For Former Soldiers and NFL Players, a Place to Heal
Albert Breer | Sports Illustrated
No, football isn’t war, but one parallel between the NFL and the military is the psychological and emotional dislocation that can come in the transition to mainstream life. Jay Glazer’s MVP program provides a place for former players and soldiers to share their experiences, and reaffirm their identity and purpose. Plus, initial grades for 2020 draft prospects, and more notes from around the league.
Elliott Ruiz was guarding a Marine checkpoint on April 4, 2003, part of a mission to rescue seven America POWs from an Iraqi camp. On his watch, a vehicle came barreling toward a barbed-wire fence that U.S. troops had erected, the driver’s side tires caught it, popped it off its stakes, and dragged the wire from its place.
Ruiz bolted, but not fast enough. The wire caught on his right leg, wrapped around it, and, bearing his body weight, ripped it wide open.
Ruiz’s life would never be the same. He suffered nerve damage and needed multiple surgeries, which led to Charlie horses that caused muscle spasms, which in turn necessitated back surgeries. He went under the knife 14 times in all—10 procedures on his leg, four on his back.
And after all that, he never really got the help he needed.
Same goes for Oren O’Neal.
In 2007, Raiders coach Lane Kiffin named him the team’s rookie of the year. The former Arkansas State walk-on’s future as a football player looked bright—and his goals were all in front of him. The next summer he went into Oakland’s third preseason expecting to play strictly at fullback. One of his teammates was a late scratch. So Kiffin asked him to fill in on the kickoff return team.
On the opening kickoff, O’Neal sprinted back to his landmark, turned, and his foot caught in the Coliseum grass. As he went to engage a Cardinals kickoff cover man, his knee went backwards, much like the injury suffered by ex-Bears tight end Zach Miller a couple years ago. O’Neal was carried off the field. On the sideline, the trainers loaded him on to the table and picked up his leg by his foot. It sagged like a noodle.
He would beat the odds one more time and make it back onto the field. But his back gave out in the summer of 2009, in a joint practice with the Niners, to the point where he couldn’t stand up straight. It was so bad that when new coach Tom Cable took the team to a winery on the Raiders’ next day off, O’Neal sat down and couldn’t breathe. He made it halfway through that season before going on IR.
He’d never play again.
On the surface, these two stories are very different. One was at war. The other was in a game. And every pro football player I know is always clear in how wrong it is to analogize what they do with what happens in the military.
“These guys are war vets,” says O’Neal. “It’s different. We’re battling in football, but we’re not at war.”
But what O’Neal was fighting post-football actually wasn’t unlike what Ruiz would go toe-to-toe with once the Marines retired him in August 2005, as a result of his injuries. And Fox NFL reporter Jay Glazer came to realize that in working with guys from both walks of life at his West Hollywood gym.
It’s why Glazer and ex-Green Beret Nate Boyer founded MVP (Merging Veterans and Players) in 2015.
So you can guess where this story is going. O’Neal found MVP. So did Ruiz.
For those guys, and everyone else in the program, the Fourth of July is a big day, and not just for the reasons it is for every other American. Glazer, Boyer and the leaders of MVP have marked it as a day for each of the guys they’re working with to take pride in who they are and what they’ve accomplished. Which, believe it or not, a lot of ex-players and soldiers actually struggle with.
Ruiz took the occasion two years ago to tell Glazer and the MVP group his whole story. They knew about his injuries. They didn’t know they were sustained in the process of rescuing prisoners of war.
“For the first couple years, I never told Jay what it was,” Ruiz says. “When I finally told him, it blew his mind. He said, ‘That’s freaking amazing.’ But I didn’t sign up for anyone to thank me. And I don’t want to come off as someone bragging that I got hurt rescuing seven POWs. I didn’t want to put it out there, I didn’t want to be talking about it. And he said to me, ‘You should let these people know. How many 17-year-olds are rescuing POWs? Most are playing grab-ass in high school.’
“He said, ‘Be proud of it.’ ”
In this week’s edition of the MMQB, we’ll look forward to what’s ahead when we all get back from vacation (and beyond), including …
National Football Scouting’s initial grades for the 2020 draft.
Some pretty cool stuff going down in Mobile with the Senior Bowl people.
Why teams are increasingly staying home for training camp.
The Tyreek Hill case.
But since the Fourth is coming up, and things are mostly quiet in the NFL, we’ve got a good chance here, I figured, to highlight some pretty important work being done away from the field.
Ruiz was America’s youngest Marine when he forged his mom’s signature to enlist in June 2002, at just 17. He did it, in his words, because “he wanted to get out of North Philly.” He was raised by his great aunt and an ex-Marine great uncle who was twice awarded the Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam.
Ruiz would find his purpose, and his identity, similarly. Getting in the uniform was a logical choice for him. Getting out of it was much more difficult.
In the immediate aftermath of his surgeries, Ruiz suffered from neurological issues that he says the doctors didn’t know how to handle. In his words, “They threw all these pain meds at me.” Things didn’t improve. His mind was cloudy. His body was sluggish. So he kept being giving more and more pills to cope—until a day in early 2005 came where we woke up, felt paralyzed by it all and flushed the meds down the toilet.
That was far from the end of it for him. Ruiz would cope with alcohol abuse. He would have anxiety in public, and he would burst into tears in front of his wife with no real explanation or notice. “This heat would come up my neck, and then into my face for no reason,” he says, “and I’d just start crying.”
But the military had taught him to be tough. To deal with it. To internalize it.
For years, he did. Then, after repeated attempts to help by the VA failed, about a decade after his Marine service ended, Ruiz hit bottom. He felt physically broken. He couldn’t dress himself. He needed his wife to help him shower. He struggled to do a single pull-up. He needed to find a different answer.
“I wasn’t suicidal, but something I always said to my wife—I always felt like I’d die young,” he said. “I’m not sure why, but I always felt like I’d die young. A lot of guys deal with that, it’s not just me. But when those roommates you’ve got, those voices in your head, start talking, it’s tough.”
So he did what most Americans would do in 2015 to find help: He went to Google. He was looking for a gym, found Glazer’s facility, and went there to ask if they had any programs for military vets. The person at the front said no, but mentioned that they had a guy putting together a group for vets, and brought him over to Glazer.
Glazer asked about his injuries. Ruiz went through them and, the war vet says, “he put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it and said, ‘We got you.’ ”
O’Neal’s low point has some similarity to Ruiz’s. After he got done playing, yes, there were times when he’d find himself in a dark room by himself, crying, without a great explanation for why. But that paled in comparison to other events in his life that put him on his heels, a result of being removed from the game.
There was a time when he was so intent on isolating himself that he’d routinely blow off family members. In one such instance, his mother called to invite him back home for a weekend in Arkansas. O’Neal accepted, with a plan to cancel the day of. He called that Friday and said he wasn’t coming. His brother was a diabetic and suffered a seizure that night and died.
You can imagine how that felt.
And then there was the day with his son, who’d become the one person he didn’t close himself off to. O’Neal got involved in an altercation at a gas station. Tempers flared. His pent-up aggression came out. His family was in the truck, with a front row seat to see the man he was slowly becoming. When he got back in, his son, then 3, said “Big Man [his kids’ nickname for him], you shouldn’t act that way.”
“The mentality, especially in football, it’s, ‘Get up and go! Suck it up and go!’ I had to stop,” O’Neal said. “I realized my son was terrified of me, even though I never put my hands on him. For him, even with it not directed at him, to see a large man be that aggressive … I remember the one time he told me he was scared of me. That broke my heart.”
An ex-Raiders teammate of O’Neal’s, former NFL tight end Tony Stewart, told him he had someone who could help. Glazer called O’Neal and offered him a chance to go with MVP to Boulder Crest, a retreat in Virginia that helps veterans and first responders cope with the toll their professions take on them.
O’Neal was on his way.
Here’s what Glazer figured out—more than anything, these guys need each other.
Ruiz thought, when he left the military, that there wasn’t a civilian who would understand what he’d been through. Along those lines, O’Neal was taught never to show any sign of weakness or vulnerability. As a result, guys from two different backgrounds were joined, seeking—without even knowing it—an outlet that had been ripped from them.
“Every guy who retires, they’ll all tell you, we don’t miss practice, we don’t miss meetings—they miss the locker room,” Glazer says. “That's the biggest thing—we're recreating the locker room. The world’s problems are solved in locker rooms. People can talk about race, religion, politics, and nothing gets out of control. It’s outside the locker room doors where everybody gets so pissed off.
“So the team is what they miss the most. But then also getting them to understand, again, ‘We’re different. Different is good. We don't have to fit into society, [society has to] fit in around us. Different is good. You're not alone. And we’re good with our messed-up-ness.’ We talk a lot about the roommates in our head, but we embrace it. We don’t run away from it.”
For the military guys, the locker room is their unit. The idea is the same.
“So the football players, it’s crazy, it’s very similar to what we deal with,” Ruiz said. “They’ve been on a routine their whole lives, then their career ends and they don’t know what to do. They’re used to the camaraderie, the regimen. They’re missing that regimen and camaraderie. This is a place where they can share their stories, their struggle. They’re all banged up too, just like us. It’s really easy to talk to them.
“We were trained for years not to show weakness. It’s same with the players. They’re trained their whole lives not to show weakness. So they have all this stuff in their head, all those things are built up in their head, and that’s where you get the issues. So it’s great to have that place to be vulnerable.”
And it helps everyone move forward with their lives.
O’Neal graduated from Arkansas State with a degree in Manufacturing/Industrial Engineering Technology in 2006, and worked for a mortgage company, then General Electric after he finished playing football. But he’s now found what he considers his true calling by establishing a literacy program and mentoring club in several Dallas schools, leveraging his NFL connections to attract kids to come aboard.
He’s made such a difference at one of the schools, the Paul L. Dunbar Learning Center in the impoverished Fair Park neighborhood, that they actually now teach his story to the kids. “Made me feel better than any touchdown could,” he says.
“It’s like magic,” O’Neal continues. “Better than any day I ever had on the football field, just to get their attention, to know you’re getting them ready. That’s my new passion, man. And I feel like I’m better at that than I ever I was at football. And I felt like I was pretty good at football. It just got taken away by injuries.”
As for Ruiz, he’s worked his way up to full-time position at a health care company in Los Angeles. He still has issues, to be sure. When we talked, he was driving to USC to get his knee drained. Five months ago, he had an epidural to manage his back pain.
But he’s there every week at MVP, sitting on the mat after the 40-minute workouts, in a place where he can let everything out. And like O’Neal, he’s found purpose.
“I feel like I found something to fight for,” Ruiz says. “Growing up in North Philly, I feel like I was fighting my whole life. Once I got out of the Marines, it was like, OK, what am I fighting for now? It didn’t have to be something physical. It never did. Now, I feel like I have something to fight for. I’m gonna fight for these guys, fight to get them help. I feel like I found my next fight.”
And it’s a fight the NFL’s taken on, too. Ex-Packers coach Mike McCarthy funded an MVP chapter in Chicago, and Falcons coach Dan Quinn has done the same in Atlanta. There are four now (including Glazer’s chapter in L.A. and one at Randy Couture’s gym in Vegas), with plans to expand to four more cities soon.
Quinn’s connection was through Glazer and ex-Marine/MMA fighter Brian Stann, who helped integrate martial arts into Atlanta’s strength-and-conditioning program four years ago. After he met with the two last summer, the Atlanta jumped on board, and MVP now hosts sessions on Tuesday nights in suburban Marietta.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of it,” Quinn said over the weekend, from his vacation in Hawaii. “You hear the impact the program is making. It’s so worthwhile. It’s a group of people that really needs help, and I couldn’t be more fired up to be a part of it. When they tell you that Tuesday night’s the best of their week, that’s when you know the difference it’s making.”
Quinn’s hope, as a head coach, is that he can show outgoing players that difference, and get more of them involved. Seahawks GM John Schneider’s thrown financial support behind the program too. And NFL commissioner Roger Goodell attended a session in New York, spending time with ex-Marine Denver Morris, who was homeless at one point, attempted suicide three times, and now has found his own life’s work as a program coordinator for MVP.
“There’s no perfect formula, because you’re dealing with mental health, you’re dealing with real issues,” said Glazer. “But we tackle it. Listen, vets are killing themselves, people in society are killing themselves, people in sports are killing themselves. We had a big talk about it the other day—there’s no perfect thing. But I’m telling our vets, a lot of these guys, they’re bailing out early, and everyone’s all upset and mourning. And they’re going, ‘f---, why isn’t that me?’ ”
“Our vets say, ‘Yeah, that’s what happened to me, that’s what I tried.’ And you know what? It’s not OK. It’s not OK to kill yourself. We’re going to be a big voice on making sure they don’t fall into that trap.”
Ruiz didn’t, and neither O’Neal.
And on Thursday, they’ll get the chance to celebrate all of their accomplishments. Those aren’t limited anymore to fields of battle or play anymore.