Alabama’s high school coaches will see the story of Charley Pell and his battle with depression.
Pell, an Albertville native, played football for Paul “Bear”
Bryant at the University of Alabama and later coached at Jacksonville State, Clemson and Florida.
He achieved gridiron success, but all the while suffered from depression. A new documentary, “The Legacy of Charley Pell,”
discusses Pell’s struggle.
The Alabama Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation produced the documentary, and the Alabama High School Athletics Association has distributed copies of the film to its athletics directors and will show it at the summer conference for coaches.
Birmingham sportscaster Herb Winches and Pell’s widow, Ward, serve as narrators for the film, which has been recognized in the National Voice Awards.
The film includes footage from Pell’s interviews with Oprah Winfrey and NBC News.
Winches played for Pell at Jacksonville State.
Pell left Clemson when it was on the brink of national success and was forced out at Florida in 1984 during an NCAA investigation into the football program.
“I never understood why it was so important to him to build, but not enjoy the labor of his love,”
Ward Pell said in the documentary.
After leaving football, and having failed business ventures, Pell embarked on a year of planning his suicide – “my ultimate game plan,”
he told NBC.
“I felt like it was an unselfish act because I felt like I relieved my family,”
he said. “In my state of mind, it was an act of love.”
Pell drank vodka and took sleeping pills, then tried to fall asleep in a running, sealed car in 1994.
“I did not want to change my mind,”
he said. " I did not want to fail. That was my biggest fear.”
But a friend found Pell from a map he’d drawn up on where to find the body. Pell told NBC he was “angry”
with himself when he woke up in a hospital.
He later went through a 17-day treatment program that helped him realize a message he spent the rest of his life trying to get across: Mental illness is real, and it is treatable.
“There is a treatment,”
Ward Pell said in the documentary. “There is a way to make it so much better in everybody’s life.”
Pell died in 2001 after battling cancer.
The National Voice Awards recognize films that reduce the stigma of mental illness and promote recovery. The awards ceremony will be Wednesday at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
