Forty years later, documentarian puts a fresh lens on the shattering Jim Tyrer story
As an acquaintance of Tina Tyrer Moore over the years, Kevin Patrick Allen came to know her as a great listener. Over time, though, he became increasingly curious about hearing her own story as a daughter of Martha and Jim Tyrer — the former Chiefs great who 40 years ago next week astonishingly and seemingly incomprehensibly murdered his wife and killed himself.
As he read more about what happened, he thought to himself, “It was like a story that was never finished.”
So last year he set out to tell the story in documentary form, a proposal that the four children were challenged to reconcile among themselves.
“We had to talk about, ‘Is this something that we want to do?’ ” Brad Tyrer, the oldest son, said by telephone from his home in Louisville. “Because we never really opened up the story to anybody.”
They resolved to go forward with it. And they’re glad they did.
“Getting (his siblings in the Kansas City area) on conference calls, having to talk through this, leading up to it, and then all through the process, it’s been very therapeutic I think for all of us,” he said.
The result is a thought-provoking, thorough and moving study of what led to that horrific night and what’s happened since. The doc, “A Good Man … The Jim Tyrer Story,” was publicly screened for the first time on Thursday at Screenland Armour as Allen and director of photography Steve Hebert seek to find its commercial home.
It makes for a compelling work toward Allen’s two goals: to cast light on the remarkable resilience of the Tyrer children and reframe the legacy of Tyrer in what became a reflection of the words of the Rev. Ted Nissen at the memorial service:
“We should be careful not to judge a whole life by the concluding events.”
In this case, through consultation with Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, Allen believes “you can be as certain as can be without having physical evidence that (Tyrer) had” chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Better known as CTE, but not until the science of more than 20 years later, a brain disease caused by repeated head injuries that can lead to aggression, depression and impulsive or erratic behavior.
Among others determined to have suffered from CTE, former NFL players Junior Seau and Dave Duerson committed suicide. And Jovan Belcher, the Chiefs linebacker who before killing himself in 2012 murdered Kasi Perkins, his girlfriend and mother to their child, had a key signature of CTE in his brain, according to a 2014 post-mortem analysis at the request of lawyers representing the interests of the child.
Nowinski “said there was greater than a 90 percent chance” that Tyrer had CTE, a notion supported in the film’s reminders of the head-butting and head-slapping in line play common at a time when suspension helmets provided less protection than those of today.
Through interviews with friends, including former Chiefs teammates Fred Arbanas, Ed Budde, Ed Lothamer and Michael Oriard, the film also probes Tyrer’s struggle to find his place and even himself after he retired in 1975 after a career that made him a worthy candidate for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
It was widely known that Tyrer was in deep debt and had lost a lot of weight. But the film makes all the more clear how he also grappled with his identity ... perhaps particularly since he wasn’t one to ask for help.
That aspect of what came to pass isn’t incompatible with the notion of CTE, Allen said.
“The way I see it is that both things are true,” he said. “He wasn’t bigger than life any more, but I think he would have known how to move forward if he had a healthy brain.”
Citing Nowinski and the work of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, Allen added, “If difficulties in your life are a winding road, a healthy brain is a guardrail. So you scratch up the car, maybe you wreck, but you don’t go over the cliff.”
Putting a name to it might help some view Tyrer in a different way, but Brad Tyrer didn’t need that.
He referred to the words of Oriard read from his book, “The End of Autumn,” that Tyrer was the “unlikeliest suicide-murderer to those who knew him.”
“That’s true. My dad was just a great guy, an all-around great guy, he didn’t cuss, he didn’t drink, you never saw him raise his voice at my mom, ever,” he said over the phone, calling his mother “the perfect mom” and adding, “It was just that something snapped. And that wasn’t him. … It was somebody else who did that, if that makes sense?”
He added, “Then when the CTE stuff came about, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, OK, well that makes sense.’ But it wasn’t like an epiphany or something that really was a milestone type thing. Because I’ve been thinking that way the whole time: It wasn’t him.”
As much as Allen wanted to convey that about Tyrer, he also wanted to detail how the children found their way into who they are now … as detailed at the end of the film.
*“Tina Tyrer Moore has been married for 25 years. She and her husband raised two good boys who have families of their own. She owns and operates a hair salon where she’s known by her clients as an empathetic listener. …
*“Brad Tyrer played college football at the University of Nebraska. He’s a successful businessman, husband and father to two grown boys. ‘I’m an eternal optimist.’ ”
*“Stefanie is a longtime pediatric surgical nurse. ‘When a parent brings in an injured or sick child, I care for all of them with empathy and respect.’ ”
*“Jason Tyrer played college football for the University of Kansas. He owns his own business and is a husband and father to three boys.”
On Feb. 2, it adds, Jason wore his father’s Super Bowl IV championship ring in Miami as he attended the team’s first Super Bowl since.
Each of their journeys has been their own, of course. But Allen marveled at how they started moving forward with the help of their maternal grandparents, Lucille and Truman Cline.
They essentially moved in as soon as then-17-year-old Brad called them — right after he called the police that dreadful Sept. 15 after hearing the gunshots from the room behind his on a day that Allen treats with sensitivity and restrained detail.
The grandparents were “salt of the Earth,” Brad said, who tried to keep things as normal as possible. It was a new normal, to be sure, but the message was “we’ve got to keep going.”
The afternoon of the funeral, Brad went to the back patio and sat down feeling sorry for himself when he felt the sense of literally being smacked in in the head. It felt like God saying, “Snap too, there, kid.” And his grief suddenly was accompanied by gratitude for all he’d had with his parents … and the start of a journey into faith that he ran from a times but led to him toward becoming a born-again Christian 21 years ago.
Soon after the funeral, they were back in school, including eldest Tina returning to the University of Missouri. Just days later, Brad rejoined the Rockhurst football team for which he typically started on both sides of the ball and kicked.
The game against Shawnee Mission West at the Shawnee Mission District Stadium came down to a field goal, and he remembers feeling the pressure even as he felt the support of coaches and teammates.
“ ‘I’ve got to do this,’ ” he thought. “Then it was just a huge sense of relief when it went through.”
In the documentary, Arbanas tells of being there and jumping over the fence to embrace and protect Brad Tyrer as part of his extended family. The moment bore what Oriard called a “freakishly uncanny” parallel to what Jim Tyrer had experienced at the same age: playing basketball the day after his own father had died after suffering a heart attack.
That and more are part of what Allen calls a “human condition story,” something at once so complex and yet so basic for all its attached joys and sorrows and uncertainties.
“Life keeps going on,” Brad Tyrer said, adding, “And you just kind of keep going.”