TAMPA, Fla. _ Gay Culverhouse never planned to put aside her career as an educator to join the family business and become a trailblazer for nearly a decade as the president and senior executive for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers team her father owned.
Perhaps even more surprising was how she later used that experience to support the cause of retired players with brain injuries resulting from concussions that were largely ignored by NFL teams like the one her father, Hugh Culverhouse, was awarded in 1974.
Gay Culverhouse died Wednesday at her home in Fernandina Beach. She was 73.
"Gay was an individual. None of society's boundaries stopped her," Culverhouse's brother, Hugh Culverhouse Jr., wrote in an email. "She did what she felt was right, regardless of consequences to her."
A family spokeswoman told the New York Times the cause was complications of myelofibrosis, a type of chronic leukemia that inhibits the production of red blood cells.
"We are saddened to hear of the passing of Gay Culverhouse earlier this week," Bucs owner/co-chairman Bryan Glazer said in a statement. "During her family's ownership of the Buccaneers, Gay was a leading figure in and around the Tampa Bay community who was defined by her compassion for helping others. Her tireless work as an advocate for retired NFL players is also an important part of her personal legacy. We send our heartfelt condolences to her children, Leigh and Chris, and the entire Culverhouse family."
Before joining the Bucs, in 1986, Culverhouse was an education specialist focusing on child psychiatry who worked as an instructor at the University of South Florida College of Medicine from 1982-86. She had earned her master's and doctorate from Columbia University in mental retardation research.
Her father, who was the first owner of the Bucs, an expansion team that lost its first 26 games when they began play in 1976, convinced Culverhouse to join the franchise as a senior executive and later team president. She held that title until 1994, never expecting to eventually use her experience 15 years later to become an advocate for players with brain injuries stemming from football.
"The team doctor is not a medical advocate for the players. The team doctor's goal is to get that player back on the field even if that means injecting the player on the field," Culverhouse testified before a House Judiciary Committee in 2009.
"The players are at a point right now where they will not self-report because they need the money. They need those extra yards and those interceptions in order to make their salaries. ... I know the chaos in the locker room as players are mended and injected to get back on the field."
Culverhouse didn't just lend her voice to the cause of helping players with brain injuries, she provided financial assistance as well for the Gay Culverhouse Players' Outreach Program, now known as Retired Player Assistance.
Based in Tampa and jointly run by the NFL and the players' union since 2007, it locates former players with dementia and provides medical assistance and up to $130,000 per year for long-term dementia care.
"The thing that I always admired about Gay is that she's a rebel with a cause," linebacker Scot Brantley told the New York Times. Brantley, who played eight seasons for the Bucs in the 1980s, has short-term memory loss. "Football was a man's world. Still is. I've always said, if you want something done and done right, get a woman involved.
"No one else has shown any interest in us for a second," he continued. "We might as well have the plague."
For years, after joining the Bucs at the urging of her father, Culverhouse became one of the highest-ranking females in the NFL, first as vice president and treasurer and later as team president.
A little more than a year after she resigned, her father died after a battle with lung cancer in 1995. The Bucs were left to a charitable trust until it sold for $380 million to Malcolm Glazer, whose family still owns the team.
Culverhouse is survived by her daughter, Leigh Standley, a son, Chris; a brother, Hugh Jr., who is a lawyer in Miami; and several grandchildren.
