Sports

‘I lied about everything’: An NFL player hid his family trauma until he saved them — and himself

Published

3 hours ago

July 25, 2024

‘I lied about everything’: An NFL player hid his family trauma until he saved them — and himself

While the waves crashed against the rocks beneath him, Grant Stuard readied himself for the fall. He was closer now, inches from the edge. He yanked the headphones from his ears and stared into the darkness.

More than anything, he didn’t want it to hurt.

Everything he’d lived through — everything he’d tried to block out and bury for years — was finally catching up to him, smothering him, suffocating him, pushing him here, to the end of this pier past 2 a.m. one night in Galveston, Texas, gazing at the jagged rocks below, convinced if he jumped all his pain would vanish in an instant.

He’d always tried to be Superman, the star athlete and A student, all while secretly keeping a broken home together. But the older he got, the more his life fell apart.

He wasn’t Superman. He was 20 years old, and he was slipping, becoming what he loathed most. He started skipping classes. Then meetings. Then practices. Coaches wanted to kick him off the team. A girlfriend called him out. “You’re just like your dad,” she told him, “and your brother and sister are gonna be just like you.”

For weeks, he couldn’t shake those words from his mind.

Just like my dad? Just like me?

So he jumped in his Mustang late one night and drove, cranking the volume on his speakers. He parked next to the pier. He deleted every social media account he had. Finally, he started walking toward the water.

“I just wanted to be gone,” he says now. “I wanted to erase myself.”

He scoped out the scene. He saw no one. Beneath him, the rocks jutted out into the Gulf.

He told himself it’d be over fast.

He peered over the edge, heart racing, hands trembling. He took out his headphones, scribbled in his notebook and envisioned the fall.

Then he heard something.

Before he tried to be Superman, Grant Stuard thought he was Spider-Man. Inside his family’s living room in Spring, just north of Houston, “he’d jump from the couch to the recliner and from the recliner to the couch all day long,” his mom says.

Laurel Montgomery’s oldest was a ball of endless energy. As a kid, Grant smashed into everything in sight, typically leaving a distinct trail of destruction: holes in the wall, holes in the furniture, holes everywhere.

“There’s no finesse to me and there never has been,” says the Indianapolis Colts linebacker and special teams star. “I don’t have the best coordination, per se, but I could always run and hit something.”

Dad wasn’t around much. Dawayne Stuard was arrested dozens of times between 1995 and 2020 and served multiple stints in prison. But when he was, he rarely missed a practice or game. A former semi-pro football player, he pushed Grant relentlessly. He screamed. He motivated. At times, he insulted.

“Are you OK with him talking to your son like that?” other parents would ask Laurel on the sideline. “I was so young I didn’t know any better,” she says.

(Courtesy Laurel Montgomery)

Tears and tantrums followed. Grant would throw his helmet if he didn’t win every rep.

“My dad pushed me a lot harder than most kids would’ve been OK with,” Grant says. But quickly, he came to crave the attention football provided. “It was the only place I felt seen.”

Laurel was 16 when she first snorted cocaine, 17 when she lied about her age to land a job at a gentleman’s club in the city, and 18 when she became a mom. She made $300 on her first shift and $800 on her second. She grew addicted to the money, then the drugs. Coke became Adderall. Adderall became Oxy. Oxy became heroin, meth. Twenty years went by. She lost control. She lost her job, then another, then another.

She’d vanish for weeks — no call, no warning, no nothing. When she did make it to one of her son’s games, she’d sneak into the bathroom every half hour for another hit.

Laurel’s mom, Janet, was around, filling in some of the gaps, but at home Grant carried most of the burden. He’d swipe the food stamps card from Laurel’s purse so she couldn’t sell it for drug money. He’d scrounge up dinner for his brother JoJo and sister Samaria, even if it was week-old Little Caesars pizza or cereal for the third night in a row. Sometimes, they’d have to settle for a bowl of uncooked Ramen noodles.

As he grew older, he started to hide his home life from everyone he knew. One lie became two. Two became 20. After football practices, Grant would ask his friends’ parents to drop him off a few houses down so they wouldn’t get suspicious and call Child Protective Services. When he missed school, he’d call and say he was sick. “The reality was I didn’t have a way to get my brother to school,” Grant says, “and I wasn’t gonna leave him at home by himself.”

He learned to drive at age 11, his head peeking over the steering wheel in his grandma’s beige Chevy Cavalier. He’d drop JoJo and Samaria off each morning, and when a teacher would ask how they got there, Grant would shrug and say, “We rode the bus.”

When friends would come over, they’d pepper him with questions.

“Where is your food?”

“Why are your floors so sticky?”

“Why are you wearing the same clothes you had on two days ago?”

By the time he was a teenager, he couldn’t ignore it. The insults he heard on the playground. The stacks of bills on the nightstand. The residue he found on his mom’s bathroom counter. The racy calendars with her picture plastered on the cover that she’d stuffed into her closet, thinking no one would find.

Grant would grow furious, leaving Post-It notes over her face. “PLEASE STOP!” he’d write.

Finally, one night, after another overdose, Laurel came clean. “I’m a drug addict,” she told her son from a hospital bed.

“I know, mom.”

She was stunned. She thought she’d been hiding it.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Mom, look at your arms.”

She stared at the needle marks. The bruises. The scars.

“I feel like I neglected him as a person,” Laurel says now, choking back tears. “I hate to say that, but that’s how it was. I wanted to be a good mom. I just wasn’t.”

Dawayne Stuard was better at hiding his vices. He hid his infidelity from his wife — “Don’t tell your mom,” he’d warn Grant in private — and hid his pill addiction from his children.

But he couldn’t hide from the police. Over the years, he was arrested on charges of theft, forgery, fraud, credit card abuse and organized criminal activity. He popped in and out of Grant’s life for more than a decade, a fleeting figure whom his son slowly came to resent.

“As I got older, I was like, ‘This is bullsh–,’” Grant says. “I was emotionally devastated.”

On the football field, Grant yearned for his father’s approval, the validation every young athlete chases when following in dad’s footsteps. His games were the only times the family would all be together. He didn’t want to disappoint.

“When I played well, it felt like I was being a good kid, like I was fulfilling my purpose,” he says.

But he always wrestled with the hypocrisy staring him in the face. Dawayne was a licensed minister, a self-proclaimed Jesus freak, the dad who poured himself into his son’s blossoming football career. He was also a serial criminal living a double life.

“There would be great moments with him, but they were few and far between,” Grant says.

So as a teenager, Grant made a vow to himself.

“I decided I wasn’t gonna smoke weed when everybody else was,” he says. “I wasn’t gonna get drunk when everybody else was. I didn’t wanna do anything they did, because everything they were doing wasn’t getting us out of the situation we were in.”

He threw himself into his schoolwork. (One of the few times he got a B, in fifth-grade English, he was left in tears. “I’m still pissed,” Grant says now. “I wrote a good paper.”) But when he’d walk through the door with his report card, anxious to show it off, no one would even ask to see it.

At Oak Ridge High he became a standout in football and track, known for the scraggly long hair that dangled past his shoulders and a motor that always revved at top speed. Colleges started to show interest. Yale called. Grant committed. Before his senior year, the coach who’d recruited him told him if he didn’t maintain an A average, the scholarship wouldn’t stand.

“No problem,” Grant assured him.

But his home life was unraveling. He was bouncing from home to home, living with his mom one month, his grandma the next, his dad the next. “Nothing was stable,” says a former coach at Oak Ridge, Kevin Goodwin. “I can’t tell you the number of houses that boy lived in from 2015 to 2019.”

Grant knew he needed a different environment, and quick.

“Who can you call about a place to stay?” Goodwin asked.

“Nobody,” Grant told him.

“OK, let’s go,” Goodwin replied. “You’re staying with me.”

Grant showed up at his coach’s door with his life in a trash bag. He stayed for most of his senior year. He ate healthier, dropped weight, kept his A average and helped Oak Ridge’s 4×400 relay team finish third in the Texas state championship, diving head-first across the finish line in a school record time. Goodwin still has a picture of it saved on his phone.

Then, just before Grant was ready to sign with Yale on a football scholarship, his hometown school called. Houston wanted him. In the end, he couldn’t leave JoJo and Samaria behind.

So he stayed, and life started to crumble. Mom wasn’t around. Dad wasn’t either, until he was, suddenly showing up for practices at Houston, planting himself two feet from Grant’s position coach for the entire workout. “That was the first time I was like, ‘I get it,’” says former Cougars assistant Blake Gideon. “There was this looming shadow.”

Grant was trying to climb the depth chart on defense, trying to keep his grades up and trying to make sure JoJo and Samaria were safe back home.

“He literally had to raise his mom and dad and his brother and sister,” Goodwin says. “Imagine doing that as a teenager.”

Grant was driving back to Spring every week. He was missing classes, workouts and meetings because of it. “My mind wasn’t there,” he admits. He started lying to cover himself. He cheated on his girlfriend, then lied about that.

“All my life I lied about everything that was happening at home,” he says.

For years he’d tried to bury it, the anger and resentment and shame he’d bottled up inside. But it was always there. He’d never fully processed his childhood. He’d never acknowledged how much the trauma lingered. He’d never been honest with himself.

He felt alone. He grew selfish. He lashed out.

His girlfriend told him all he ever did was hurt people.

For a while, he started to believe her.

Then he asked himself a question: If he was gone, would everyone’s life around him be better?

Grant Stuard earned All-AAC first-team honors as a senior. (Courtesy of the University of Houston)

The sound he heard on the pier that night, the sound that stopped him from throwing himself onto the jagged rocks below, was laughter. A little boy laughing.

Wait a minute, Grant asked himself, wasn’t I the only one here?

He stepped back. He looked behind him. A hundred yards away, he saw a father and son. They were fishing.

In the middle of the night?

He stared at them, stunned. The boy laughed again. Grant thought about his little brother.

Who’s JoJo gonna have if I go through with this?

He walked back to his car, his heart oddly at ease.

“I told myself, ‘I don’t have a plan, I don’t have a sense of what I’m going to do next, but I owe them enough to try.’”

Six months later, inside a church that sat in a strip mall, wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt, shorts and sandals, Grant Stuard’s life changed. He’d gotten in another fight with his girlfriend the night before, then sat in his car alone, as lost as he’d ever felt. He sped back to Spring, slept on his dad’s floor, then drove to his cousin’s church for a morning service. He parked his Mustang a few blocks away. The back right tire was flat.

The pastor spoke. He was an ex-felon and a former drug addict.

“Somebody didn’t want to come today, but they’re here,” he began. “Somebody is struggling with their job and can’t sleep at night, but they’re here. Somebody got a flat tire on the way this morning, but they’re here.”

Grant perked up. No one had seen his car. No one could’ve known he had a flat tire.

“Now I’m paying attention,” he says.

They broke into prayer groups. A man approached.

“The feeling you had last night, sitting alone in your car? That’s the reason you’re here,” he told Grant. “That was God telling you to keep coming back.”

At this point, Grant could barely speak. Tears welled in his eyes.

How could this man have known?

How could anybody have known?

“I hadn’t told a soul about the night before,” Grant says. “And for me, that was God showing me he existed. He was telling me he cared about me, like genuinely cared about me, something that was missing my whole life. For a long time football filled that void. Then girls filled that void. I always had this feeling I had to do everything for my siblings and everything for myself, and I always ended up feeling alone.”

A weight was lifted.

“He wasn’t there by accident, that’s what we kept telling him,” says Megan McCullum, who also spoke that morning. A former drug addict herself, McCullum worked in the same club as Grant’s mom a decade prior. After getting pregnant, she left the job and turned her life around. She got clean. She became a pastor. She started a family.

Grant saw the hope. In that moment, he clung to it.

Then he cut the toxicity from his life. He grew closer to God. He stopped lying, stopped cheating, stopped feeling like he had to be everything to everybody. He met the woman who’d become his wife, Josie, and proposed within a year. He came clean to his coaches and re-dedicated himself to football.

“He comes into my office one day in tears and tells me everything,” Gideon remembers. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, what?’ I’m sitting there watching a third down cutup, like that matters in that moment.’”

The coach listened. He counseled. He kept his phone on all hours of the night, urging Grant to call whenever he needed. Then he leveled with him. “The best version of you is good enough,” Gideon told Grant before his senior year. “Keep working and you could change everything for your brother and sister.”

Translation: The NFL wasn’t out of the question.

“Grant always had that strength in him,” Gideon says. “He just lost his confidence and his direction.”

After bouncing from running back to safety early on at Houston, Grant found a home at linebacker. As a senior he broke out, leading the Cougars in tackles and earning All-AAC first-team honors. “He played with his hair on fire every single snap, with no regard for his personal safety,” Gideon says. “Not one time did I have to ask, ‘Can you give me more effort? Can you play a little more physical?’

“He’s also the worst walkthrough player ever,” the coach adds with a laugh. “He can’t tone it down.”

The following spring, Grant waited 258 picks to hear his name called in the 2021 NFL Draft. With the last selection, the Buccaneers made him Mr. Irrelevant.

While the family celebrated back in Spring, Grant snuck into a quiet room for a video call with reporters. A few minutes later, Laurel popped her head on the screen. She waved. She smiled.

She was high on meth at the time.

She was arrested a few hours later.

For years and years, Grant had begged his mom to go to rehab. Twice, Laurel had relented. The first time she stayed sober for a month. The second time she was high 20 minutes after being released.

“I had just given up on a regular life,” she says.

Her addiction spiraled. She was living in hotels, stealing cars, stealing from store shelves, stealing anything she could. She was also overdosing every few months.

By this point Samaria was a freshman in high school, struggling the same way Grant had a few years prior. Mom was gone. Dad was back in prison. Friends were worried. They called Grant, begging for help. He decided to pursue custody to keep his sister safe.

Laurel would essentially have to sign over her rights as a mother. Grant called, demanding she show up at a Whataburger to sign the papers. For a full week, she made excuses, running off to hotel rooms, getting high.

“If you’re not there mom,” he told her at one point, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

Finally, she made it. She signed. She left in tears. And not long after that, Laurel overdosed for the last time. Paramedics had to administer her Narcan, a drug used to reverse the effects of opioid overdoses, and give her CPR for so long it bruised her ribs. For weeks Laurel couldn’t breathe without searing pain, a constant reminder of how close she’d come to never waking up.

A month later, she called Grant.

“I don’t wanna die,” she told her son. “I just don’t know how to stop.”

Within a week, she dug up the binder Grant had been keeping for years, the one with all the brochures from all the rehab centers he’d looked into for her. Laurel started making calls, asking if they had an open spot. Some were full. Some wouldn’t take her insurance. Some were too expensive.

She kept calling.

Finally, hope. A place called Turning Point, in Tampa, Fla., seven miles from the Bucs’ practice facility.

“Crazy, right?” Grant says.

For an early exercise, each patient was asked to write down how their drug use had negatively impacted their loved ones. Laurel hesitated.

She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready. She thought about her three children, about all those nights they’d been left alone while she was out getting high. She gazed at the front door. She considered sprinting right through it.

“There are no drugs in there, so all you’re left with are the things you’ve done,” she says. “It was so hard.”

She stared at the blank sheet of paper. Finally, she started writing.

She stayed 90 days this time, working through the shame she’d been carrying with her for decades. She found a way to forgive herself.

“I feel like I got my master’s degree in recovery,” Laurel says. “This time, it just clicked.”

After Turning Point, Laurel moved into a sober living home, counseling women in recovery, then started picking up shifts at Dunkin Donuts — her first job out of the sex industry since before Grant was born. Pretty soon, she was promoted to manager. Now she’s back at Turning Point, this time as an employee, working with addicts hoping to change their lives the same way she did.

She’s been sober since Dec. 11, 2021.

And she’s also a new grandma. Grant and Josie welcomed a baby boy, Elihu, on May 24. The family gathered in Houston, Laurel and her three kids, together in a way they’d never been before.

“I thank God every day they still wanna be in my life,” Laurel says. “And that they still love me, and they still want me in their lives.”

After getting sober, Laurel Montgomery (middle) reunited with her three children: Samaria (second from left), Grant (middle) and JoJo (second from right). (Courtesy of Laurel Montgomery)

Laurel is almost three years clean. Dawayne, who did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story, has built a relationship with his son. JoJo is in college at Houston Christian. Samaria will soon be at Central Florida.

Grant is entering his fourth year in the NFL and third in Indianapolis, where he’s become one of the Colts’ top special teams weapons. Last December, in an overtime win over the Titans, he scooped up a blocked punt and returned it for a touchdown. On his feet that afternoon were black and red Nikes, emblazoned with the words “Stuardship Foundation,” Grant’s pick for the NFL’s My Cause My Cleats campaign. He and Josie started the organization to pour back into the community he came from, to show kids engulfed in trauma that there’s a way out, impossible as it can sometimes seem.

“They’re gonna be talking about Grant Stuard’s story back in Houston for a long time,” Goodwin says. “I remember thinking this boy’s life is gonna mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people someday — that is, if he’s able to make it through.

“I just thank the Lord he was able to make it through.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or is in emotional distress, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or at 988lifeline.org.

(Illustration: D/ The Athletic. Photo: Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire)

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Former Oregon high school track and field coach files lawsuit after dispute over transgender athlete law

Published

3 hours ago

July 25, 2024

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Former Oregon high school track and field coach files lawsuit after dispute over transgender athlete law

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Attorneys for John Parks, a track and field coach in Oregon, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the school district where he previously worked.

The Lake Oswego School District, which oversees Lake Oswego High School, and the Lake Oswego School Board fired him last month after he sent a letter to state officials concerning laws related to transgender athletes.

“The Liberty Justice Center has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against an Oregon school district on behalf of a high school track and field coach who was fired for proposing an open division for transgender athletes to compete in, to ensure fairness for all student athletes,” according to a release obtained by Fox News Digital.

John Parks coached girls track and field at Lake Oswego High School in Oregon. (Fox News)

Parks recently made an appearance on OutKick’s “Gaines for Girls” podcast, which is hosted by former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines.

Parks said the moments leading up to the women’s 400-meter event were filled with high levels of stress for the athletes he coached and their parents. A biological male runner, who identified as a female, competed in the race.

“It caused great distress to them in the lead up to it,” Parks told Gaines, an OutKick contributor and the director of the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute. “Their parents were very concerned and had issues with…. but they [were] afraid to speak out in any way… they very much want to support all students and transgender students in every way. But, they just felt like it was putting them under an unfair stress to have to race in this kind of conditions where this trans athlete [had] just recently transitioned [and] was a bodybuilder before.”

NEW YORK COUNTY LAWMAKERS PASS TRANSGENDER ATHLETE BILL

Parks previously told KATU that he addressed two letters to a high-ranking official with the Oregon Student Activities Association.

He also sent letters to state Sen. Rob Wagner, including one last month after Oregon’s state championships. In the letters, Parks argued that the state’s laws, as currently constructed, do a disservice to girls’ sports.

John Parks was fired after sending a letter to state officials concerning laws related to transgender athletes. (John Walton – PA Images via Getty Images)

Parks appeared to reference the International Olympic Committee’s hormone testing mandates. The requirements for hormone testing vary across different sports leagues, committees and organizations.

“The OSAA competition rules need to be aligned with what the rest of the world competes under,” Parks wrote in the letter addressed to Wagner. “My proposal to encourage transgender participation is to offer an open division that is so named so it doesn’t identify or discriminate but offers an opportunity to participate.”

John Parks said the moments leading up to a women’s 400-meter event were filled with high levels of stress for the athletes he coached and their parents, as a biological male runner, who identified as a female, competed in the race. (C. Morgan Engel/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

Parks also offered details of the events that happened after he wrote the letter.

“After the letter was sent – I sent it on a Sunday night late… on Tuesday I see my athletic director in the hallway just passing, and he says the lady at the state, Kelly Foster, she received your letter, and she agrees with you, but she cannot respond.”

While Parks raised concerns over laws that offer protection for athletes who seek to compete against the gender they personally identify with, he also said he is not calling for the complete exclusion of transgender athletes.

“All I was advocating for…. [was] an open division that would allow competition so that the fans could cheer the transgender athletes separately and recognize and reward their efforts,” Parks told Gaines. “But not take away from the female athletes that were naturally born females that are in a whole different competition level.”

The full announcement can be read below.

A Lake Oswego School District spokesperson previously confirmed that Parks was no longer employed by the district. The school district stopped short of going into the circumstances surrounding Parks’ separation.

“We do not discuss personnel matters,” Mary Kay Larson, director of communications at Lake Oswego School District, said in a statement.

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Sports

Rams cornerback Derion Kendrick being examined for possible torn ACL

Published

3 hours ago

July 25, 2024

Press Room

Rams cornerback Derion Kendrick being examined for possible torn ACL

A Rams defensive backfield undergoing significant change might have suffered an early loss.

Cornerback Derion Kendrick, who was expected to play a rotational role, suffered a knee injury during the Rams’ first training camp practice and is being examined for a possible torn anterior cruciate ligament, a person with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly said Thursday.

Kendrick was injured Wednesday when he twisted awkwardly while tracking a receiver during a full-team drill at Loyola Marymount.

Kendrick, 23, started 12 games last season and intercepted one pass. But his status as a starter ended during the spring when the Rams signed free agents Darious Williams and Tre’Davious White.

Williams was a significant player for the Rams during their run to victory in Super Bowl LVI. He played for the Jacksonville Jaguars for two seasons before re-signing with the Rams.

White played seven seasons for the Buffalo Bills and was voted first-team All-Pro in 2019. He is coming off 2023 Achilles surgery, but he was a full participant Wednesday.

Cobie Durant and Tre Tomlinson are other cornerbacks for a defense now under the direction of Chris Shula, who succeeded Raheem Morris as defensive coordinator.

The Rams are adjusting to the retirement of star defensive lineman Aaron Donald.

Second-year pro Kobie Turner, who is expected to take on the leadership void on the defensive line, did not practice Wednesday because of a groin issue, coach Sean McVay said.

Sports

Don Garber: 25 years of the most powerful man in American soccer

Published

10 hours ago

July 25, 2024

Press Room

Don Garber: 25 years of the most powerful man in American soccer

Don Garber is a storyteller.

Over lunch at a Midtown Manhattan rooftop restaurant last month, as he chronicles his journey from Bayside, Queens to the NFL offices on Park Avenue to MLS commissioner, it is clear he knows it is the little details that make a story sing.

He didn’t just work at a gas station in high school, it was Barney’s Gulf, a sponsor of the Tony DePhillips Little League baseball team he played for. He didn’t just deliver newspapers, he learned how to properly fold up the Long Island Press to toss while riding his Stingray bike. He reels off the names of characters he has met along the way, like his wife Betsy’s boss at public relations firm Ruder and Finn, who told her she could find Betsy a better match “than this knucklehead”. “We’ll be married 39 years,” he notes. Or the man who ran the farmstand he worked at during summer break while a student at SUNY Oneonta.

He drops a few surprises, too. Garber’s resume may start at a vocational school near LaGuardia Airport, but his first year and a half after college was spent sleeping in a Ford van, working at bars and installing irrigation lines to pay his way across the U.S. and Mexico with some buddies.

“Old guys have great stories,” Garber says, with a smile.

Next month will mark 25 years for Garber as MLS commissioner, and his ability to tell a story — and to sell it — make him one of the most impactful figures in American soccer history.

Garber, 66, joined a fledgling MLS in 1999 from the NFL. His background in public relations, marketing and sales was essential to keeping MLS afloat. Garber had to sell soccer — to the public, to sponsors and, eventually, to investors. He navigated MLS through near bankruptcy and dissolution in 2001, ushered it into solvency with the creation of Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of the league that leveraged the growing popularity of the sport to keep the league afloat, and then led its expansion and foundational growth over the ensuing two decades.

MLS has a permanence now that never previously existed in the sport’s history in the U.S. and Canada. Whereas past pro soccer leagues came and went, an alphabet soup of attempts to make soccer “the sport of the future,” MLS now has 30 teams, 22 soccer-specific stadiums in markets across the U.S, with another two under construction and two more no longer in use, and club valuations that continue to rise at a head-spinning rate.

“I can confidently say we wouldn’t be where we are today, in fact, the league may not still be in business, without Don’s leadership,” said FC Dallas owner Clark Hunt, who also owns the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.

Garber’s legacy is that foundation but, two and a half decades later, the job is hardly done.

Whereas he once sat across the table in a conference room with three owners, on Wednesday Garber will sit on a dais in a hotel ballroom for a board of governors meeting with nearly 100 people representing all 30 ownership groups. His job is to build consensus in that group at a time in which soccer has continued to grow in popularity in the U.S. and Canada, but where MLS is still fighting for its place in the sports landscape.

MLS is confronting a moment in time as consequential as when Garber first sold the idea that kept the league alive in 2001. The World Cup is coming in two years, and everyone wants a bite at the market Garber has called the sport’s ATM. The greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, plays for Inter Miami and has brought more eyeballs to MLS than ever before. The league announced this week it has set midseason records in attendance and in sponsorship sales. But how they fully take advantage of the moment remains very much up for debate, even within their own board.

Once again, Garber — who is in the final stages of a contract extension to remain as commissioner — is tasked with seeing the right path forward; of understanding the risks, but also recognizing the opportunity.

Don Garber talks to The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio (MLS)

Garber shakes his head at the question: How much is Queens still a part of who he is?

“You cannot take the Queens out of anybody who truly was born and bred there,” he says. “It is a part of your DNA.”

Garber grew up in Bayside in the 1960s and 70s, a middle-class community built around immigrant families. Your reputation was built playing basketball and stickball, and you were judged not just by how good you were on the fields, but also how good of a hang. Garber didn’t struggle in either area.

“He was the glue, he was the guy who created a lot of the fun,” said New York Islanders owner Jon Ledecky, who went to grade school with Garber in Queens. “He was a ringleader, if you will, but not in a mischievous way, a very positive way of organizing everything, from being on the sandlot to hoops and just hanging out and having fun. As little kids, there are guys you look up to. Don was one of those guys.”

For Garber, being from Queens is about deep loyalty, but also “real ambition to want to be in an environment that still has the connectivity and the loyalty and the friendships from where you came from, but sort of aspires to be across the river.” It was a hunger that built up in his group of friends, many of whom went on to great success. The group includes a billionaire, a sports team owner and a commissioner, as well as several others who have risen to the top of their field.

Ledecky, a Harvard grad, said the cohort may be the smartest group of people he has been with in a concentrated fashion. There is a group of them, about 15 or 20, that still get together at a bar back in the old neighborhood around the holidays.

“We were all part of a group of guys who had drive and ambition burned into us by immigrant parents,” Ledecky said.

Garber left home to attend SUNY Oneonta, and then, after living in a van for about 18 months, got a letter from his mom trying to lure him back home with a job advertisement clipped from the newspaper. It was for a PR job at the Bulova School of Watchmaking, a tuition-free program for veterans. Garber moved back to the old neighborhood and got to work, coaching a wheelchair basketball team at the school.

Eventually, his aunt recommended he get an internship at Rudder and Finn, a PR firm, which was starting a sports department. There, Garber worked on accounts for 7Up, Miller Lite and Kinney’s Foot Locker. He eventually parlayed his PR work into a job with NFL Properties.

In an office filled with MBAs from Ivy League schools, the kid from Queens felt he constantly had to prove himself. Garber put his head down and worked in what was an unforgiving environment. It was there he learned how to sell and to “chart through choppy waters.” It was also there that Garber learned to trust his vision for what others might not be able to see.

When NFL Properties decided to keep just one sales exec to run the team, Garber remembers a colleague, Rick Dudley, coming into his office.

“Hey Don, you’re out,” he said.

As a VP of business development, Garber oversaw areas that came at a cost for the NFL. The other employee who worked in media sales was bringing in money. Garber, though, could not fathom the idea he was out.

“I said to Rick, ‘Why don’t you let me go home and I’m going to create a department for all these things that we’ve been working on,’” Garber said. “We can do an event at the Super Bowl. I think we can do TV shows. I think we should change the halftime show. There’s a whole events business… I went home and I came up with a plan.”

Garber returned and took the plan to the sales team. He was asked a simple question: Could they find sponsors to fund these ideas? If they did, it would get moved up the chain to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Over the next few months, they sold the plan.

“We went to Coke, went to Amex, went to Frito Lay on the halftime show,” Garber said.

The NFL Experience launched in 1992, drawing 100,000 fans. Three years later, the success of NFL Experience led Tagliabue to tab Garber, then 37, to run the NFL international business. Garber built out a successful group there, too.

His success selling American football to the world prompted New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to approach Garber to see if he would be willing to take over as MLS commissioner and try selling soccer in the U.S. Newspapers around the country panned the decision to hire an NFL executive with no soccer knowledge to run the league. For Garber, it felt like a similar pitch to the one he made around the NFL Experience. He understood the potential.

“There was so much opportunity,” Garber said. “They weren’t really doing everything they needed to do. And you have to have the kind of mind to see that, and that was my skill set. I saw something in soccer that I think a bunch of owners saw, but I don’t think a lot of other people saw. You have to look and see what could be as opposed to what’s right in front of you.”

It wouldn’t take long until that skill set was tested.

Garber was just over one year into his tenure as MLS commissioner but, as he sat around the dining room table at Phil Anschutz’s ranch in Colorado with a handful of owners in December 2000, the existence of the league was in jeopardy.

Multiple teams were struggling at the gates. The league was losing money and bankruptcy attorneys were on retainer. MLS’s handful of owners gathered to discuss whether there was a path forward. Garber and then-deputy commissioner Mark Abbott presented two plans. The first was to continue doing business as usual.

“We’re going to lose more money and I can’t sit here today and tell you that, three years from now, we would recommend going forward,” Garber recalled saying. “We don’t think it’s a viable plan for a professional sports league.”

Plan B was more involved: “Quadruple down, take some big risks,” Garber said. Fold two teams, build stadiums and invest tens of millions into a new business focused on growing the commercial market around soccer. Garber said the idea was to prove there was, indeed, an appetite for the sport — and through that, a market for MLS.

“We needed to create a commercial engine that would raise the overall commercial value of soccer in America, because that hadn’t existed,” Garber said. “You couldn’t talk to a sponsor about investing in soccer. They didn’t know what soccer was. They couldn’t see any value in soccer.”

It wasn’t an easy sell to the owners.

“When we presented that plan, a number of owners said ‘I’m out’,” Garber said. “I don’t like Plan A, which is gonna lose more money and the league is going to fold, and I don’t want to put in any more money (for Plan B). And we needed to sit in that famous dining room and not leave until we had at least come up with an iteration of the plan which kept the original owners together. And that was backroom negotiations and some really fun discussions that got heated at times, that had everybody looking each other in the eye and saying: ‘Are you in? If you’re in, I’m in.’”

Three owners, Anschutz, Kraft and Lamar Hunt, committed to stay in. Hunt and Anschutz took on ownership of multiple teams. Teams in Miami and Tampa Bay were contracted after the 2001 season. Most crucially, the owners launched Soccer United Marketing, purchasing the American television rights to the 2002 and 2006 men’s World Cups and 2003 Women’s World Cup — which had no buyer at the time — for around $40 million, covering all production costs and selling advertising for ESPN.

“Don’s a great salesman and he was able to convince us that there was an opportunity to create an economic model that went beyond the league, that Major League Soccer could participate in, that would help sustain the sport,” Clark Hunt said. “The creation of SUM was pivotal at that time. I think today, you look back at it and know that was one of those seminal moments in the history of the league.”

The decision around that table set the stage for the next phase of MLS: stabilize the league and then, just a few years after contracting teams, expand again. That Garber carved the path there was no surprise to those who had watched him ascend to the job.

“I think the reason they hired Don is they saw what I saw when he was a kid,” Ledecky said. “They saw that gift of being able to bring people together and to say, ‘Look, we’re gonna go from A to B, and we’re gonna be OK doing it.’ That is one of his superpowers.”

The images have become ubiquitous over the past decade in MLS. Garber on a stage wearing the scarf of a new expansion city, or in a hard hat holding a shovel in front of a stadium site.

If Garber’s legacy in his first decade and a half in MLS was keeping the league afloat and helping it find some degree of stability, the past 10 years have been about the league’s growth, both across the continent and vertically in the stadiums and facilities it has built.

The turning point came in 2009, when Garber stood on the field in Seattle in awe of the 32,000-plus in attendance. The league started to expand again in 2005, welcoming franchises into Los Angeles — one of the league’s biggest mistakes, Chivas USA, which it dissolved in 2014 — as well as Salt Lake, then relocating a team to Houston in 2006 and welcoming Toronto in 2007.

David Beckham’s arrival with the LA Galaxy in 2007 also gave the league a level of credibility it had long sought. But the images of packed stadiums in Seattle became the selling point on which the trajectory of the league flipped.

Don Garber and David Beckham, two hugely influential figures in MLS history (MLS)

“That was the shot heard around the world,” Garber said. “Like, ‘Hey, there’s something here that everybody’s missing.’”

Soccer was suddenly sellable. The Seattle Sounders were the 15th team in MLS. Ten years later, the league had grown to 24 teams, with expansion franchises in Philadelphia, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Orlando, Atlanta, Minnesota, Los Angeles and Cincinnati. Five more teams would join from 2019-23.

“It was very hard to get people interested in the league with no fee to join (at the beginning),” Clark Hunt said. “And Don kept working at it and started nurturing some relationships that he had and building new relationships with people who were interested in the sport, and slowly but surely we were able to start attracting investors and also gaining traction with city leaders in various parts of the country who were interested in potentially bringing a Major League Soccer team to their city and helping build a stadium where that new team could play.”

As the league grew, Garber pushed owners to invest in facilities. Billions of dollars were spent on training facilities and stadiums around the country. The images of those soccer-specific stadiums, and the atmospheres in them, have become arguably the league’s greatest asset.

“One of the biggest accomplishments that our owners have achieved, which takes blood, sweat, enormous planning, intense lobbying municipalities and real courage, is the fact we built 26 soccer stadiums,” Garber said. “When I walk into this office every day and I walk past a long wall of (pictures of) stadiums, I find it’s still incredibly inspiring. We did that one brick at a time.”

Don Garber surveys St Louis’ CityPark stadium in 2022, shortly before it officially opened (MLS)

As the league’s infrastructure and real-estate portfolios have grown, so too have valuations around the clubs. Forbes ranked LAFC as MLS’s most valuable club at $1.2 billion this year, just ahead of Messi and Miami’s $1.03 billion valuation. Forbes estimates the average value of an MLS club is around $658 million.

It is a remarkable number, considering Forbes’ estimates that MLS teams average around $66 million in revenue and the league recently locked into a 10-year media rights deal with Apple for $2.5 billion, a deal in which the league covers all of the production costs. The Apple deal is considered one of the league’s biggest bets, moving the entirety of its product — local, national and international media rights — behind a paywall on a streaming service, but also in partnership with one of the world’s most powerful companies.

The market has remained bullish on MLS, especially with the World Cup around the corner. San Diego recently paid a $500 million expansion fee and will begin play next year, while Indianapolis is now lobbying for its own expansion team.

On Monday, the league announced increases in league and club sponsorship revenue by about 10 percent year over year, as well as increases in jersey sales and social engagement.

“It was an average (team) value of $10 million 20 years ago,” LAFC owner Bennett Rosenthal said. “You’ve got close to $20 billion of enterprise value (now). That’s a legacy of itself, that you’ve created something of such economic value.”

Garber, meanwhile, has grown into the most powerful figure in American soccer. In addition to running MLS, he has sat on the board of U.S. Soccer for more than two decades, a seat that drew the ire of fans this year when MLS attempted to pull its team out of the U.S. Open Cup. In the end, only eight MLS teams participated in the 110-year-old tournament. Garber has been accused of wielding his influence too much to favor MLS over other professional leagues and of putting the good of the league’s business over that of the sport itself. The relationship between MLS and U.S. Soccer was also long considered too cozy, with a shared media-rights deal brokered by SUM, though the U.S. Soccer and SUM relationship ended in 2021 after nearly 20 years of partnership.

Garber, however, has long pushed back at the idea he has too much power, instead saying it falls on the pro leagues to have that sort of influence on growing the game.

“There is no doubt we take it very serious that we have an obligation to build this sport,” Garber told The Athletic earlier this year. “And that’s something we think about every day. I’ve been on the board of U.S. Soccer for decades, I’ve never missed an (annual general meeting), and I take that responsibility passionately and seriously. But we all have to think about our evolving world of soccer as something that can’t just be based on what was — but has to evolve in a world of what it is and what it needs to be. And that requires rethinking things.”

That idea applies to more than just the U.S. Open Cup or U.S. Soccer, however. With the appetite for the sport continuing to increase, MLS must now determine the best way forward. Garber again will have a hugely influential impact on that direction.

Messi’s arrival in Miami last summer turned an even bigger spotlight on MLS and highlighted areas where the league still has massive opportunity. While the business metrics are positive and the valuations have soared, the sporting side of the league still lags behind much of its global competition.

For so long, MLS has been about steady, targeted growth. But whether that approach is still the right one is very much up for debate in a boardroom that has had an injection of new personalities and opinions during the league’s boom era of expansion. Some owners want the league to push forward more aggressively. Others favor the continuation of the more conservative approach.

“In the past, we had 100 percent unanimity on every vote. We don’t anymore. Now, there’s lots more debate,” Garber said. “And that’s OK. It requires us to do a little more work on ensuring everybody understands the decisions they’re making and what impact that’s going to have on the enterprise. But that’s the reality of a maturing sports league. It happens in every other league. You’re going to have big markets and small markets. You’re going to have legacy owners and new owners… I need to be focused and the league office needs to be focused on enterprise success on behalf of all. That’s a very, very, very different job than it was 10 years ago.”

Garber’s ability to navigate the boardroom has become an increasingly important — and difficult — job. Many of these owners are billionaires who have built ultra-successful businesses. All of them have strong opinions.

“Those are not 30 shrinking violets — and, by the way, it’s not necessarily 30 (owners), it’s 60 or 80 personalities,” Sounders owner Adrian Hanauer said, “Don has a superpower of relating to people in the way they need to be related to. He has a breadth of knowledge but also just a humanity about him that allows him to have empathy, to understand what people are going through and what they need.”

Nashville owner John Ingram said: “He can be a tough New Yorker when he needs to be, but he’s also just a lovely person too.”

Garber said he got one last piece of advice from Tagliabue when he left the NFL: “Keep the owners who hate you away from the ones who are undecided.” As the number and variety of opinions have increased, that task is probably put to the test more often. While his ability to tell a story and sell a sport may have been his most important skill when he first took over as commissioner, it is the skill set of the kid from Bayside, that ability to bring people together, that became his most important attribute over the past decade.

“As a commissioner, it’s not just having the ideas; it’s being able to get people to rally around them and join hands,” LAFC co-owner Larry Berg said. “And he’s very good at that.”

Don Garber meets Nelson Mandela in 2010, with President Clinton also present (MLS)

As Garber now moves into the back half of his third decade in charge of MLS, however, he has to determine the best path for owners to rally around. The league’s success with a deliberate approach over the past 25 years undoubtedly still informs the strategy today.

Garber clearly understands that, as the global market evolves, MLS’s ability to evolve with it is critical to its continued growth. What was accomplished in his first 25 years as commissioner has set the league up to be ready for what comes next, he said.

“Where it was a primary focus on building long-term stability and viability in the past and having to make some really creative or tough decisions to achieve that, today we’ve achieved that long-term viability and stability,” Garber said. “And now we need to turn a lot of our energy into thinking about: How do we take everything that we built and turn it into something that will truly achieve our goal of being one of the top soccer leagues in the world?

“What does that mean to our player signing strategy? What does it mean to our focus on competitive balance? What does it mean to our competitive schedule and competition format? What does it mean to how we centralize a lot of our commercial rights? We need to go through a process to determine: Are the things that we’ve done that have driven us to where we are today the same things that will drive us to where we need to go tomorrow? And I’m not convinced they are.

“I think we do need to take a big step back so we can take five steps forward.”

The many questions Garber posed remain unanswered as he and MLS determine what those five steps forward look like. At its core, Garber believes the task is still the same one he signed up for 25 years ago. Selling a dream about what top-division soccer can look like in the U.S. and convincing people to care.

“We will be one of the dominant leagues in the world,” he said. “The question isn’t if, it’s when. We will be. Nothing but time will stop that. And we just have to be smart enough to not be lazy and think we can get there too quickly. We have to earn it.”

It’s a story Garber’s not quite done telling yet.

(Top photos: Getty Images and Austin FC; design Eamonn Dalton)