Marty Walsh talks about overcoming obstacles at Suffolk graduation – The Boston Globe

“You kept going. You persevered,” Walsh said after accepting an honorary doctorate of public service and having a blue hood draped over his neck. “Give yourself credit — you earned this.”

He urged students to be heartened even in the face of superheated politics and an uncertain economy.

“Don’t shrink your dreams,” Walsh said under the overhang of the Leader Bank Pavilion. “If anything, dream bigger.”

Walsh attended Suffolk for one semester in 1990 before dropping out.

“The reality was I wasn’t ready — I wasn’t focused,” said Walsh, clad in a blue graduation gown.

His life, he said, was a “crooked line.”

“It wasn’t a smooth path, and it wasn’t a straight path,” but it’s one he’s ultimately proud of, he said. “Life will have more to teach you,” he told them.

As he has many times over the years, including at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he recounted his personal winding road, including childhood cancer and battles with alcoholism.

“Inside of me, I was broken,” Walsh told the crowd of when he hit rock bottom with his addiction in the mid-1990s. “My first night in detox, I thought my life was over … what I come to find out is my life is just beginning.”

Walsh was on the ballot for state representative two years later, a race he won. He held that seat until he became mayor and for a few years worked as the head of the Greater Boston Building Trades umbrella union. He was elected mayor of Boston in 2013.

Now, he heads the National Hockey League Players Association. He left his post as labor secretary in February after just under two years in President Biden’s Cabinet and is now making a reported $3 million.

Walsh drew laughs by telling a story about how he initially missed the call from Biden. He saw the Washington, D.C., area code 202 and let it go to voicemail, he said. Shortly afterward, he said “a friend” texted him that he should probably pick it up on the call back “because it’s the president of the United States of America.”

The call came again, he picked up, and accepted. Walsh said it was “an honor” but leaving his seat as Boston’s mayor was “one of the toughest things I’ve ever done in my life.”

He said he’s proud of his time in the administration and is now “back to my roots as a union leader.”

Walsh also talked about the early days of the pandemic, when he made the calls to close businesses and implement masking and other mandates.

“I had to shut down the city that I love,” Walsh said. “Despite tremendous loss, we survived as a city.”

To the students, he said, “I want to apologize to you because we changed the rules a lot.”

Almost 700 students graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences. The university handed out 1,969 degrees across its undergraduate and graduate programs over the weekend, it said.

Many of the graduates began college during or just before the pandemic, Walsh noted.

“That was very challenging — so much of it was remote,” said graduating law student Michele Garbit in an interview after the ceremony.

One of the student speakers, Lindsay Dieudonne, told her classmates that they’ve “learned to advocate for themselves … there is no door that has been opened for you that any person can shut.”

Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com.Follow him on Twitter @cotterreporter.