Here! Remembering Bradley Steven Slusher '19 on Muster 2025
It was 7:49 a.m. on Nov. 3, 2024.
I'll remember it forever.
A phone call that suddenly made a 44-20 loss to South Carolina so incredibly insignificant.
I can still vividly hear the shattered voice on the other end of the line repeat the same line over and over before it finally registered.
"...Bradley's dead...Bradley's dead...what am I going to do?"
Every Aggie knows that today's Muster.
This year, it's more solemn and personal than ever before. Truth be told, I'm not sure how I'll feel when I sit with the Dallas A&M Club this evening and answer "Here" for Bradley Steven Slusher '19, but I know that's where I need to be.
He was my best friend. We grew to be brothers as students at Texas A&M, and either hung out or spoke almost every day from when we met at the Dixie Chicken in 2017 until his high school sweetheart Katie called me that Sunday morning.
There's not a day that goes by where I don't think about Bradley — or Katie, for that matter.
Healthy 27-year-olds don't just pass away suddenly in their sleep. Likewise, nobody should be a widow at 28.
While on a camping trip in Arkansas, Bradley went to sleep and never woke up.
Discussing the pain November brought is always difficult. It's also better reserved for a different time and column.
After all, on Muster, Aggies are expected to get together, eat a little, sup a little and live over the days spent at A&M.
And there were so many great days with Bradley.
The sun-splashed spring afternoons spent in 203 (well, officially 202, since Olsen Field's renovation) were the setting for our friendship that evolved into a brotherhood during the frustrating-yet-magical 2017 baseball season.
We stood together and unfurled the large "AGGIES IN OMAHA" banner as George Janca threw across the diamond to Hunter Coleman to beat Davidson and punch A&M's ticket to the Men's College World Series.
A year later, that same bedsheet covered an entire living room wall in our duplex off Luther, and we truly thought we were elite interior decorators.
The two of us — and a rotating third roommate — spent two years in that three-bedroom unit.
We filled it with laughs, family dinners and more than a few empty beer cans. A game of some kind — football, baseball, hockey, soccer — was on the TV 90 percent of the time, and when there wasn't, we were challenging each other on NCAA14 or NHL20 on a PlayStation.
Bradley would cook breakfast while teaching me about his favorite Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur. I educated him on the early days of Detroit's YzerPlan. He wisely chose to root for the Dallas Stars, while I foolishly took to Spurs with their Aggie-esque history and nature.
A couple of times, we stumbled in after a night at Northgate. Bradley's infamous "Vamos Doyers" still makes me and our friends laugh.
In the fall of 2018, Aggieland served as the setting for a college football game so amazing that they changed the rules.
I made the same-day decision to drive back from Flower Mound. Bradley pulled me a last-minute student ticket as I got back from DFW 30 minutes before kickoff. Katie refused to let us be two-percenters and leave after Kellen Mond threw what appeared to be a back-breaking interception.
What seemed like an eternity later — however long it takes to play seven overtimes — we watched from the second deck as the playing surface was engulfed by a sea of humanity and eventually walked out of Kyle Field exhausted but wearing smiles that stretched from ear to ear.
We both graduated in December of 2019. Bradley earned his undergrad and master's through Mays' Professional Program in Accounting, while all I studied was baseball and vibes en route to a telecommunications degree.
I walked the stage on a Friday night. He followed the next morning. Looking back, it means so much that we got to celebrate together on the same weekend.
As post-grads, we stuck around College Station for an extra spring, which meant we had the unique experience of quarantining together through the early days of the pandemic.
Movie marathons filled our nights. Bike rides through A&M's deserted campus helped pass the days.
Eventually, the time came to grow up...for one of us at least.
I'm still in Aggieland, but Bradley and Katie moved to Dallas. He went to work for Deloitte, meanwhile, Liucci can't seem to get rid of me.
Just as we'd celebrate together when the Aggies would win, we often saw each other for big life moments and holidays.
There was his East Texas wedding in August of 2020 and trips back to Omaha in 2022, as well as my more infamous visit to the MCWS last summer.
In so many of my best memories, he's front and center.
On what happened to be Bradley's last New Year's Eve, the two of us sat on the back porch of his new house in Carrollton. With our feet by a fire pit, we pondered what 2024 would bring. Between the cigars and the drinks, neither of us could have fathomed just how much could change.
Indeed, my world is infinitely worse without him, but the joy and memories he brought to so many will live on.
So often, I think of the question Katie kept repeating in November.
"What am I going to do? What am I going to do?"
Everyone seems to be figuring that out day by day. Some of them are better than others.
On this day, there is only one thing I know I need to do.
Answer "Here" for my brother Bradley.
