I have covered two Steelers who were paralyzed in the prime of their lives and promising careers. They are stories I rather would not have written.
The first was Gabe Rivera and the second Ryan Shazier, both first-round draft picks chosen to help rebuild a sagging defense. Both crippling injuries left all of us with thoughts through the years of what might have been.
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The accidents that injured them were not similar, and neither were their recoveries. Rivera wrecked his sports car after having drinks at a North Side bar in 1983 during his rookie season. It turned him into a paraplegic that kept him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, which ended July 18, 2018, at age 57 in part from complications from that accident 35 years earlier.
Two months before he died, I called Rivera — I worked the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette copy desk the night of the accident and I visited him later in Texas for a longer piece. My reason for calling him that May of 2018 was to ask him about Shazier, whose own spinal injury occurred on the playing field in Cincinnati five months earlier.
Rivera told me he was pulling for Shazier’s recovery, that “It seemed like he came through pretty good.”
All things are relative, but, indeed Ryan Shazier has come through it pretty good. He announced his official retirement from football Wednesday, and unlike Rivera, he can literally walk away from the game.
Thank You 🙏🏽… pic.twitter.com/JS3diYi2ar
— Ryan Shazier (@RyanShazier) September 9, 2020
“The last few years I’ve been working my tail off to come back,’’ Shazier said Wednesday during a news conference to announce his retirement. “I just felt it was time to transition and focus on my family more and my next steps.”
Those steps include a weekly Tuesday NFL podcast on Sportify, working with his foundation that helps people who have had spinal injuries — “I want to give more to the people going through the same situation as myself” — and other business interests.
“It’s tough, but right now I’m at peace where I’m at,’’ said Shazier, who has put his large home up for sale but said he and his family will remain in Pittsburgh.
Although hurt playing football, Shazier said he has no anger with the sport he loves, would allow his two boys to play if they want, and would not rule out coaching at some point.
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Early in the news conference, Mike Tomlin and Vince Williams, who lined up next to him at inside linebacker, made a surprise appearance via Zoom. They recounted a few stories and how much he meant to them.
“This is just the beginning,” Tomlin told him.
Said Williams, “I’m so excited about watching you attack everything else the way you attacked football.”
Near the end, another guest popped in: general manager Kevin Colbert, who had Shazier as part of his scouting crew last season. Colbert told him that they often worry about players when they retire because sometimes they don’t find their way. But over the past few years, Shazier eased any worry on that end with him, and that “never once did you ever say ‘Why me?’”
Colbert, in an emotional voice, finished by telling Shazier, “I just want you to know, you can retire from the game of football, but you’re never going to retire from being a Pittsburgh Steeler.”
We can all be sad about how a blossoming football career was cut short in such a violent way. Instead, Shazier’s tale is one of even greater accomplishment, of overcoming tremendous odds to not only walk again but to live life how he wants, to pursue work and dreams that Rivera could not. He and his wife have two young boys. His football career may have been cut short, but he gets a jump on what Chuck Noll would call his life’s work.
Rivera told me shortly before he died, “I think about it every once in a while, how things would have turned out” without his car accident. Shazier, knowing the attitude he brought to his incredible recovery, can turn his thoughts from what might have been to what can be.
Yes, he was a wonderful football player, with Troy Polamalu-like quickness and an innate sense for following the ball. He ran a 4.36 at Ohio State’s Pro Day in 2014 and two years later beat the fastest Steelers receivers in a post-practice 40-yard sprint. Remember, Ryan Shazier was an inside linebacker. As such, he was not Monster of the Midway but Sultan of the Speedway.
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Shazier made the Pro Bowl in each of his third and fourth seasons and appeared headed for greatness before his injury on Monday Night Football, Dec. 4, 2017, in Cincinnati. His knowledge of the game had caught up with his speed and quickness to create a new-wave NFL inside linebacker who could play anywhere on the field. It was that talent that allowed him to make the tackle that injured his spine, that and doing something he should not have done — lowered his head into the ballcarrier. But that’s how many players growing up were taught to tackle. Had he entered the NFL today with its bans on helmet hits, he might still be playing. But this is not a what-if story for Ryan Shazier.
Although he told me during a long interview at the Super Bowl in Atlanta in 2019 that his goal still was to play football, Shazier has had to know for quite some time that would not happen. A breakthrough came during the 2018 draft when he walked on the stage with his now-wife, Michelle, to announce the Steelers’ first draft pick, Terrell Edmunds. He jogged for the first time that November.
“Sometimes it’s hard to come to rehab, and you start crying or I’ll come to rehab and go, man, I don’t feel like I’m making any progress,” Shazier told me in Atlanta in 2019. “But you talk to everybody else, they let you know you’re doing a lot better than we ever expected. Every day is getting a little better, it just might not be going at the speed you want it to.”
I was there, in Cincinnati covering the game when he was injured. I’ve seen major injuries on football fields, some that looked worse at the time. Although I watched it on TV and not in person, I’m surprised Terry Bradshaw even survived the tackle in Cleveland when the Browns’ Turkey Jones lifted him and spiked him head first into the ground in 1976. Bradshaw would go on to help win two more Super Bowls, play seven more seasons and accomplish so much after his retirement from the game.
Shazier will never win a Super Bowl, but he has a chance to do so much with his life’s work. There promises to be many more inspirational stories from Ryan Shazier than the ones we’ve already witnessed.
(Photo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
