Does It Look Like Ryan Shazier Will Ever Play Again

The pastor takes a phone 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 applicative 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 jump and summer counseling parishioners, friends, relatives, fifty-fifty NFL players from his long-ago days as the Dolphins squad chaplain. He advised and so many, for and then long, their problems so vexing and deep, that he took September off. Had to. "I needed a intermission from solving bug," he says, knowing that he still spent two total weeks in the month away dealing with his own.

I outset met Vernon terminal autumn, on that very porch. I came to ask him near his son, Ryan, a Pro Bowl linebacker for the Steelers who, in Dec. 2017, suffered a spinal string injury on a football field in Cincinnati. I asked Vernon most his religion, about 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

One thing 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 again. He knew the odds, and how he sounded, and how many would call back him delusional at all-time. Merely he believed, all the way until this September, when Ryan planned a visit abode to tell the residual of the globe what Vernon already knew.

Vernon picked upward Ryan, daughter-in-law Michelle and their young son, Lyon, at the aerodrome on Sunday, Sept. vi. Not fifty-fifty three years removed from one of the scariest injuries ever suffered in a pro football game, Ryan could now walk with only a minor limp. He didn't need assistance. He could live a "normal" life. Ryan had left Pittsburgh, Vernon says, because he didn't want to be a distraction to his former teammates and he wanted to be home, with his family, for unconditional support. "I worked my butt off," he told Vernon. "Only I take not been able to become back to 100 percent."

For Vernon, the unplugging had already started. No email. No phone calls. He'd read books, smoke cigars, sit down out on the porch and contemplate his son's future. Normally when Ryan visited, old friends stopped by constantly. But not at present, during the global pandemic. Ryan's grandparents marked the only guests. "It was similar 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 simply family member who had struggled with low; 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 e'er walk once more, Vernon prayed. Kickoff, he prayed for his son to walk. Somewhen, 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 it in my mind, [him] running back on that field." That prayer would non be answered.

On Ryan's first mean solar day abode, a Monday, Labor Day, Vernon held his emotions together. On Tuesday, he lost control. He estimates he cried between xx 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 about the football career catastrophe, though. He was concerned about Ryan, still 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 tin't share too much, Vernon says, wanting Ryan to tell his own story, in his own time, aforementioned every bit ever. Merely he does insinuate to "some thoughts" beingness "too crazy" and says, "depression can take your mind to some deep, night places."

The pastor has always done his best thinking on that porch, the verbal kind of critical analysis he needed so, and he kept going back outside that Tuesday. Finally, he decided he should hear from the source. But subsequently Tuesday turned into Wednesday, around 1:xxx a.1000., he tapped on the sliding drinking glass window from outside, summoning Ryan to his dwelling house office, the ane 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 conclusion," Vernon said. "And your life."

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

"Information technology'south painful," Ryan said. "But I'm all right, dad. I'm all right."

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

On Wednesday, the pastor felt better. 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 infirmary for six months after the injury. They had seen the visits, the tears, the fear that he might not walk once again. Ane nighttime, Vernon had an out-of-body experience, and he swears he could see himself, as if floating higher up, looking down at Ryan and trying to switch bodies with him. "I've talked to him when he didn't want to alive," Vernon says. This was different, Ryan reassured him.

"I'm skillful," he said again.

A film crew arrived in the forenoon and prepare outside, in the only identify that fit the news that would exist delivered that afternoon. Ryan sat on the porch, the lake glimmering behind him, and recorded the declaration he hoped he wouldn't have to make until years later, after a comeback: His playing career had officially concluded. He had known that, on some level, e'er 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-circular choice in 2014 to a cornerstone of another fierce Steelers defence to the Pro Bowl to the cease—the football part, anyway. Shazier played 4 seasons. Made 299 tackles. In his bulletin, he said he loved everything nearly football.

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 gunkhole and went for a cruise. Most nights bled into mornings, with Vernon and his boys, Ryan and other son Vernon, staying upwardly; sometimes, they watched the sun rise together before heading off to bed. "Honestly," Vernon says, "those were two of the all-time weeks of my life."

The following Mon, Vernon withal did not watch the Steelers open their flavor, against the Giants, on the aforementioned Monday Night Football stage where Ryan's career ended. Vernon hasn't watched football since the injury; why, he's not exactly sure. Ryan does sentinel, preparing for his podcast. But his father stopped tuning in to sports nearly entirely back in '17, to the point where he says he simply found out the Miami Oestrus, who play just down the road, were proficient when a relative mentioned their NBA Finals run. "Look, it'due south not equally of import to me equally it in one case was," the pastor says. "I don't know if I avoid it to continue from allowing it to trigger. That could be part of information technology, 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 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 wedding his father officiated. He had another son, Lyon Carter. (His kickoff, R.J., is from a previous relationship.) The same doctors who said he would never walk again now described Ryan as a miracle—truly, his progress extended beyond any reasonable expectation.

He enrolled at the Academy of Pittsburgh to finish off the psychology degree he had started at Ohio State. With 1 more class, he will complete that part of his educational activity. Only as Vernon watched Ryan put distance and perspective between himself and his football career, he believes that Ryan also 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 some other rep or v. There were his young man linebackers, moving their position meetings to the hospital, lingering afterward to deepen their connection. There was Coach Mike Tomlin, still coaching, a primary motivator who never needed to be on a football field to achieve 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 unit, no pastor begetter or famous friends.

"The support was overwhelming, yet at the same fourth dimension, it was similar, you're sitting at the table, and you take ham, y'all've got turkey, you've got all of your favorite dishes, you have all the desserts you desire, you take more than enough," Vernon says. "And yous wait across the room and somebody is sitting in that location with an empty plate, and they have crumbs on it."

Somewhen, Ryan decided he wanted to not simply grow his foundation but abound it so large that he could assistance exactly those kinds of people. The ones who needed him. Who needed counseling and bills paid and expensive therapy that near cannot afford and insurance often won't cover in full. "We want to get in 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

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