Sad story, man.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/sports/ncaafootball/ryan-hoffman-a-unc-football-player-two-decades-ago-is-now-homeless.html?_r=0

By Juliet Macur
New York Times

With sunset minutes away, the man in the neon yellow knit hat took his usual spot at a busy intersection in Lakeland. Across from a Publix supermarket and on the edge of a Circle K parking lot, he sat against a streetlight holding a worn cardboard sign with dirt-stained hands that could easily palm a basketball.

'Lost Job. Laid Off. Homeless.' Here was the man I had been looking for.

At the urging of his family, I had tracked him down after a string of texts to several prepaid cellphones kept - and lost - by this man, who is plagued with short-term memory problems. For weeks, I had wondered what he would be like and how many details he could remember from his former life, which he had abandoned - or which maybe had abandoned him? - years ago.

And now, here he was, looking forlorn in the fading light, his big, blank blue eyes beseeching drivers for a dollar or two. Each time cash appeared through a car window, he sprinted there, retrieved the bills with a 'God bless,' and just about skipped back to his spot by the lamppost. 'I really don't want to do this,' he said, 'but I have to. Gotta eat.' His life wasn't always like this. Nearly 20 years and more than 100 pounds ago, this panhandler in the yellow knit cap, Ryan Hoffman, was a hulking offensive lineman for a college football team ranked in the top 10, a starting player renowned for his toughness. Now his old Levis are so big that even a belt on its ninth notch can't keep them from sagging below his hips.

'Look, I'm still in tiptop physical shape and can probably run a marathon,' Hoffman said, the words tumbling out of a mouth missing a tooth that was knocked out in a street fight. 'It's my brain that keeps me from being a productive member of society. I'm physically very strong, but I'm mentally so weak. Something is wrong with me. I don't know what it is, but I used to be normal, you know?

'I'm confident - well, I'm pretty sure - that football had something to do with it.' Football's toll on its participants is well established. We know about dozens of former NFL players who were left with severe brain damage from repeated blows to the head. Their stories often contain disturbingly similar details - depression, substance abuse, memory loss, dementia - and their brain damage was always revealed posthumously.

But there are many more former players out there wondering if they are football's next casualties. Most of those players are not famous. Most never made a dime off the game. They are relatively anonymous men who played the sport in college and only later, for some reason or another, have found themselves struggling in life.
Just like their NFL counterparts, Hoffman and those former college players have been left to wonder: Did football do this? Are the hits to the head I took the reason for my decline? Or would I be in this condition even if I'd never played a down?

They might never know the answer, because a definitive answer might not exist.

Hoffman blames football for scrambling his brain, but it is impossible to disentangle what could be football-related brain injuries from his subsequent drug use and possibly genetic mental illness. He simply cannot be sure. No one can.

He and players like him are faced with the same terrifying uncertainty as former pros. Yet none of them will benefit from the $765 million settlement the NFL has agreed to pay to thousands of its former players, and few of them can expect much help. Spun out of a system that makes billions of dollars for the NCAA and its member universities, these former college athletes are little more than collateral damage.

'Those are the players who are being left behind in this whole concussion debate and, unfortunately for some of them, it's a life-or-death issue,' said Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, the newly formed college players union. 'But even if the NCAA paid a billion-dollar settlement, it may not be enough to help all the college players suffering right now. There are just too many of them.'

Making sense of it all

Hoffman, 40, is about as far from the game as one can be. For more than eight months, he has been homeless. He has been stabbed. He has been shot. He acknowledges addictions to alcohol and prescription medication. He has served time in jail. He has sold his blood for $20 to $30 a pop, and has sold drugs, too. But sometimes even that is not enough to buy food; he once was arrested for stealing an eight-piece fried chicken bucket from a supermarket.

Once upon a time, though, Hoffman was a football star, a 6-foot-5, 287-pound left tackle at North Carolina, the ironman on a team that went 11-1 and sent a halfdozen players to long careers in the NFL. In 1997, his final college season, he played nearly every snap. His position coach, Eddie Williamson, called him the 'epitome of an offensive lineman:' physical, durable, driven.
But when his dream to play in the NFL never materialized, Hoffman stumbled into the real world, and he has failed to right himself ever since.

The pattern of his downfall is not unique. It is football's ongoing problem.

At the Sports Legacy Institute, which studies sports-related brain trauma and its aftereffects, more and more phone calls are flooding in from former college players (or their families) concerned that football has damaged their ability to live normal lives.
'They're starting to connect the dots because the players are literally watching themselves change,' said Chris Nowinski, one of the institute's founders. Nowinski said he used to field the calls himself, but now needs help because of the volume.

Hoffman's sister and only sibling, Kira Soto, was the first person to make the connection between football and her brother's radical changes in behavior. After seeing reports about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head, Soto researched its symptoms. Depression. Sensitivity to light. Memory loss. Impulse control. Aggression. With every sentence, she could feel her stomach lurch. She was reading a description of her brother.

Promise, then problems

Ryan Hoffman's memory is flimsy. Just hours after I met him at a Lakeland seafood place for lunch in January, he told me that he was not hungry because he had just been to a great seafood place. He suggested I try it. But he does remember things about his life as a football player.

'You try to hold on to those memories when they're all you've got,' he said.

Hoffman took up the game as a high school freshman and pushed through the hard hits and the headaches and the time he vomited several times on the team bus riding home from a particularly physical game. Soon the recruiters from the top college programs came calling. Nebraska. Florida State. Alabama.

Hoffman, with the help of meticulous research by his father, a management consultant, picked North Carolina. But what his parents did not realize was that Ryan was about to become another interchangeable piece in America's football machine. Once on campus, he was just a number - in his case a Carolina blue 79 - but Ryan reveled in it.

'I thought I'd just play my sport, then make the NFL and go live in some big mansion,' he said.

Hoffman recalled having only one concussion, during his junior year, but couldn't remember the details. He said he might have had others, too, but never complained because he feared losing his starting position. He never thought about consequences.

Yet by his final season, Hoffman said he noticed his mind had begun to warp, and that antisocial thoughts - punching strangers, drinking and driving - had begun to creep in. When Soto visited him that year, she also noticed something odd: Hoffman had lined up clear plastic bags around his bedroom, spaced perfectly apart, containing things like his keys and his notebooks.

'I asked him why he was acting so weird - why the Ziplocs? - and he said, 'It's the only way I can mentally remember where things are,' ' she said. 'Looking back, he probably felt himself losing control.'

Lost without football

Maybe Hoffman was too small to be a pro. Maybe he wasn't fast enough. Whatever the reason, no NFL team called Hoffman during the draft or afterward, and by the spring of 1998 his football career was over - just as it was for the thousands of other college players that year.

Many went on to productive careers and happiness outside football. Some were not as fortunate.

After graduation, Hoffman moved into his father's house in Florida, jobless and without direction. He struggled to sleep. He complained of headaches and dizziness and of hearing loud noises like shotgun blasts inside his head and of seeing flashing lights. In college, Hoffman's worst offenses were speeding tickets and fishing without a license. Now he was getting into fights, getting arrested, using marijuana, abusing Valium.

Doctors could not figure out what was wrong. They prescribed Xanax and Adderall, and diagnosed a list of psychological disorders: depression, schizoaffective disorder, manic depression, borderline personality disorder, anger impulse control disorder.

His sister enrolled him in welding school and got him a job at a parasailing company. He worked in construction, then as a roofer, then at a mattress plant. He even fought in MMA, encouraged to do so by his father, who thought Hoffman's growing anger could be put to use there.

Nothing lasted, including his marriage. Hoffman divorced in 2008, and his daughter and stepson moved in with a grandmother. His life was unraveling. 'I didn't have football anymore,' Hoffman said, 'so I felt lost.'

What now?

Hoffman said he's not jealous of those who made the leap to the NFL that he could not. One of Hoffman's old linemates, Jeff Saturday, went from Chapel Hill to Indianapolis, where he won a Super Bowl as Peyton Manning's longtime center.

Saturday told me he was shocked to hear that Hoffman was homeless because Hoffman had been so focused in college. Hoffman was elated to hear that Saturday remembered him.

'I'm proud of those guys who made it,' Hoffman said. 'And, you know, maybe if I would have made it in the NFL, maybe I would've gotten para lyzed or something.' Instead, he is paralyzed in other ways. Months after police supposedly confiscated his identification, he has yet to apply for a new government I.D. Day after day he told me, 'Yeah, maybe tomorrow I'll go to the office to get one.' Without an I.D., Hoffman can't stay in a shelter. His girlfriend, Michelle Pettigrew, lives on the street with him, and often snuggles next to him when he's panhandling.

Instead of seeking medical help, Hoffman said he self-medicates, often by using his panhandling money to buy moonshine off the street or $2 Modelos from convenience stores.

His family lives about 200 miles northeast, a world away. Hoffman's mother wires him $20 here, $100 there, mostly for new cellphones because Hoffman keeps losing his.

'Sometimes, I just pray that a meteorite hits me,' Hoffman told me. 'I think about drinking until I die and just lay down. But I need money to get a drink, so I need to work. A little bit of me still thinks there's hope. I have some issues, but I'm still viable.

'I just need a little help. I just don't know how to get out of this myself.' Inside that shell of a man - a player turned panhandler whose spotlight is now a dim streetlight - there is still that athlete who doesn't want to quit.