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Column: Courtney Hall, center on Chargers’ Super Bowl team, dies at 52

Courtney Hall with Quiksilver at the NFL Draft 2012 Hospitality Suite.
Courtney Hall with unidentified woman at the NFL Draft Hospitality Suite for Quiksilver in April 2012.
(AP Images)

Five-time captain of Chargers was “the perfect center,” one former team executive said

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Courtney Hall, a highly durable, smart and consistent Chargers center who captained San Diego’s only Super Bowl team, has died. He was 52.

“We’re incredibly saddened by news of Courtney’s passing,” the Chargers said Friday in a statement. “His detractors thought he was too small for his position coming out of college but it turned out that his intelligence, hunger and toughness were what actually would set him apart from his peers. ... Courtney had so much more life to live and has been taken from us far too soon.”

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The team didn’t report the cause of death.

Hall started all but one Chargers game between his rookie year in 1989 and 1995. The span of 118 games played included six playoff contests and Super Bowl XXIX in January ‘95. Teammates voted him a captain each season from 1992 through ’96 — although Hall was the NFL’s youngest player when he first trained with the team at age 20.

“He was the perfect center,” said former Chargers director of player personnel Billy Devaney in February 2020.

Devaney described Hall as unflappable and both “incredibly tough” and “incredibly smart.”

Hall, who left football in 1997 after starting only seven games in the previous season, was a Pro Bowl alternate four times as a Charger.

Having served five years as the Chargers’ representative with the NFL Players’ Association, he went on to earn an MBA and law degree from the University of Chicago in 2003. Since 2008, he’d worked for a venture capital firm he co-founded.

Leading up to the recent Super Bowl, played 26 years after Hall snapped to Stan Humphries for the AFC-champion Chargers, Hall and a friend penned an USA Today column urging NFL fans to abide by health guidelines, lest Super Bowl viewing parties become a “super spreader” of the coronavirus.

Hall said he planned to watch the game at home, with his wife, LaShann DeArcy Hall, and their young daughter.

He said in February he was determined to fight the pandemic, however possible. COVID-19 had killed three of his friends and others in his Harlem neighborhood. Hall said he called a former teammate who was hospitalized with the disease, every day for a month, encouraging him. A New York City board on which he served facilitated use of a local park as a staging ground for mobile morgue vehicles, needed during the pandemic’s surge.

He said he worried that his mother, Doris, who was bedridden in Los Angeles, would contract the disease and was becoming overly isolated. And he didn’t want decreasing COVID-19 rates to breed complacency.

“This is certainly something I would hope that everyone can agree upon that the right thing is to save lives in this crisis,” he said.

Hall, who two weeks ago said he was launching a new business and heading to Los Angeles for a visit, is the ninth player from the 1994 team to die at a young age — the first since Junior Seau in 2012. Eight of his teammates on the Super Bowl squad died before age 45.

On the 25th anniversary of San Diego’s appearance in the Super Bowl, a loss to the 49ers in Miami Gardens, Fla., Hall said he sensed the Chargers’ victory at Pittsburgh in the AFC Championship Game had provided closure for many longtime fans of the team.

“It made it even more special because of how the entire city turned out,” he said of fans filling up the Mission Valley stadium to greet the team after the victory in Pittsburgh.

Citing the style of the fight, he said he expected the win against the Steelers, although the Bolts were the biggest underdog (9 1/2 points) to win an NFL conference-title game.

“It was a rainy day, we knew it was going to be ugly, we knew the yards were going to be hard fought,” Hall said, “and, frankly, those were the type of games we thrived in. … That was the kind of game we loved to be in — a nasty, cold, dirty game — because we felt we were going to win those games.”

Growing up in Carson, the industrial suburb where the Chargers played their home games between 2017-19, Hall was identified as gifted (135 IQ or higher) by the California state educational system when he was in fifth grade, a factoid the Chargers released after Steve Ortmayer took him in the second round of the 1989 draft out of Rice.

He went to Houston to play for Rice, a private school, and started for the Owls at age 16. A two-time team MVP and Southwest Conference first-team selection, Hall recently said he nevertheless was surprised when Chargers coordinator Larry Beightol informed him San Diego had drafted him. Hall was sitting in his shabby Houston apartment, studying for an economics exam, when the phone rang.

“I had no idea I was going to be drafted at all, much less in the second round,” said the former center, ascribing his skepticism to falling short of the NFL prototype for size and Rice’s 0-11 record the previous season.

Hall earned the starting job that summer. He started every single NFL game he played.

Among his survivors are former wife Sally Hall; son Terence Hall, a physicist in the Bay Area; daughter Rachael Hall, a law-firm employee in New York City; and son Alexander Hall, a college student.

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