My Words: My personal journey, an open book

I grew up with a love for reading. I crushed the “Harry Potter” collection. I’d go cover-to-cover in a single sitting with books from the “Magic Treehouse" series. Maybe it was because my mom was an elementary school teacher with an English degree and her passion for the written word rubbed off on me, or maybe it was just fate. Whatever the case, I always make sure to have a book or two with me wherever I go. 

But writing a book of my own proved to be more of difficult than I thought. I had to get over the fear of really putting myself out there. I think a lot of people have that problem with social media these days. 

You’re trying to be yourself, but what if you’re not as well-liked or accepted as you might think?

It came down to me having the presence of mind to say, “OK, let’s go try this thing out. Let’s own it. Let’s prepare it. Put your heart and soul into it and be proud of it. If you sell one copy or 1,000, it doesn’t really matter because you know you did the best you could.”

Those negative, intrusive thoughts are always going to be there. What do people think? How am I being received? Ultimately you have to have confidence in your abilities and the determination to see the project through.

I spent more than a year writing “The Seven Crucibles: An Inspirational Game Plan for Overcoming Adversity in Your Life” because I wanted to give people who are struggling a path forward. There’s a lot of people who fit in my target audience: athletes, young business professionals, really anyone trying to be the best version of themselves.

“Dedicated to all of the kids who are worried about being perfect,” is how the dedication reads. “I pray you find purpose in this book and use it to bring that life to reality.”

My path began in Green Bay, where I was an all-state quarterback and state champion wrestler at Bay Port High School, and then led to the Wisconsin football team, where I was a fullback for the Badgers from 2015 to 2018.

I wasn’t chosen in the NFL draft as I’d hoped, but I landed a free-agent contract with the then-Oakland Raiders and spent three seasons establishing myself as a contributor on offense, special teams and in the community. I was a Pro Bowl alternate in 2019, a Walter Payton Award nominee in 2020 and one of the team captains in 2021.

Everything changed for me in a mid-November game against Kansas City. I was on the punt coverage unit when I tried to accelerate downfield to cover the return man. I planted and felt my left leg twist. Then I heard a pop. My anterior cruciate ligament was completely torn.

I remember crying as I was being carted to the locker room. I’d worked so hard to get where I was. In a blink I went from the highest of highs to a painful, uncertain future.

Strange as it may sound, this is the moment when the book started to come to life.

A group of veteran players began giving me advice on how to deal with an ACL injury. It’s something where when you tear it and you’re in a contract year and there’s all this uncertainty, all these questions are rising. I really had to lean on a lot of the older guys, guys I played college ball with and a lot of guys currently playing with in the league.

A lot of them told me to keep a journal. Just write out my emotions, get everything on paper. Once it’s on paper, they said, it’s not going to be as much in your head. It’s not going to be a big deal. You’ll be able to rehab better. You’ll be more consistent.

During those journal-writing moments, I started to read books. Every day that I was on a training room table trying to straighten my leg, I was reading and journaling.

All of a sudden I started to realize like, ‘man, a lot of these ideas in these books I’ve heard from my coaches at Wisconsin, in the NFL and high school’ and all these familiar messages started to kind of align for me. It’s like I already know the answers to this test. I already know what I need to be doing.

Maybe I can turn this thing into a book.

I reached out to a couple of established authors whose work and expertise I respect to pick their brains. Jon Gordon, who wrote “The Power of Positive Leadership,” and Ben Newman, who wrote “Your Mental Toughness Playbook,” are known for their books on positivity and purpose. It was very therapeutic for me. I realized that my torn ACL was basically a metaphor for life’s challenges.

It took me 15 months to put it all together. Sometimes the creative tension just kind of boiled over and everything popped out in a second. Then there were anxiety-ridden nights where the only thing that would get me back to sleep and ready for rehab the next day would be recordings for hours of voiceovers and audio files.

I had to start with how I wanted the book to look like, feel like, read like so that I could write it. I wanted it to be very conversational, to make sure it felt like a conversation and make sure that things flowed the way that they needed to.

You learn a lot about yourself when you’re writing. My injury sent me down a deep rabbit hole and I think I went all the way in. That was an important journey for me. You’re like, ‘Man, you’re in a really dark place’ and you don’t know what the other side is going to look like, but you believe you know how to get out of there.

Writing the book was definitely a process, but it’s cool to have something to look back on through all that uncertainty going through free agency. I wound up being released by the Raiders, but signed a two-year contract with the Miami Dolphins in March of 2022. That was a big weight off my shoulders, not to mention one of the best things to happen to me.

It’s been really special to be able to have something that you worked on extremely hard, that you are kind of going through the raw emotions while you’re writing it, so you know it’s real. To share that vulnerability with people, perfect strangers, is humbling.

A cool part of this project was having my mom, Chris, read the transcript as one of my trusted resources. There are portions that I was worried about what she was going to think. To have her validation, her support, was huge. She had some grammatical coaching points to be sure, but her stamp was really special.

One of the most satisfying outcomes is running into random people who have read the book. I might not have had a conversation with them before, but now we can relate on a very personal level.

I mentioned earlier that I was a bookworm as a kid, but from middle school to high school you couldn’t pay me enough to read a book. I fell in love with it again because of my injury. Life has thrown a lot of full-circle moments my way lately. It’s been fun to experience that irony and to embrace it the best I can.

I’ve really come to like books on personal growth. My favorite was written by Ryan Holiday entitled “Discipline is Destiny.” The message: Show up every day and do the work even if you don’t want to. It’s really relatable whether you’re rehabbing a torn ACL, studying for the bar or working third shift. It’s not going to be peaches and cream. There are days when it’s going to be minus-10 degrees on a random morning in February and you have to show up for a 6 a.m. workout and give it all for the guys that you go to work with.

I think I’d like to write another book. I’d also like to visit college campuses and share my experiences with student-athletes. I think I have a lot to offer.

I’d love to encourage, enlighten and help guide the next generation of Badger greats. I love being around those people. Student-athletes tend to be so hungry to learn and grow.

Being a student-athlete at a place like UW forces you to figure out who you are and you have to go through hard things to do that. Wisconsin does that to you. One of the coolest parts about my experience there was that nobody holds your hand. They let you figure it out for yourself. They’re not going to give you the fast answer. They’re not going to give you the blueprint. All the resources are there for you to maximize.

The people who leave UW own it so much more. That’s what’s really special about this place. I didn’t realize it while I was going through it. You struggle and eventually figure it out.

Then, when the time is right and you’re properly inspired, you might write a book about your journey.

Did you enjoy reading this? Read more My Words stories from the Badgers here.