Diagnosed with “mixed dementia” and frontal brain lobe damage, former Texas Longhorns defensive tackle Greg Ploetz had been deteriorating since 2005. In January, he looked at his wife and said: “Deb, please help me. I don’t want to be like this.” By then, he generally didn’t recognize anyone other than his wife. In February, Deb placed him in a memory care facility, where he continued on five “conventional” prescribed medications. The caregivers told Deb that Greg wouldn’t let anyone else touch him and was belligerent when the staff tried to give him the drugs.
He was bewildered to find himself among only people far older. The staff told Deb it was not working for Greg there, just as it hadn’t worked at a couple of other facilities Deb had tried temporarily before.
The former football player, a one-time renowned artist and a longtime art teacher, had just turned 65.
Deb was told her husband belonged in a state psychiatric hospital.
She couldn’t and wouldn’t do that to Greg.
In desperation earlier this year, she had given Greg a marijuana joint. Smoking it burned his throat, but calmed him. She remembered that. The next day, she walked in and told Greg, “Let’s go.”
She put Greg in her car and she drove from Dallas to Colorado, where Greg spent much of his childhood. Their son, Beau, lives in Golden. Deb hoped Colorado’s laws would allow her to legally and openly give Greg marijuana-based products.
“I’m trying to help Greg die with dignity and peace,” Deb, 63, said last week.
After Greg’s brief, troubled stay at a facility in Aurora, Deb recently moved him to another “memory care assisted living” home in Arvada. His artwork and pictures from his football career and of family hang on his bedroom wall. He doesn’t talk much and he moves haltingly.
Each morning, Deb, still living with Beau in Golden, uses a syringe to squeeze a tiny bit of marijuana oils — roughly the size of a rice kernel — onto a cookie and Greg eats it. “Tears of Luv,” the dispensary calls the oils. “In 30 to 40 minutes, Greg is calm,” Deb said.
Greg and Deb Ploetz, and their dog, Butter, take a recent walk at an Arvada facility designed to care for patients with dementia and related diseases. Greg, the son of a World War II fighter pilot, played youth football in Colorado Springs. He became a University of Texas defensive tackle and a renowned artist. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)
Each night, she gives him “Cannabis Tears” capsules filled with a gooey-type extract, also of the Indica marijuana plant.
“I’m not trying to get Greg high,” she said. “I’m trying to give him peace of mind. He’s almost off all other medications. He’s allowing other people to shower him. He’s saying full sentences this week. He looked at me the other day and said, ‘You look nice.’ “
Last week, Greg’s college roommate, former Longhorns linebacker David Richardson, journeyed to Denver to visit Greg and represent the Longhorn Support Group (LSG), an association of former players founded by another former Ploetz teammate, former Longhorns running back Billy Dale. Ploetz didn’t recognize Richardson, and when Richardson took one of his pictures off the wall and brought it into the central living room to ask him about it, Ploetz silently took it out of his hands, returned it to his room and put it back on the wall.
Richardson, the outreach minister at Victory Baptist Church in Cedar Park, Texas, wasn’t offended. His father died of Alzheimer’s four years ago. He also brought a check for $14,000 from the LSG to give to Deb. That would pay for about 70 days of Greg’s stay in the Arvada home, and it follows an earlier check from the LSG for $6,000 to cover day care expenses for Greg earlier in the Dallas area.
“I told Deb today, she needs to take care of herself,” Richardson said. “I think she’s found some good people who will take care of Greg, who will be patient and loving with him. Other places were ignorant; they didn’t know how to handle dementia patients. We need more places like this. She can’t take care of Greg if she’s laid up someplace.”
Deb Ploetz holds a tube filled with medical marijuana oils used to help treat her husband, who suffers from dementia.
A kid in Colorado Springs
Ploetz’s father, Frederick, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism as a P-40 Warhawk fighter pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II and remained in the military afterward. The family spent much of Greg’s childhood in Colorado Springs. There, his first football experience was in the Young America League and he was on the verge of entering Wasson High School when his father was transferred to Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, Texas.
Greg soon was a star guard and linebacker in high school in Sherman, and a visit from University of Texas coach Darrell Royal convinced him to head to Austin. It was a time of huge rosters, even on the freshman teams. Ploetz initially was listed as the fifth-team freshman defensive end.
“I thought, ‘God, I’m going to have to kill somebody,’ ” Ploetz said in 2001. He said he took advantage of an “eye opener” drill, where a tackler went one-on-one with a runner picking a hole between bags. He blasted the ball carrier. “They picked him up and I got up and somebody asked me, ‘Now what’s your name again?’ ” Ploetz recalled. “The next day, my little ring is hung at starting linebacker.”
As a sophomore, he played linebacker for the varsity, then switched positions in 1969. He was all of 5-foot-10, weighed only 205 pounds, and wore number 31. And he was a defensive tackle, popular among this teammates.
“His mind was always going and he had a brilliant mind,” Richardson recalled. “He didn’t have to study. It came to him so easy. He was a heck of a football player, as tough as they come.”
Ploetz was a fine arts major. “As I took the life drawing classes, we had nudes, of course,” he said in 2001. “The guys would literally be waiting at the dorm: ‘Here he comes! Let’s take a look!’ … They’d get my pad out and look at the girls I was drawing.”
During the 1969 season, he made four unassisted tackles as the Longhorns beat Arkansas in the famous “Big Shootout” then helped knock off Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl to secure an undisputed national championship.
He sat out the next season, though, because his girlfriend from Sherman became pregnant, they were married and he managed an apartment complex while continuing to go to school.
“The baby was real premature and had to stay in the hospital,” Ploetz said. “They didn’t know if he was going to make it, so I called Fred Bomar.”
Father Fred Bomar was the friend of many of the Texas players, including former Wheat Ridge High star and Longhorns safety Freddie Steinmark, whose leg had been amputated in December 1969, within a week of the Arkansas game, because of cancer.
When Bomar baptized Chris — soon Chris Fry after his parents were divorced and he took his stepfather’s name — Steinmark stood in as Chris’ godfather. Chris survived; the doctors were shocked. Years later, Ploetz still couldn’t talk about Chris, his baptism and his godfather without choking up. (Steinmark, a Denver Post Gold Helmet Award winner, died in 1971 and remains one of the most legendary figures in Colorado sports history.)
Named the top art student at Texas, Ploetz played one more season with the Longhorns, in 1971, then managed a movie theater; bought, refurbished and sold houses; and earned spots in shows with his artwork. He taught off and on before finally settling into a career as a teacher, while also doing some coaching.
Dementia tied to football?
In 1978, he remarried. Deb Hardin was at the Longhorns-Razorbacks game in 1969 — as an Arkansas student. They had two children: Beau and Erin.
Greg took Beau fishing and Erin on butterfly expeditions. They lived on an 11-acre spread in Weatherford, Texas, where Greg had done much of building of the house himself, and they were happy.
Then Greg started having problems.
In 2005, when Greg was teaching at Trimble Tech in Fort Worth, he couldn’t learn to work his new cellphone. He couldn’t remember what the green button was for. Greg also was struggling to adapt to new computer technology and handle television remotes.
“When I look back on it now, it was his inability to grasp new knowledge,” Deb said.
She initially wrote it off as an artist’s quirkiness, or the common tendency to be brilliant at some things, inept at others.
In early 2009, Greg couldn’t fathom the school’s computer system to enter grades. The principal told Greg she was placing him on probation. Deb, by now aware something serious was wrong, said no, Greg was taking a medical leave.
Deb said a Fort Worth neurologist told her that Greg’s memory issues probably were related to head injuries from football. That was the first of several doctors’ similar diagnoses.
Greg still painted and was able to ride bikes with Deb. By March 2013, Greg was slipping and they had sold their Weatherford spread. Greg spent four days in a psychiatric ward as doctors determined what medications he should be taking.
Deb tried placing him in several facilities, but Greg couldn’t handle the one she liked best because of the noises around him. Eventually she made the call to bring him to Colorado. The major regret is moving away from the supportive Erin; her husband, Dan Cherkassky; and their infant son, Lukas.
So, is Ploetz’s dementia related to football? Is it the degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), that has been linked to concussions and to the suicides of football players such as Dave Duerson and Junior Seau?
Doctors’ verdicts have been inconclusive and more won’t be known until after Greg dies. Deb’s informal conclusion is, yes, it’s football related, but to her, that’s not a legal issue because she’s not looking to sue.
“I’ve never been a litigious person,” she said. “I’ve never believed in that. Greg chose to play football. He loved football. He would tell you his best years were with his brothers in football. He wouldn’t take that back.”
Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost.com or twitter.com/TFrei
More on Greg Ploetz in Field House Blog
State's legal acceptance of marijuana use plays big role for Ploetzes
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