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'We're totally in shock' Vikings not blaming anyone for Stringer's death
By Don Banks, Sports Illustrated MANKATO, Minn. -- While Korey Stringer's death on Wednesday will again focus attention on the potentially devastating combination of summer heat and full-pads football practice, Minnesota Vikings owner Red McCombs said there is no blame to assign. Asked if he was at peace with the notion that Stringer's death from heat stroke was unforeseeable and unpreventable, McCombs said: "Absolutely. I'm glad I was there to watch practice [Tuesday]. We all saw the same thing, with nothing that appeared out of the ordinary. This happens in life. It happens in the workplace. It happens on ranches. It happens everywhere. Fortunately, it doesn't happen very often." McCombs said there will come a time when the Vikings will look for ways to ward off any recurrence of the Stringer tragedy, but that time won't come until the grieving is done. "We're just trying to comfort people," he said. "We haven't given any thought to that yet, what we could have done differently. We'll put together issues that we might could use in a circumstance like this. But we hadn't planned on this one." Vikings wide receiver Cris Carter said he and his teammates were not left with regrets that that something could have been done to save Stringer. "We're totally in shock," Carter said. "But that's not what we're feeling, that somone should have done more. Everything that could be done was done. It wasn't something that was overlooked." One surprising twist behind Stringer's death is that 10th-year Vikings head coach Dennis Green is known as anything but a practice-field taskmaster. His players almost universally have applauded his crisply-paced workouts that don't drag on and on. Green always gives his team Sundays off in training camp, doesn't go in big for full-squad two-a-day workouts, and believes in not draining all the energy from his players in the preseason. And that style has paid off handsomely, with the Vikings getting off to a series of strong starts over the years. Former Vikings team president and CEO Roger Headrick, who ran the franchise when Stringer was drafted in the first round out of Ohio State in 1995, echoed McCombs' sentiments. "I don't think anybody is trying to point the finger or put blame anywhere," he said. "People want to try to understand what happened. Maybe it's one of those things we will never know. This just seemed to be one of those freak things. It was an unbelievably hot day. Unbelievably hot, for anybody." With Headrick's approval, the Vikings in 1997 sent Stringer, who then weighed in the range of 375 pounds, to the Duke University weight loss clinic. But Stringer this week was at his all-time NFL career weight of 335, considered optimum by the Vikings. "I've had people say to me already, 'I thought those guys go through physicals before they play,'" Headrick said. "And they do. They have to pass a physical just to go to camp. How stringent it is, I don't know. "Your major fear when you run a team is that you have someone hurt on the field, like a Dennis Byrd or a Darryl Stingley. But something like this is so far removed from what you imagine."
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