Will Ryan Shazier Ever Play Football Again

The pastor takes a telephone call on his porch, where he is reading about the life of Moses, the Biblical character who endured the Ten Plagues, led the Exodus of the Israelites, received the Ten Commandments and wandered the desert for xl years. Kind of seems applicable to 2020, the pastor says with a express mirth.

This is Vernon Shazier, head of River of Life Fellowship in South Florida, a homo who spent all spring and summer counseling parishioners, friends, relatives, even NFL players from his long-agone days as the Dolphins squad chaplain. He advised so many, for so long, their issues so vexing and deep, that he took September off. Had to. "I needed a suspension from solving problems," he says, knowing that he still spent two full weeks in the month away dealing with his own.

I first met Vernon last fall, on that very porch. I came to inquire him about his son, Ryan, a Pro Bowl linebacker for the Steelers who, in Dec. 2017, suffered a spinal cord injury on a football game field in Cincinnati. I asked Vernon about his organized religion, nearly the months that Ryan had been paralyzed, about his miraculous recovery and how the pastor reconciled the worst twenty-four hours of his life with what he described every bit his life's calling.

Vernon Shazier

Jeffery A. Salter /Sports Illustrated

I matter Vernon said from the evening resonated with me ever since. He couldn't bring himself to watch football, or even sports. But he wanted, more than anything, for Ryan to play once more. He knew the odds, and how he sounded, and how many would think him delusional at best. But he believed, all the way until this September, when Ryan planned a visit home to tell the rest of the earth what Vernon already knew.

Vernon picked upward Ryan, daughter-in-law Michelle and their immature son, Lyon, at the airport on Sunday, Sept. 6. Non even three years removed from one of the scariest injuries e'er suffered in a pro football game, Ryan could now walk with just a pocket-sized limp. He didn't need help. He could live a "normal" life. Ryan had left Pittsburgh, Vernon says, because he didn't want to exist a distraction to his old teammates and he wanted to be home, with his family, for unconditional support. "I worked my butt off," he told Vernon. "But I accept not been able to become back to 100 percent."

For Vernon, the unplugging had already started. No e-mail. No telephone calls. He'd read books, smoke cigars, sit down out on the porch and contemplate his son's future. Commonly when Ryan visited, sometime friends stopped past constantly. Simply non at present, during the global pandemic. Ryan'south grandparents marked the only guests. "Information technology was like we were in a cave, homo," Vernon says.

They needed the isolation, because they knew how hard the declaration would be to brand. Ryan wasn't the only family unit member who had struggled with low; they all had. Ryan wasn't the simply family unit member who wanted him to reclaim his starting spot in the Steelers starting lineup; they all wanted him to.

For months, as Ryan lay in a hospital bed, wondering if he'd e'er walk again, Vernon prayed. First, he prayed for his son to walk. Eventually, he believes that prayer was answered. Then, "I prayed so many times and asked God to let [him] play football once more," the pastor says. "I apposite information technology. I visualized it in my mind, [him] running dorsum on that field." That prayer would non be answered.

On Ryan's commencement day home, a Monday, Labor Day, Vernon held his emotions together. On Tuesday, he lost control. He estimates he cried between 20 and 25 times, taking drives through his neighborhood, or heading out dorsum to the porch, trying to avoid Ryan seeing him suspension down.

Vernon wasn't sad virtually the football career ending, though. He was concerned about Ryan, still only 28. "Was he healthy?" Vernon asks. "Psychologically? Emotionally? Would he exist stuck in nostalgia thinking his all-time years were already backside him?"

He tin't share also much, Vernon says, wanting Ryan to tell his own story, in his own fourth dimension, same as always. But he does allude to "some thoughts" being "also crazy" and says, "low tin take your mind to some deep, dark places."

The pastor has ever washed his best thinking on that porch, the exact kind of disquisitional analysis he needed then, and he kept going back outside that Tuesday. Finally, he decided he should hear from the source. Just subsequently Tuesday turned into Wednesday, around i:30 a.one thousand., he tapped on the sliding drinking glass window from outside, summoning Ryan to his home office, the 1 sitting on that manmade lake in Coral Springs. He was crying over again. They both sat down.

"I demand to know where you are with your determination," Vernon said. "And your life."

Scroll to Continue

SI Recommends

Ryan stared back, and in that moment, he looked to the pastor like his son, not the football role player who had conquered the NFL and rehabilitation from spinal surgery.

"It'south painful," Ryan said. "But I'm all right, dad. I'1000 all right."

"When he said that," Vernon says at present, "I was practiced."

On Wednesday, the pastor felt meliorate. He still worried about his son, he explains, delving deeper into what he had alluded to earlier. Either Vernon or his wife, Shawn, had spent every night with Ryan in the hospital for six months after the injury. They had seen the visits, the tears, the fear that he might not walk over again. One night, Vernon had an out-of-body feel, and he swears he could meet himself, as if floating to a higher place, looking down at Ryan and trying to switch bodies with him. "I've talked to him when he didn't want to live," Vernon says. This was different, Ryan reassured him.

"I'm good," he said once again.

A flick crew arrived in the forenoon and set up exterior, in the only place that fit the news that would exist delivered that afternoon. Ryan sabbatum on the porch, the lake glimmering behind him, and recorded the announcement he hoped he wouldn't have to brand until years later, afterward a comeback: His playing career had officially ended. He had known that, on some level, always since the injury. But that didn't ease the pain of sending the message out into the world.

Ryan, on the Steelers' sideline during a game last season.

Jake Roth/Us Today Photograph

From a first-round pick in 2014 to a cornerstone of another violent Steelers defense to the Pro Bowl to the end—the football part, anyway. Shazier played four seasons. Made 299 tackles. In his bulletin, he said he loved everything about football game.

On Midweek evening, the Shaziers began to relax. Ryan stayed with his family for two weeks. They locked themselves inside and laughed and cried and reminisced. They played games like Jenga and Heads Up. They rented a boat and went for a cruise. Most nights bled into mornings, with Vernon and his boys, Ryan and other son Vernon, staying up; sometimes, they watched the sun rise together before heading off to bed. "Honestly," Vernon says, "those were two of the best weeks of my life."

The following Monday, Vernon still did not lookout man the Steelers open up their season, confronting the Giants, on the same Monday Night Football stage where Ryan's career ended. Vernon hasn't watched football since the injury; why, he'south not exactly certain. Ryan does watch, preparing for his podcast. Only his father stopped tuning in to sports near entirely dorsum in '17, to the betoken where he says he just plant out the Miami Heat, who play just down the road, were good when a relative mentioned their NBA Finals run. "Expect, it's not every bit important to me every bit information technology once was," the pastor says. "I don't know if I avoid information technology to keep from allowing information technology to trigger. That could be part of information technology, then that it doesn't trigger whatsoever negative feelings or emotional thoughts."

Instead, Vernon prefers to focus on the futurity, on the congregation he must guide and the foundation that his son wants to build into a philanthropic force. As Ryan went through his own recovery, he reached and then many milestones, from the feeling in his legs returning to walking to getting dorsum in the gym. He got married, to Michelle Rodriguez, at a wedding his male parent officiated. He had another son, Lyon Carter. (His first, R.J., is from a previous relationship.) The same doctors who said he would never walk once more at present described Ryan as a phenomenon—truly, his progress extended across whatever reasonable expectation.

He enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to stop off the psychology degree he had started at Ohio State. With one more than form, he will complete that part of his educational activity. Only every bit Vernon watched Ryan put altitude and perspective between himself and his football career, he believes that Ryan as well found a higher purpose.

It started during the worst months, in the infirmary. There was Steelers GM Kevin Colbert, beside Ryan every bit he rehabbed, imploring him to scratch out another rep or v. There were his swain linebackers, moving their position meetings to the hospital, lingering afterward to deepen their connection. There was Passenger vehicle Mike Tomlin, withal coaching, a main motivator who never needed to be on a football field to achieve a thespian. And still, in the very same hospital where Ryan reclaimed the life he had lost, he saw other patients with no team, no family unit, no pastor father or famous friends.

"The support was overwhelming, nonetheless at the aforementioned fourth dimension, it was like, you're sitting at the tabular array, and y'all have ham, you've got turkey, you've got all of your favorite dishes, you have all the desserts you lot want, you have more than plenty," Vernon says. "And yous look across the room and somebody is sitting there with an empty plate, and they have crumbs on it."

Eventually, Ryan decided he wanted to not only grow his foundation but abound it so big that he could help exactly those kinds of people. The ones who needed him. Who needed counseling and bills paid and expensive therapy that near cannot beget and insurance frequently won't cover in total. "We desire to go far their fight," Vernon says, "because and so many got in ours."

massenburgarly1977.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/10/29/ryan-shazier-retirement-through-eyes-of-his-father#:~:text=As%20His%20Father%20Watched%2C%20Ryan,cord%20injury%20suffered%20in%202017.

Share this post