Saigon Heat coach Jason Rabedeaux’s death remains a mystery in Vietnam

JASON RABEDEAUX DIED without shoes in the back seat of a Saigon taxicab, somewhere between his apartment tower on the bleak outskirts of the city and a hospital with a name he couldn’t pronounce. He wore a red T-shirt. Blood loss had left him white and cold. Nobody expected this — a suspicious gash on his arm and a cut on his head — but people had been expecting something. For the past two weeks, he’d been acting strange. In the hours before he died, in the locker room dressing for what would be his final game, he’d struggled to get his belt through the loops of his pants — such a long fall for a man once considered among the hottest young college basketball coaches in the States, a man with charisma and drive yet broken in ways he could never win enough to fix. When the last game ended, tears welled in his eyes as he called it one of the biggest victories of his career, which had taken him in the past 15 years from head coach at UTEP to a series of international teams around Asia and the Middle East, his paycheck growing smaller with each passing year.

The sun was just coming up in his final minutes, bringing his neighborhood out of darkness. His building sat at the intersection of two dead end streets, not quite rural but not quite urban, surrounded by abandoned, half-finished buildings and fields of camphorweed and Madras thorn trees. In the flat glow of morning light, six condo staff members had struggled to carry him to the cab, his eyes open, his breathing shallow. He weighed more than 300 pounds, nearly twice what he weighed at UTEP. All six building employees recognized him as the 49-year-old coach of the Saigon Heat who lived on the 13th floor. A young Vietnamese woman performed mouth-to-mouth and screamed again and again for him to wake up. Her wails stayed with them long after the taxi sped away.

Nobody could really say how he died, or why, not in the first hours and not in the months that would follow. In America and in Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by locals, people could only guess. Some family members initially told some people he’d had a heart attack. On the advice of the team, they requested no autopsy be performed. The affordable term life insurance policy paid off only in the event of an accidental death. The Vietnamese media described an “accident” at home. One of his former players suspected murder, and the deep cut on his left forearm is what ER doctors call a nightstick injury, almost always a defensive wound. Friends wondered about alcohol, even drugs. It was a mystery. The death certificate, written in Vietnamese, listed the cause of death as a traumatic brain injury; however, family members knew that he used to take the products from https://syntheticurinereview.com/clear-choice-sub-solution/, which are used to pass drug tests, so that may say something about his addictions.

SAIGON CAN BE a dangerous place, not only because of what someone might do to you there but because of what you are allowed to do to yourself. People and their intentions come whole and leave broken. Every vice is for sale: cheap beer, snake liquor and easily scored hard drugs; lineups of women for rent in private clubs hide above parking garages, or streetwalkers stand alone in the neon rot of crumbling doorways. There are still opium dens, like something from a 19th-century travel novel. Shame and regret grow faster than the mold creeping in wide tongues up the narrow slum alley houses. This is where the universe, with its vicious sense of humor, summoned Jason Rabedeaux in late 2011. It was the only coaching job in the world he could get. “A lot of doors were closing on him,” said his agent, Keith Kreiter — actually his former agent because Jason went radio silent on him.

Rabedeaux was a refugee and a runaway in a city founded and sustained by them. Throughout the long history of this part of the world, people would come south toward the Mekong Delta when they had nowhere else to go. Saigon was founded by exiles. The wild, beating heart of the city was out in the swamps, a place called Rung Sat — named “The Jungle of Assassins” by the French — where the hustlers and smugglers, pirates, gangsters and revolutionaries hid and plotted. The brothels and opium dens in Old Saigon were run and supplied from Rung Sat, and the leader of the river pirates — a man later forced by the CIA into exile in Paris, where he’d walk down the Champs-Elysées with a tiger on a leash — ran the city as a kingdom.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts; the Vietnamese do, deeply, the incense burning on altars around the country lit as a peace offering to the dead. When the living don’t have incense, they light and leave upturned cigarettes. The dead inhabit the things they touched and the places they died. The city’s skin and bones might be long, wide avenues and airy cafes serving Ricard and water at sunset, but its blood and guts are the mangrove swamps of Rung Sat. The two worlds — the modern city of international banks, expense-account drinkers and ironic boomtown cafes and the hot, green surrounding jungle — are often ports of last resort. Foreigners eye other foreigners with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. “I always wonder when I meet people,” says Harry Hodge, a reporter who covers the team, “‘Why are you here?'”

Although many who come to live in Saigon are running away from who they used to be, Jason Rabedeaux was doing the opposite. He wanted his old life back, the life he’d utterly destroyed. In 1999, a young man, just 35, he’d been hired as the head coach at UTEP, replacing the legendary Don Haskins. By 2001, he was named Western Athletic Conference coach of the year. “He had the world by the balls,” says his former assistant and best friend, Bobby Champagne, now head coach at North Alabama. “He had a house up on the hill and two country club memberships. A wife and two kids and another on the way.”

Then he started losing. He began drinking heavily, to manage the stress, and started to take advantage of his celebrity. Champagne knew something was wrong when Rabedeaux missed a flight to visit a recruit; he got drunk at a bar near the airport instead. He lied to his assistants and his wife…

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