How a one-man sports office created a 7-section arrangement about a NFL star's sketchy passing

 

Police say Jim Duncan died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound from a policeman’s revolver in 1972. The circumstances remained a mystery for 50 years.

Clockwise from top left, reporter Bret McCormick interviews Floyd White, the assistant coach on Jim Duncan's high school football team and a neighbor; the cover image for the "Return Man" podcast; Jim Duncan (35) during a game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Jets in 1971. (Photos: Matt Walsh, McClatchy, AP)

Around four years prior, a neighborhood eatery proprietor in a town outside of Rock Slope, South Carolina, asked Bret McCormick for research help for a hallowed place devoted to NFL players from the region. 

McCormick, at that point an associate games manager for the Stone Slope Envoy (and the paper's one-man sports office), was given a rundown. At the point when he got to the late Jim Duncan, McCormick was struck by the previous Super Bowl champion's short life. Duncan, who was Dark, was brought into the world in 1946 and passed on in 1972 from a self-incurred shot injury with a cop's gun. 

What started as interest in 2017 push the writer into an extraordinary examination concerning Duncan's demise. The outcome is Return Man, a seven-section arrangement and digital recording by the Stone Slope Envoy and McClatchy Studios that was distributed in late January. 

McCormick's composed arrangement starts in a police headquarters in Lancaster, South Carolina, where Duncan "stepped up to the counter where a criminal investigator stood, filtering during that time's mail, not focusing on the trim, attractive old neighborhood saint coming in from the other side." McCormick revealed that what occurred straightaway — around 11:20 a.m. on Oct. 20, 1972 — has been a secret for almost 50 years in this humble community an hour south of Charlotte. 

Through chronicled photographs of the football star both on and off the field, old news stories, and meetings with the individuals who knew him from adolescence and past, the definitive examination puts an amplifying glass on Duncan's life and numerous battles including yet not restricted to cash issues and a cerebrum injury when, McCormick revealed, the NFL saw minimal about the game's likely effect on the human mind. 

"I thought it was momentous," said Davin Coburn, the leader maker, for sound for McClatchy who directed the creation of the reciprocal digital recording to the arrangement. "I thought it was a staggering accomplishment of analytical detailing, and that is before you include the segment of all the other things that (McCormick) was shuffling as a one-man sports division there in Rock Slope." 

McCormick kept the beginning phases of his task calm. He previously had his hands full as the solitary full-time individual on the paper staff devoted to sports. He was liable for inclusion in a town where, he said, secondary school football was the end-all be-all. Without specialists, McCormick said it would have been difficult to do everything. McCormick's work was directed by the school year, so he had the option to complete more work on Return Man in the late spring months. 

At the point when he got Elroy Duncan, Jim Duncan's sibling, on board, McCormick at that point started enlightening individuals concerning the arrangement. Since Jim Duncan's passing happened many years prior, a considerable lot of the sources the games columnist discovered who realized the football star were more seasoned and a couple had their own medical problems. A couple were dead. 

"There were times when I felt somewhat voyeuristic on the grounds that you're burrowing something that is truly difficult and awful to the vast majority included, so why bother? The underlying point was to ideally discover something out that had not been discovered. I did that as it were … the story is truly filled in," McCormick said. 

Section 5 of the arrangement starts with the depiction of an outlined sign on the work area of the current Lancaster Province coroner, about the obligation to give the local area a reasonable and exact examination. McCormick announced that it was easily proven wrong whether Duncan's family was dealt with "similarly and genuinely" back in 1972. There was an absence of straightforwardness from specialists that left what McCormick called an "data vacuum" in the wake of Duncan's demise; there were no photographs delivered from the scene, no delivered examination reports, and no dissection. 

McCormick said there was a piercing statement from his meeting with Rosey Gilliam, the child of Duncan's secondary school and football trainer: "We're at a point now where on the off chance that you removed the date and time could you envision that incident today? Furthermore, the appropriate response is yes you can." 

"I believed that was truly amazing in light of the fact that the appropriate response is certainly yes," McCormick said. "I think on the off chance that somebody read this story and thought, 'Goodness amazing, that appears to be something that could happen now,' I trust their next idea would resemble 'Goodness, we've not actually progressed … as far as how we treat the casualties of Dark families or treat Individuals of color.' I believe that is something worth being thankful for to take from it, also. It truly is shocking that it's something you could truly see on CNN at the present time and it wouldn't be strange." 

Part of an arrangement with iHeartMedia, the web recording arm of the venture — like the actual arrangement — took some time, Coburn said. "I think with his announcing and with all that he has put resources into this story, unfortunately audience members will hear straightforwardly from Jim Duncan's family," he said. "You hear from his mentors, you hear from his neighbors and his partners and his companions. Bret worked effectively making a full representation of a truly unpredictable person. I think those recollections and those accounts are what truly help audience members wrestle with inquiries around the passing of a person who was a nearby legend in South Carolina, however he was a public games saint, too." 

Coburn added that it's difficult to hear Duncan's story and to not attract equals to occasions that are going on today, including progressing banters about police strategies especially as to networks of shading. 

McCormick left the Stone Slope Envoy in July 2019 for the Games Business Diary in North Carolina. The Return Man arrangement was incomplete, yet McCormick had the option to make a game plan with his current and previous bosses to keep chipping away at the undertaking to see its fulfillment. 

One of the beneficial things of being a "solitary individual" in Rock Slope, McCormick said, was being given a long rope for stories and inclusion. The opportunity permitted him to deal with this undertaking. 

"I simply trust individuals that are working at more modest papers would see this and not be stopped from taking on something that appears to be too enormous," he said. "I think for the reporting business, possibly that is the best message … ideally it doesn't take you four years, however you can do enormous stuff this way in the event that you got a smidgen of help."