Will Ryan Shazier Play Ever Again

The pastor takes a phone phone call on his porch, where he is reading about the life of Moses, the Biblical character who endured the 10 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 man who spent all spring and summer counseling parishioners, friends, relatives, even NFL players from his long-ago days as the Dolphins team chaplain. He advised then many, for and so long, their issues so vexing and deep, that he took September off. Had to. "I needed a break from solving problems," he says, knowing that he however spent ii total weeks in the month away dealing with his own.

I commencement met Vernon terminal fall, on that very porch. I came to ask him most his son, Ryan, a Pro Basin linebacker for the Steelers who, in December. 2017, suffered a spinal cord injury on a football field in Cincinnati. I asked Vernon nigh his faith, about the months that Ryan had been paralyzed, about his miraculous recovery and how the pastor reconciled the worst day 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 e'er since. He couldn't bring himself to picket football game, or fifty-fifty sports. But he wanted, more than anything, for Ryan to play again. He knew the odds, and how he sounded, and how many would think him delusional at best. But he believed, all the mode until this September, when Ryan planned a visit dwelling house to tell the residuum of the world what Vernon already knew.

Vernon picked up Ryan, daughter-in-law Michelle and their young son, Lyon, at the airport on Dominicus, Sept. 6. Non even three years removed from one of the scariest injuries ever suffered in a pro football, Ryan could now walk with merely a minor limp. He didn't need assist. He could live a "normal" life. Ryan had left Pittsburgh, Vernon says, considering he didn't want to be a distraction to his erstwhile teammates and he wanted to be habitation, with his family, for unconditional back up. "I worked my butt off," he told Vernon. "But I have not been able to get back to 100 percentage."

For Vernon, the unplugging had already started. No email. No phone calls. He'd read books, fume cigars, sit out on the porch and contemplate his son'southward future. Normally when Ryan visited, former friends stopped by constantly. Just non now, during the global pandemic. Ryan's grandparents marked the only guests. "It was like we were in a cave, human being," Vernon says.

They needed the isolation, because they knew how hard the announcement would be to make. Ryan wasn't the but family unit member who had struggled with depression; they all had. Ryan wasn't the just family unit 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 infirmary bed, wondering if he'd always walk again, Vernon prayed. Outset, 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 again," the pastor says. "I rehearsed it. I visualized information technology in my heed, [him] running back on that field." That prayer would not exist answered.

On Ryan's commencement twenty-four hours home, a Monday, Labor Twenty-four hour period, Vernon held his emotions together. On Tuesday, he lost control. He estimates he cried betwixt 20 and 25 times, taking drives through his neighborhood, or heading out dorsum to the porch, trying to avoid Ryan seeing him break down.

Vernon wasn't sad well-nigh the football game career ending, though. He was concerned about Ryan, still just 28. "Was he good for you?" Vernon asks. "Psychologically? Emotionally? Would he be stuck in nostalgia thinking his best years were already behind him?"

He can't share too much, Vernon says, wanting Ryan to tell his own story, in his ain time, aforementioned as always. But he does allude to "some thoughts" beingness "too crazy" and says, "depression can have your listen to some deep, nighttime places."

The pastor has always washed his best thinking on that porch, the exact kind of disquisitional analysis he needed and then, and he kept going dorsum outside that Tuesday. Finally, he decided he should hear from the source. But after Tuesday turned into Wednesday, effectually 1:thirty a.one thousand., he tapped on the sliding glass window from outside, summoning Ryan to his dwelling office, the one sitting on that manmade lake in Coral Springs. He was crying again. They both sat down.

"I need to know where y'all are with your determination," 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'southward painful," Ryan said. "Only I'm all right, dad. I'm all right."

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

On Midweek, the pastor felt better. He still worried nearly 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 later on the injury. They had seen the visits, the tears, the fear that he might not walk again. One night, Vernon had an out-of-body experience, and he swears he could see 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 unlike, Ryan reassured him.

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

A film coiffure arrived in the morning and set up upwards outside, in the merely place that fit the news that would exist delivered that afternoon. Ryan saturday on the porch, the lake glimmering backside him, and recorded the announcement he hoped he wouldn't have to make until years later on, afterward a improvement: His playing career had officially concluded. He had known that, on some level, e'er since the injury. Only that didn't ease the hurting of sending the message out into the globe.

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

Jake Roth/USA Today Photo

From a showtime-round pick in 2022 to a cornerstone of some other fierce Steelers defense to the Pro Bowl to the end—the football game function, anyway. Shazier played four seasons. Fabricated 299 tackles. In his bulletin, he said he loved everything about 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. Most nights bled into mornings, with Vernon and his boys, Ryan and other son Vernon, staying up; sometimes, they watched the sun ascension together earlier heading off to bed. "Honestly," Vernon says, "those were ii of the best weeks of my life."

The post-obit Mon, Vernon still did non picket the Steelers open up their season, against the Giants, on the same Monday Night Football game phase where Ryan'due south career ended. Vernon hasn't watched football game since the injury; why, he's not exactly sure. Ryan does watch, preparing for his podcast. Merely his begetter stopped tuning in to sports virtually entirely back in '17, to the signal where he says he but found out the Miami Heat, who play just down the road, were good when a relative mentioned their NBA Finals run. "Look, information technology'southward not as important to me as it once was," the pastor says. "I don't know if I avoid it to go on from allowing information technology to trigger. That could be role of it, so that it doesn't trigger whatever 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 strength. As Ryan went through his own recovery, he reached so 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 nuptials his begetter 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 again at present described Ryan as a phenomenon—truly, his progress extended beyond whatever reasonable expectation.

He enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to stop off the psychology caste he had started at Ohio Country. With one more class, he will complete that function of his teaching. But as Vernon watched Ryan put distance and perspective between himself and his football career, he believes that Ryan also institute a higher purpose.

It started during the worst months, in the infirmary. There was Steelers GM Kevin Colbert, abreast 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 afterward to deepen their connectedness. At that place was Jitney Mike Tomlin, nevertheless coaching, a master motivator who never needed to be on a football field to reach a actor. 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 same time, it was similar, you're sitting at the table, and yous have ham, you've got turkey, you lot've got all of your favorite dishes, yous take all the desserts you lot want, you lot have more than plenty," Vernon says. "And you await 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 abound his foundation but abound information technology and so 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 comprehend in total. "We want to go far their fight," Vernon says, "because 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