MARIPOSA, CA – Bob Linneman lives on Highway 49 in a gold rush town, occupying a single-wide trailer behind an Ace Hardware.
But the real goal for Linneman, as it’s been for decades, is to get himself to the corner of “Happy and Healthy” as they say on those annoying Walgreen’s commercials.
He’s inching closer.
Linneman, 52, is a former high school football player from Santa Cruz and one-time award-winning sports writer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, who has bipolar disorder – commonly known as manic depression. Since 2002 when he won a national third-place award for column writing, his life has spiraled downward and has included three firings from newspaper jobs, three near-death experiences, drug addiction, an eviction, three 5150s (involuntary psychiatric hold) and his final acceptance of a bipolar diagnosis.
Now Linneman is courageously fighting his way back and has agreed to tell his story to Prep2Prep so he can educate the public and help those similarly afflicted.
HOME ALONE
Heading east from the Bay Area to Mariposa, one arrives at Hwy 140 which passes through open ranch land. Cruising the two-lane road toward the rugged foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, you see fruit stands, cows, ancient barns and more jacked-up pick-up trucks than you thought existed.
Finally you reach the old mining camp town of Mariposa that Linneman now calls home. It has a population of just over 2,000 and a quaint, old-fashioned main street. Among its notable former residents was Logan Mankins, a former offensive lineman for the New England Patriots.
Mariposa also boasts the county courthouse, built in 1854. It is the oldest continuous-use courthouse in the state and one that Linneman, thankfully, has not had to appear in. He’s been busy battling other demons.
“I can trace it back to incidents of weirdness that weren’t me, dating back to the 1990’s, maybe even earlier,” Linneman said. “It was probably my mid-20s or late 20’s that I really noticed that depression was taking hold and so I sought out help. I was diagnosed at first with depression. I can’t even tell you how many types of anti-depressants drugs I took. They didn’t work.”
Sitting in the living room of his no-frills, $625-per-month trailer where he lives alone, Linneman is surrounded by reminders of his past – that third-place plaque from the Associated Press Sports Editors, a framed autographed picture of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Y.A. Tittle and a lithograph of Santa Cruz’s famous Cooper House that was ruined in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake – a year before he was hired full-time by the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
“I was hired by the Sentinel in 1990, right before football,” Linneman said. “I was thrilled. I was coming home. That was my goal really to work for them. I delivered the paper as a kid.”
GROWING UP
Linneman grew up on Santa Cruz’s west side, two blocks from Natural Bridges State Beach. Future pro athletes Glenallen Hill and Johnny Johnson were west-siders when Linneman was young.
Even as a young boy, the future journalist displayed creativity and a love of sports.
“He had a wild imagination,” said Jan Linneman, mother of Bob. “He loved the Oakland Raiders and he used to tell kids that he was abandoned at the Oakland Coliseum and we adopted him.”
Another tall tale Linneman concocted was that he only had a partial right foot, just like the New Orleans Saints’ record-setting kicker Tom Dempsey.
Yeah, this Linneman kid had a talent for story-telling all right.
Linneman played Little League baseball. One of his teammates died in the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks – an event that prompted Linneman’s award-winning column. He also played freshman football at Santa Cruz High School where none other than Pete Newell Jr. (better known as the school’s basketball coach) mentored him.
“I coached Bob on the freshman football team in 1977 at Santa Cruz,” Newell said by email. “He played guard. As a reporter he was professional in getting post-game quotes and in his write-ups.”
MAKING HIS WAY
Linneman’s family moved across town his sophomore year and he enrolled at Harbor High School. He played junior varsity football there but quit after that, saying he was “weary of football coaches” – an anti-authority bent that continued into his adult life.
After majoring in journalism at Fresno State, he was hired as a reporter by the Scotts Valley Banner, preceding an 18-month stint at the Yuba-Sutter Appeal-Democrat. Then it was onto the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a life-long goal achieved.
“Bob was a local guy and he had great local knowledge,” said Brent Ainsworth, the former assistant sports editor of the Sentinel. “But Bob was a moody guy. Nobody knew what he was going through, clinically, with the mood swings. He could be a pleasure and then a pain to deal with.”
Bipolar sufferers, according to the American Psychiatric Association, experience extreme mood swings ranging from mania to depression. The disease impacts 2.2 percent of the population, or 5.3 million US adults, said the National Institute of Mental Health in 2014.
Linneman was a young writer in the early 1990s, but he improved rapidly, helped by sports editor Ed Vyeda, Ainsworth and other staff veterans. He toiled admirably in the Sentinel sports department from 1990 through ’96, turning in top-notch work, even as the depression was gripping him.
One Sentinel news reporter dubbed Linneman “Bitter Bob” in reference to his sometimes-dour demeanor. Few understood what he was going through.
“As men we’re told to tough it out,” Ainsworth said. “People say ‘Don’t be a wuss. Pull yourself up. Get off your ass and make it happen.’ But it’s not that simple.”
WANDERLUST
Following nine years at the Sentinel (including three on news side), Linneman in 1999 abruptly left for a news reporting job at the News-Tribune in Duluth, Minnesota. He wanted to get out of California and see what the rest of the country and a real winter was like, he told people. Years later, he second-guesses his motivation.
“Was it the reasons I stated, or was it flight or fight?” Linneman said. “I flighted, not understanding the things that were going on (inside of me).”
Linneman did well at his job, but by this point was self-medicating in a big way to deal with the crushing depression. Opiates were his drug of choice and he got them by manipulating an array of doctors. He stayed there a while, but eventually took a buyout from Knight-Ridder which owned the paper.
Next stop: The Daily Times in Farmington, New Mexico where he lasted just four months as a news reporter before getting fired for some ill-advised statement. Landing on his feet, though, he wound up back at the Santa Cruz Sentinel, hired by sports editor Mark Conley.
Things were good at first highlighted by that national award in 2002, but then Linneman’s problems resurfaced. His moodiness and erratic work habits prompted another firing which is how he wound up working at a small weekly newspaper in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills – Siberia for a national award winner.
He lasted just nine months at the Mariposa Gazette before an epic disagreement with the paper’s owner over his late return from an Easter trip led to his third and last firing.
“I was a walking ball of rage for a long time,” Linneman said. “It came out three times and cost me three different jobs, the last time right here. The next thing you know I’m out of work and I have no way to pay for where I’m living and that was a real fear for me.”
Things got worse. Crestfallen at his plight, Linneman overdosed on muscle relaxers twice and nearly died each time. Then on June 10, 2015 came the event that changed his life forever – a seizure while he was driving his truck on Hwy 140 that caused him to plunge off a 40-foot cliff into the Merced River.
“In a way you can say the drought saved me, because if that river had been full, I’d be fish food,” he said. “I don’t remember before it or after it, but (I remember) hitting trees, my mirrors being ripped off, going over a boulder, into a boulder. It was the scariest thing of my life.”
BOUNCING BACK
The accident scared Linneman straight. He continued to attend Narcotics Anonymous to help rid himself of opiates and then finally accepted the bipolar diagnosis and went to work on that. Aided only by an anti-seizure medication and a sleep aid and by focusing intently on his hobbies of listening to music, photographing birds and watching sports, Linneman has been able to limit his manic episodes. He can finally live a normal life -- albeit alone, without a car and supported only by disability checks.
Now he’s spreading the word about his struggle in a courageous attempt to help others.
“My message to people with bipolar is do not hide, do not fear it,” he said. “Accept it, tell people about it and just live your life, because it can be lived. I’m living proof. I’m happy. I’m smiling. I’m at peace and it’s getting better every day."
John Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@prep2prep.com and followed on Twitter @PrepCat
