Simmie Lives

By: Andy Graham
IUHoosiers.com

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Simmie Cobbs was at the Boys and Girls Club, where he customarily went after school, when his grandmother came to pick him up early.

He wasn't sure why. And he figured they were just driving home.

Then came the phone call. And the hospital.

"Right when we were pulling up to the hospital, my grandmother gets a phone call," Cobbs recalled. "She starts crying and tells the person, whoever is calling on the phone, that 'Simmie just passed.' Then she breaks down."

Simmie Cobbs, Sr., had just entered his fourth decade on the planet when he died of a heart attack.

Simmie Cobbs, Jr., was 9 at the time.

"Once I heard that, I walked into the hospital doors," Cobbs said. "You could see how my family had just gathered up. They came and hugged me. Everyone was crying.

"That's when I saw him in the hospital bed."

Cobbs asked everybody else to leave. He wanted to be alone with the father who, up till that moment, was virtually his whole world.

"He was my best friend," Cobbs said. "It was very different, because not having a mom around, he was like my mom and dad."

Cobbs crawled up onto the bed to spend as much remaining time as he could with the lifeless form that had been his father.

"I just laid with him as long as I could," he said, "until I was told I had to leave."

That scene, that experience drives Cobbs to this day.

"Just seeing that at a young age just changed my whole opinion on everything," Cobbs said. "It was definitely a huge impact on my life, but throughout that time period I learned a lot. And as I got older I realized that things happen for a reason."

Cobbs now figures there was a reason, for example, that he was a little league football teammate of Robert Spillane on the Oak Park Youth Huskies and later attended the same middle school.

Because that friendship would become a fount of family.

But that's not anything the 9-year-old could envision that awful day at the hospital.

"It was just like everything just stopped," Cobbs said. "It was the worst situation that you could imagine … still to this day, the whole situation is very vivid to me.

"I just didn't think anything was going to be the same anymore. I didn't know what the future was anymore. At a young age, I was always thinking about coming home, hanging out with friends, my father and my grandmother. Then, when it happened, it just changed everything. I didn't look forward to any of that. All I could think about was the past memories. That's all I had left."

Not anymore.

*****

Simmie Cobbs, Jr., who just turned 22 in August, has a meaningful present and promising future. He's in the process of earning an Indiana University degree and performing as an All-Big Ten-caliber wide receiver for Coach Tom Allen's football Hoosiers.

Cobbs' 2017 campaign commenced with a spectacular 11-catch, 149-yard performance against No. 2 Ohio State at Memorial Stadium. And Cobbs continues to lead the Big Ten in receptions with 33 heading into IU's Homecoming clash with No. 17/16 Michigan.

Gretchen Spillane plans to be on hand to watch the Hoosiers host the Wolverines, roughly a decade after she and husband Michael welcomed their son Robert's friend Simmie into their Oak Park, Ill., home as one of their own.

"He's been a wonderful addition to our family," she said this week. " … He's fun. He's energetic. He always has a smile on his face. We're proud of him, and he should feel proud, too.

"He overcame all the adversity he faced to be a good young man, and that is what's important. The football is great, the academics are great, but just to have him be a good young man is what we most appreciate.

"We know we cannot replace (his father), at all. You lose a parent, and nothing diminishes that. They're your parent and that's who they are. We were just there to offer support for him. We could never replace anybody, nor would we try to. We just wanted to love him and provide him a safe place to be, to succeed and to move forward."

*****

Simmie Cobbs, Sr., had helped shield his son from adversity as much and as long as he could.

Simmie, Jr., was born in Texas but was only about a year old when, after a divorce, his father took him to Chicago while his mother and two sisters moved to Florida – and, as things developed, basically out of Simmie, Jr.'s, life.

Cobbs' father worked construction in Chicago. He helped build the local police station. He helped build the church where his funeral service would be conducted.

And he helped build a life that at least somewhat sheltered his son from aspects of life that afflicted other kids in the area.

"I was having the time of my life," Simmie, Jr., said. "I'd go to the park every day and play basketball. I just was always out doing something. But he made sure that I was where I needed to be, doing things I needed to be doing. He just taught me everything.

"I had more of an advantage than most people when it came to street smarts (because) I just learned so much at a young age (from him). It helped me because where I grew up on the west side of Chicago, there's troubled neighborhoods. There's always shootings, killings, drug dealing and stuff like that, so it just kept me where I needed to be, off the streets."

Where father and son needed to be often changed with his job requirements and other circumstances.

They lived with Simmie, Jr.'s grandmother, great aunt, uncle and a pair of cousins in a two-story west-side Chicago home for extended periods but also, he said, "countless" other places.

After his father's death, the young Cobbs' grandmother would also take him out of the city if she felt things were too dangerous and he slowly became accustomed to sleeping "at the neighbors or down the street, or across the city at a friend's house."

The elder Cobbs was a basketball player, so that was the young Cobbs' sport of choice in the parks. He and current IU teammate Nile Sykes would play at a court adjacent to the house of his school pal and former youth football teammate Robert Spillane.

So Cobbs would visit the Spillane house. He'd play catch and jump on the trampoline with the Spillane boys.

"Robert (and I) started hanging out more and more, then that situation formed where we had so many sleepovers that they were just like, 'Man, you should just stay here. You're here all the time.' " Cobbs recalled. "I was just like, 'I'm cool with it.'

"That situation just formed, and it got to a point where it was so natural that I would get a call if I wasn't there. Like, 'Are you coming home?' It just formed that way and it's still like that to this day."

*****
Cobbs was used to a crowded household and so were the Spillanes. Gretchen Spillane was one of eight kids growing up and her husband had been one of 11.

The Spillane children were Robert, younger sister Nora and younger brothers Harry and Timmy. Robert and Simmie shared the basement of the three-story house and soon felt like brothers.

"After Simmie's freshman year of high school, the summer heading into his sophomore year, he was spending a lot of time at our house," Gretchen said. "After about three weeks of him sleeping over …"

Gretchen talked with her husband, then they consulted their children, about welcoming Simmie into the family. The response was unanimously affirmative.

Cobbs was grateful but needed to check with his grandmother about it.

"I had started going to (Spillane) family events while maintaining the relationships with my family as well," Cobbs said. "When I made the move, I didn't feel like I did it to leave. I felt like I was helping my grandmother out by lessening up her worries for doing extra jobs or paying for an extra mouth to feed.

"So I felt, in my situation, that I was taking advantage of an opportunity that was given to me to help out my grandmother in the long run. She didn't understand it at first, but eventually she understood and was truly satisfied with that. She appreciated it."

Gretchen Spillane put it this way:

"You know the phrase, 'It takes a village to raise a child.' We had so many people in our lives help us with our children, and then our extended children. We all help each other."

Cobbs certainly saw that philosophy at work first-hand.

"They're very welcoming people, very cool people," he said of the Spillanes. "They've always been like that. At a point in time, we had a foreign exchange student. They're just nice people. They're just willing to help when they can."

And the Spillanes saw a kindred spirit in Simmie.

"He definitely has become a very good, very kind adult, but he was always kind," Gretchen said. "Always very nice. Kind to everybody. It wasn't just us. It was kids in the neighborhood. Special needs kids. Those kids would cling onto him and he was fine with it.
He loved them right back.

"There was one boy in particular, I think his name is Matt, who worked with the Oak Park football team. Still, to this day, when he goes to my son's baseball games, he'll say, 'How's Simmie? Where's Simmie?' And when Simmie came to a couple of the games in the summer, he'd run over to Simmie and give him a big hug. Simmie welcomed that. He's always been good with a lot of different people, anybody and everybody."

*****

There is, among a great many other things, a football context to the Spillane family.

Gretchen's father was Johnny Lattner, the 1953 Heisman Trophy-winner from Notre Dame – who appeared on the cover of Time Magazine and later was frequently the bearer of St. Patrick's flag in Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade.

Robert Spillane currently plays linebacker at Western Michigan and his father will be on hand this weekend to see the Broncos play while Gretchen is watching Cobbs and the Hoosiers.

The Spillanes have seen Cobbs overcome some adversity at IU, not the least of which was the lower-leg fracture that cost him all but one snap of the 2016 campaign.

That was after a 1,035-yard season as a sophomore standout in 2015, establishing Cobbs as one of the Big Ten's best receivers. Now healthy again, the 6-foot-4, 220-pounder is a matchup nightmare for defensive backs across the league.

Cobbs has thrived, in part, amidst what he calls "the competitive spirit of the family" in the Spillane household, carried by kids "chasing the glory of their grandfather." He added: "Growing up with all that going on made you want to step up your game."

"All that" included access to a Heisman Trophy.

Lattner, a generous and modest man by all accounts, would lend the trophy out for charitable causes – and just generally make it available.

"I got to hold it plenty of times," Cobbs said, "and it's definitely a great feeling to hold that greatness in your hands."

Cobbs is grateful for it all.

"I just met a bunch of people, went around different families and figured out what a young boy is supposed to do to grow up to be a man," he said. "… and I'm still learning."

And he isn't about to forget the lessons his father taught him all those years ago. He took those away from that hospital bed and carries them still.

Cobbs keeps his dad close to his heart. Literally.

Tattooed over his left chest is a basketball with wings, adorned by a crown and supported underneath with the words "Simmie Sr."

"Every time I step on the football field, or when I'm alone, I always send him a prayer and talk to him," Cobbs said. "I feel that since I put him on my heart, whenever my chest is beating, he'll still be beating through me, as well."

Players Mentioned

Nile Sykes

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