Ben Bolch: Before he tried to kill himself, Erik Kramer saved a kid battling his own darkness
LOS ANGELES — Heroes can change you forever and go on to crumble out of sight. It's not often they piece themselves back together and sit down to tell you about it.
Erik Kramer has high-tech plastic in his skull. Teeth realigned through surgery. Bullet fragments lingering from the hazy night he put a gun under his chin in a Calabasas hotel room and pulled the trigger.
"Basically," Kramer said over breakfast a while back, pointing toward his forehead, "what you see here is not mine."
What kind of hero is that?
Well, you wouldn't be reading this if, many years earlier, the emerging college quarterback who later starred for the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears had not saved a 12-year-old suffering from paralyzing anxiety and depression who didn't understand it at the time.
Yep, that's me.
Back then, middle school sucked the little joy there was out of life. Mondays were the worst, Tuesdays and Wednesdays not much better. Saturdays were the payoff, a chance to see Kramer fearlessly lead my hometown North Carolina State Wolfpack to the Peach Bowl in 1986.
Sports were my savior, and Kramer's weekly feats sent me scurrying back to the IBM Selectric III typewriter in
