Will Ryan Shazier Ever Play Footbal Again

The pastor takes a telephone call on his porch, where he is reading virtually 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 40 years. Kind of seems applicable to 2020, the pastor says with a laugh.

This is Vernon Shazier, head of River of Life Fellowship in South Florida, a human being who spent all leap and summer counseling parishioners, friends, relatives, even NFL players from his long-ago days as the Dolphins squad chaplain. He brash and then many, for so long, their issues so vexing and deep, that he took September off. Had to. "I needed a interruption from solving problems," he says, knowing that he still spent 2 total weeks in the month away dealing with his own.

I first met Vernon final autumn, on that very porch. I came to enquire him well-nigh his son, Ryan, a Pro Bowl linebacker for the Steelers who, in December. 2017, suffered a spinal string injury on a football game field in Cincinnati. I asked Vernon about his organized religion, about the months that Ryan had been paralyzed, about his miraculous recovery and how the pastor reconciled the worst twenty-four hour period of his life with what he described as his life's calling.

Vernon Shazier

Jeffery A. Salter /Sports Illustrated

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

Vernon picked up Ryan, girl-in-police force Michelle and their immature son, Lyon, at the airport on Sunday, Sept. 6. Not even three years removed from one of the scariest injuries ever suffered in a pro football game game, Ryan could now walk with only a small limp. He didn't demand assistance. He could live a "normal" life. Ryan had left Pittsburgh, Vernon says, because he didn't want to exist a lark to his former teammates and he wanted to be home, with his family, for unconditional support. "I worked my barrel off," he told Vernon. "Simply I have not been able to get dorsum to 100 percent."

For Vernon, the unplugging had already started. No electronic mail. No phone calls. He'd read books, fume cigars, sit down out on the porch and contemplate his son's future. Normally when Ryan visited, erstwhile friends stopped past constantly. But not now, during the global pandemic. Ryan's grandparents marked the merely guests. "It was like we were in a cave, man," Vernon says.

They needed the isolation, because they knew how hard the announcement would exist to make. Ryan wasn't the only family unit member who had struggled with depression; they all had. Ryan wasn't the merely family fellow 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 ever walk again, Vernon prayed. First, he prayed for his son to walk. Eventually, he believes that prayer was answered. So, "I prayed and so many times and asked God to let [him] play football game again," the pastor says. "I rehearsed it. I visualized it in my mind, [him] running back on that field." That prayer would not be answered.

On Ryan'due south starting time day home, a Monday, Labor Twenty-four hours, Vernon held his emotions together. On Tuesday, he lost control. He estimates he cried between twenty and 25 times, taking drives through his neighborhood, or heading out back to the porch, trying to avoid Ryan seeing him break down.

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

He can't share too much, Vernon says, wanting Ryan to tell his ain story, in his own time, same every bit always. But he does allude to "some thoughts" existence "too crazy" and says, "low can take your mind to some deep, dark places."

The pastor has always done his all-time 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 after Tuesday turned into Wednesday, around 1:30 a.grand., he tapped on the sliding glass window from outside, summoning Ryan to his domicile role, the one sitting on that manmade lake in Coral Springs. He was crying again. They both sat down.

"I need to know where you are with your decision," Vernon said. "And your life."

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Ryan stared back, and in that moment, he looked to the pastor like his son, non the football player who had conquered the NFL and rehabilitation from spinal surgery.

"It's painful," Ryan said. "But I'm all right, dad. I'g all right."

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

On Wednesday, the pastor felt better. He withal 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 afterward the injury. They had seen the visits, the tears, the fearfulness that he might not walk over again. 1 night, Vernon had an out-of-trunk experience, and he swears he could run into himself, as if floating to a higher place, looking downward at Ryan and trying to switch bodies with him. "I've talked to him when he didn't desire to live," Vernon says. This was different, Ryan reassured him.

"I'g proficient," he said again.

A picture crew arrived in the morning and set upwards outside, in the merely place that fit the news that would exist delivered that afternoon. Ryan sat on the porch, the lake glimmering behind him, and recorded the announcement he hoped he wouldn't have to make until years after, after a comeback: His playing career had officially concluded. He had known that, on some level, ever since the injury. But that didn't ease the pain of sending the message out into the earth.

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

Jake Roth/USA Today Photo

From a first-round pick in 2014 to a cornerstone of another fierce Steelers defense force to the Pro Bowl to the end—the football part, anyway. Shazier played iv seasons. Fabricated 299 tackles. In his message, he said he loved everything virtually football.

On Wednesday 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. Virtually nights bled into mornings, with Vernon and his boys, Ryan and other son Vernon, staying up; sometimes, they watched the lord's day rise together before heading off to bed. "Honestly," Vernon says, "those were ii of the all-time weeks of my life."

The following Monday, Vernon still did non watch the Steelers open up their season, against the Giants, on the aforementioned Monday Night Football game stage where Ryan'due south career ended. Vernon hasn't watched football since the injury; why, he's not exactly certain. Ryan does lookout man, preparing for his podcast. But his male parent stopped tuning in to sports almost entirely dorsum in '17, to the point where he says he just found out the Miami Heat, who play only downward the road, were good when a relative mentioned their NBA Finals run. "Look, information technology'south non equally important to me equally information technology in one case was," the pastor says. "I don't know if I avert information technology to keep from allowing it to trigger. That could exist role of it, so that it doesn't trigger any negative feelings or emotional thoughts."

Instead, Vernon prefers to focus on the future, 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 back in the gym. He got married, to Michelle Rodriguez, at a wedding his father officiated. He had another son, Lyon Carter. (His first, R.J., is from a previous human relationship.) The same doctors who said he would never walk again now described Ryan equally a miracle—truly, his progress extended beyond any reasonable expectation.

He enrolled at the Academy of Pittsburgh to finish off the psychology caste he had started at Ohio State. With one more class, he will consummate that part of his education. Only equally Vernon watched Ryan put altitude and perspective between himself and his football game career, he believes that Ryan also found a college purpose.

It started during the worst months, in the hospital. There was Steelers GM Kevin Colbert, beside Ryan as he rehabbed, imploring him to scratch out another rep or five. There were his fellow linebackers, moving their position meetings to the hospital, lingering later on to deepen their connexion. In that location was Coach Mike Tomlin, nonetheless coaching, a master motivator who never needed to be on a football game field to attain a player. And yet, in the very same hospital where Ryan reclaimed the life he had lost, he saw other patients with no team, no family, no pastor father or famous friends.

"The support was overwhelming, yet at the aforementioned time, information technology was similar, you're sitting at the tabular array, and you accept ham, yous've got turkey, yous've got all of your favorite dishes, y'all have all the desserts you want, you have more than enough," Vernon says. "And you 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 just abound information technology and then large that he could help exactly those kinds of people. The ones who needed him. Who needed counseling and bills paid and expensive therapy that most cannot afford and insurance often won't cover in total. "We want to get in their fight," Vernon says, "because and so many got in ours."

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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.

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