach for McGrew’s senior year, and remembered the linebacker as a cool customer. “My first game as a coach I was literally upchucking in the locker room and Larry put his arm around me and said, ‘Relax, we’re USC, we always win.” 

McGrew spent most of his 11-year NFL career with the New England Patriots. He led the team in tackles in 1985, the year the Patriots made it to the Super Bowl, but is best known for being the defender William “The Refrigerator” Perry stampeded over for a touchdown in the Chicago Bears victory over the Patriots in the championship game. His friend Williams said that when a teammate asked McGrew if he was all right as he lay on the ground after the play, McGrew replied, “I’m OK, but I’m going to be on ESPN for the rest of my life.” 

Injuries took their toll on McGrew, who ended his career as a reserve on the 1990 Super Bowl Champion New York Giants. Though his skills deteriorated, Charyce said, McGrew’s spirits were always high. “Larry never sulked. I can’t remember him ever complaining,” she said. “For him, it was just work.” 

An inoperable neck injury made it difficult for McGrew to work after his football days were over, Charyce said. Tyler, also a resident of Lancaster, said he and McGrew often exercised together at a local gym. He said McGrew made friends with everyone and never played up his NFL past. “He was never Lawrence McGrew the football player, he was always just Larry.” 

But even though McGrew didn’t want to play up his days as a pro football player, someone wanted to do it for him. Last year McGrew was the victim of a highly publicized case of identity theft. A Nevada resident, Fred McGrew, made headlines when he was arrested for posing as the football star to get a job as a football coach at Gavilan College in Gilroy.  

“He wasn’t a happy camper about that one,” said Charyce. Not only was the impostor only six feet tall, he claimed to have gone to school in Cincinnati. 

McGrew moved his family back to the Bay Area after his playing days were over to be close to his parents and his three children from a previous marriage. After a few years the couple moved to Lancaster to be closer to Charyce’s family. Tyler said McGrew would drive to Berkeley every month to visit his mother and children. 

During their last conversation, the day before he died, Tyler said McGrew was planning to go Berkeley Friday to visit his mother, who is on dialysis, but then realized Friday was his anniversary. “That was Larry,” he said. “He was always on the go helping others.”