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When the stories came out in mid-May of last year, the glaring headlines — another athlete who died of a drug overdose — Shannon Hoffpauir knew there was more to the story.
Much more.
Zach Hoffpauir, Shannon’s son, lived life to the fullest in his 26 years, seemingly never taking a day off from injecting joy or perspective into someone else’s life. He was in the middle of everything, from his dance moves to his football hits, to his baseball home runs, to his transparency and resiliency and leading the room.
“For a report to come out, ‘Just another athlete who died of a drug overdose,’ that doesn’t tell the story,” Shannon says in the 30-minute documentary, “Zach Hoffpauir: The Real Story,” that will first air on Sports360AZ.com at 5 p.m. Monday.
The documentary that dives into the life of the former Peoria Centennial High School and Stanford football and baseball standout will air 12 times on Bally Sports Arizona, starting Tuesday.
More: Former Centennial, Stanford multi-sport athlete Zach Hoffpauir dies at 26
Shannon doesn’t want her son’s death to go in vain as just another sad statistic. Hoffpauir suffered after his years of playing football. All the concussions he got from playing shortened his career.
He battled Lyme disease, Valley fever, meningitis, depression, insomnia.
Then, as Shannon says in the documentary, “He didn’t sleep one night and he got a Percocet from a friend and it was laced with Fentanyl and he died instantly.”
The family donated his brain to Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center that studies long-term consequences of repetitive head trauma.
More: Zach Hoffpauir remembered for compassion, friendship during powerful celebration of life
“Zach Hoffpauir touched the lives of each person he met,” says Claudia Faust, executive producer of the documentary. “It’s humbling to have been trusted by his family to share his story with those who never got to know the real Zach Hoffpauir.”
Faust’s team accumulated 15 hours of footage to put into the 30-minute documentary that not only includes interviews from his parents Shannon and Doug, but insight from Ann McKee, a neurologist and director of Boston University’s CTE Center on the results of the study on Hoffpauir’s brain.
Former Arizona State football coach Todd Graham, who was heartbroken on 2011 National Signing Day when Zach announced he’d be going to Stanford and not ASU, also is in the documentary, along with Stanford football coach David Shaw and Hoffpauir’s best friend from Stanford, Carolina Panthers running back Christian McCaffrey.
“He had quite a number of what we call lesions in the brain,” McKee says in the documentary. “It was riddled with CTE lesions.”
Brad Cesmat, founder and CEO of Sports360AZ.com, said that he first approached Shannon and Doug about doing a documentary on their son in mid-May.
At that time, McCaffrey and other Stanford teammates returned to the Valley for a dinner on the anniversary of Hoffpauir’s death. They shared stories about Zach.
“He’s someone every time I call him, he was totally present,” McCaffrey says in the anniversary dinner speech that is in the documentary. “To a point it was exhausting talking to him. I’d talk to him for three hours. But I never knew how much I needed every word.”
More: Family donates former Centennial, Stanford athlete Zach Hoffpauir’s brain for CTE research
To suggest human-interest story ideas and other news, reach Obert at [email protected] or 602-316-8827. Follow him on Twitter @azc_obert.
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