Wes Bender started playing Pop Warner in Van Nuys at six years old. The very first time anybody handed him the ball, he ran 80 yards for a touchdown. He was smaller than the other kids and just outran all of them. At Burbank High they put him on the offensive line. He didn't want to play on the line. He wanted to be a fullback. So after his sophomore year he transferred to Burroughs, another school in Burbank, just to get the position he wanted. Then he went to Glendale Community College and was a monster. As a freshman he carried 84 times and scored 13 touchdowns. As a sophomore he ran for 996 yards and made All-State. He was, at every level of his life up to that point, a guy who scored. Then USC offered him a scholarship, and he became something else entirely. At USC, Wes Bender stopped getting the football. In two full seasons as a starter he carried the ball 42 times. Total. Fifty-nine yards one year, sixty-four the next. He wasn't there to run. He was there to hit people. His job was to sprint into the hole ahead of the tailback and collide with a linebacker at full speed so the guy behind him could get through. Over and over, every single play, for two years. The tailback running behind him was Mazio Royster. "Wes was a great teammate, but an even better person," Royster said. "When we played together at USC in the early 90s, the fullback position was truly all guts and no glory. It was my job as the tailback to read the fullback's block. These were some of the most violent collisions imaginable, and Wes never shied away from contact, complained, or even asked for praise." He was also one of the strongest players the program ever had. Bender set weightlifting records at USC that are still posted in that weight room today. Marty Schottenheimer, who coached the Kansas City Chiefs, called him one of the best blocking running backs he had ever seen come out of college. That got him to the NFL, undrafted. The Chiefs, the Raiders, a season in Frankfurt, then the Saints. Twenty NFL games. Five career carries for nine yards. Nobody was ever going to hand Wes Bender the football again. That wasn't the deal. The deal was that he absorbed the hit so somebody else didn't have to. In two seasons at USC, he scored exactly one touchdown. Wes Bender died on March 5, 2018, of an apparent heart attack. He was 47 years old. In his last years his short-term memory had been failing badly. He could recite movie lines from 30 years earlier and jokes from his childhood, but he couldn't remember what he'd eaten that morning. He stopped sleeping through the night. He'd built a successful concrete business in Los Angeles and had to walk away from it because ordinary stress had become unbearable. After he died, researchers at the UNITE Brain Bank examined his brain and diagnosed him with Stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He is one of more than 345 NFL players to receive that diagnosis after death. Three years before he died, Burroughs High School put him in their Hall of Fame. He stood up at the ceremony and didn't talk about USC, or the Raiders, or any of it. "I had a great time here and at Glendale College." He spent a career making other people's touchdowns possible. The picture of him celebrating one of his own is one of the only ones that exists.