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TJ Ward Bet on Himself and Became a Champion · Sports In America with David Greene

• DAVID GREENE, HOST: I have been in journalism for something like twenty five years. I feel like I've had some pretty good assignments, but I have never had an assignment like Jake Pearson just had. he was given thousands of dollars by his bosses and told to just gamble with it, gamble the money away. That was the assignment. Am I right, Jake? Is that— do I have that about right? JAKE PEARSON: Yeah, almost right, but yeah, essentially this was just like a crazy all-time pitch. I still can't believe they went for it. there were there I should say there were sort of more there's a little more rigor to it, but you know, headline, yeah, I convinced my bosses to bankroll me, you know, tens of sports bedding industry. DG: Yeah. which is amazing. Well, just to do a bit of a level set here so everyone understands. Jake Pearson is a reporter for ProPublica. And, you know, we've talked about on our show just the explosive growth of sports gambling. and it's just changing the way we consume sports in our country. It's causing a lot of concerns about addiction. People who listen to my show know that I Have gambled on sports and really love it. My mom was a sports gambler and I paid her, had to pay her bookie off after she passed away because she had gambling debt. And I was always worried, Jake, that, you know, she was a problem gambler and like where that line was and what that even means. So maybe we can start there in this world where gambling has taken over sports, online gambling. What is a problem gambler and why did that get your interest? JP: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, look, the sports books are casinos, right? And their mission is to make money through sports betting and gambling without encouraging gambling addiction. And that's sort of critical, right? Like in all their regulatory filings and all their public statements, all of the companies, DraftKings, FanDuel say that they do not want to build their business on the backs of problem gamblers. that this is an entertainment product, they say they want people to stay in control, to budget, to play within their means. And implicit in all of that is a recognition that what we know to be true, which is that gambling is addictive, can be addictive, right? I mean, it's recognized by the DSM as an addiction. and so there is sort of this fine line that we walk in a big business that's built on a potentially addictive product of wanting to maximize profits. These are publicly traded corporations without wanting to sort of perpetuate harm, right? And so that was a sort of, you know, in my shop ProPublica, we talk a lot about public interest. What does accountability reporting look like? What are the table stakes? How does something have sort of a broader policy social import and we sort of we we we narrowed in on this dynamic right and how how these companies work so you're saying what is a problem gambler well it is it's tricky but we do know from research and other in you know in treatment that there are sort of telltale signs of what the betting behavior of a problem gambler looks like. There's sort of a separate classification for how betting or harmful betting or problematic betting can play out in your personal life, right? And that's actually sort of critical for a diagnosis, it is not just sort of what you're doing on the app, but how it bleeds into your real world. If you're lying, if you're stealing money, there are known betting behaviors, patterns of betting that are associated with problem gambling, that are sort of red flag behaviors. And so the conceit of the story was, could we sort of control for that, right? Could we show the apps? Could we show them on the other side? These under the, you know, I had sort of like this brain trust, this panel of advisors who are addiction specialists and addicts themselves, recovering addicts, and professional sports bettors. Could I wave some of these red flags of known betting patterns that are associated with sort of the most problematic behavior just to see how it registers on the other end? What is their system? DG: How you were treated as a problem gambler, like if they were fulfilling their promise to actually shut things down once they knew that you were exhibiting some of these red flag behaviors. JP: Right. They have a system in place. They call it responsible gaming. That's the corporate speak for it, but it is essentially sort of a guardrail system, a safety net system. It's fairly opaque. We're learning more and more about it sort of as we do the reporting, but it is supposed to, if you as a user exhibit XYZ behaviors, it's ingested on their end and certain things are supposed to happen. And a lot of that we found sort of comes in the form of like pop-up messages in your app that you can sort of that some you have to acknowledge, some you can flick away. I think as things progress, it can be a little more rigorous. You have to watch a video maybe or answer a survey. And ultimately sort of what we found was like two things. One is those the that messaging sort of pales in comparison to the sort of user design features and promotions that are simultaneously sort of pushing you to bet more. DG: And that feels really important in terms of what you learned. Like you were getting some of the messages that were like, hey, maybe you shouldn't be doing this as much because you're exhibiting these behaviors as a problem gambler, but at the same time, like, hey, here are opportunities for more. We're gonna like put more money in your account. You're a VIP diamond member now, which is, you know, sort of like, you know, you get whiplash probably. JP: Yeah, you took the word out of my whiplash was sort of the word that comes to mind, right? Because on the one hand, on the other. And that that sort of push and pull was, I think, sort of a a key finding of the story. Now the books will say, like, look, we are a regulated business, right? we've got state licenses, we pay an awful lot in taxes, some states more than others. And w w we're not breaking the law, right? This is our system. DG: Well, and we should say we want to make sure the voice of some of these companies are, you know, in you know, in our show. I mean Lori Kalani, who I think is the Chief Responsible Gaming Officer at DraftKings, told you, quote, “I think as a business, as an industry, we're doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts.” Is anything she said there not true? JP: Yeah. I think that the companies are earnest when they say they want more people to avail themselves of these responsible gaming tools. So, like for example, in your app, you can go to this sort of responsible gaming setting and set a limit on how much screen time, right? Like you could say, I only want two hours, or you can limit how much you can deposit. There are these tools that exist. They are all opt-in, right? They're not sort of default opt-out, which is sort of an issue that people in the reform movement are pushing, right? Like how easy a fix is, right? It's all about friction. So people who are worried about how gambling can quickly spiral out of control, time and time again come back to this point that like the seamlessness of the app, like the ease with which you can sort of press your f finger on your your thumb on your phone and like rip it, you know, is what can make things really risky really fast. And yeah. DG: And you were ripping it. I mean you were you were able you were betting like I mean I mean different sports, different games, sports you'd never even know how to play or never watched before. JP: A hundred percent like look the the point of this was like so I had this brain trust, right? This Greek chorus of like experts because I couldn't just do it on my own. I love sports, I'm not and haven't been like sports better, right? Like I'll play blackjack at the casino, but I've never been a sports better. And DG: And so this group of people, you one of the things they were doing was helping you behave like a problem gambler, to then see how these apps responded to you. JP: That's right. So like I said, my first week on the app was normal, casual, unremarkable, just for fun. Like I put some features on the Knicks. So this is fun. So like I actually I'm in New York. We sort of pegged this whole thing, this whole experiment to the NBA playoffs. The Knicks were in. Yeah, like my kids love the Knicks. You know, it's fun, right? So So the whole DG: And you're a Knicks fan, we should say, right? Have they won recently? They haven't won a title in a long time, right? They're still I haven't heard I haven't I didn't hear any news about that, but JP: The dude, like the whole premise was like this, the Knicks are gonna [EXPLETIVE] the bed like they normally do. And my course of my experiment will sort of run in conjunction with their, you know, ultimately yeah, letting everybody down as they always do, right? Shame on me. Anyway, so like I put a couple of initial bets on them to win it all, to win the chip and to win the conference. There was a school fundraiser for my son who's a second grader at Yankee tickets. So we were like in the nosebleeds and I threw some money on the game and also on like judge to hit a homer. He hits a homer. Like it's fun, right? You get the appeal. You understand why, you know, millions and millions of people want to do this. Like I'm not naive about that, nor am I the morality police, right? and then we made a deliberate decision to escalate the trajectory. And it was game three of the first round, Knicks, Hawks and while I had been sort of like just a $20, $30, $40 better, I increased my bet size. So like I'm doing hundreds, right? I'm betting more frequently over the course of the game. I'm not just betting on the outcome. I'm putting a prop bet on Jalen Brunson to hit 30 points or something. He didn't make it. And– DG: You're doing these in game bets that are sort of instant gratification, like if something is gonna happen or not happen or whatever. JP: Correct. Yep, that's right. And then over the course of that game, I'm down 500 plus on the Knicks. And then my expert panel had told me like the telltale sign of a problem gambler is something called loss chasing, which is what it sounds like. It is trying to basically recoup your losses with more and bigger bats at longer hits. digging yourself out of the hole, doubling down, right? And so, when the Knicks lose, the Cavs and Raptors are still playing. I then deposit $750 more from my bank into my DraftKings account, throw it on the Cavs. They lose. It's late, it's past midnight. The West Coast games are still going. I deposit another $500 into my account, and throw it all in the Nuggets. I think that was the Timberwolves series. they lose. So all in one night, after a week of like unremarkable 2030 here, just for fun, as it should be. Ho! DG: Yeah. And that's one of the biggest takeaways from this whole experiment, right? That you were exhibiting clear problem gambler behavior. And that's one of the responses that you got from this from this app. Do more. Be one of our top gamblers. JP: Yeah, and I should say right, the company gave me meaningful access to Lori Kalani for a long interview. We talked about a lot of these things. To their credit, they, you know, engaged in good faith. I did of course too, and I thought it was productive. The one question that remains for me outstanding to this day that they have never really addressed is why I got that VIP invite. You know, it's still unanswered for me, like and I have asked it multiple times, like what was the thinking here? How do you basically reconcile everything that you say about responsible gaming and the business and you know that it's key to the company's long term sustainability? How do you reconcile all that with what happened in that first what was it, ten days of my gambling behavior on the app? DG: Could it have been that you just hit ten days on the app or something? Or do you know with some certainty that it was based on your behavior the night before? JP: Well, I don't have, for example, somebody on the inside saying, like, Jake, this is exactly why. But there is, you know, we what here's what we do know. We know that VIP is an extremely select cr sort of contingent of customers who are picked because the company has assessed that they are potentially lucrative, right? Long-term value is the term in business. we also know that This is by the company's own admission. Most customers they say are not, you know, huge spenders, right? It's the casual better. and we also know from studies in the UK, even Connecticut, elsewhere, that problem gamblers sort of have very small number of high active users, account for a very large amount of company revenue. So VIPs are sort of coveted customers in this business. The DraftKings, Fan Duels, Fanatics sort of compete fiercely over them. The whole point of a loyalty program is to like secure that action in your shop, right? To keep them from bouncing between. DG: Yeah. And just just to be clear, I mean, what you have the the sort of take home from your reporting is not that these companies are doing something blatantly illegal. You're raising awareness for whether people kind of in this industry, gamblers, others, they should know how problem gamblers are being treated. And the question becomes now like, do we want to do something about it? Do we want to put pressure on policymakers to, you know, tighten regulations and so forth? There’s nothing, there's no— It's kind of th there's there's nothing unlawful clearly here. JP: Yeah, that's right. Look, we thought that there was a virtue of the you know, you were talking about at the top of the show how like, you know, sports betting ads are inescapable, right? Like you can't really engage with sports these days without my son is seven, right? And we were watching the Knicks the other night and the Celtics game. The Knicks are having a hard start, but it's okay, they'll turn it around. Anyway, the guys announcing the game are giving me the lines, like the FanDuel line. Like and my son was like, Whoa, what's you know, it's okay, but he's seven. And I think that a lot of people are sort of grappling with like, okay, we this g and now talk forget about it with prediction markets sort of adds a whole nother layer. We could talk about that, but there is, I think, this sense of like, my gosh, there's a lot of this. Is it too much? What's the right amount? We talk a lot about like a crisis of men in this industry in this country. We know from survey results that most sports betters, or you know, that I should say that many young men are active sports betters. So there are these sorts of concerns about consumer finance, public health, and advertisement culture. And when we were thinking about the story, we were sort of taking a step back. Like, do people really even know? What's it like on the app? Do you know, certainly like policymakers, regulators, there's a lot of concern that's sort of like generalized, but what is it actually like in the app? What does it look like? What can you do? What are the guardrails that exist? How easy are they to toggle on and off or circumvent or push through? So we thought there was sort of like a public service, not to get like too haughty about it, but like that there was sort of a virtue of just laying it out there. as there is this broader public conversation about like what we've unleashed, whether it's working, what parts could do better, et cetera, et cetera. But you're right, no, there was no this wasn't like a gotcha there was no like illegal I think actually probably some people in industry are sort of like, yeah, like yeah, that's the system. DG: That's exactly how it works. We're a business, and we try to balance the needs of our business, and do our best when we can to help problem gamblers. But yeah. JP: Yeah, so anyway, so yeah, you got you nailed it, man. Like that it is sort of the thing, but I was surprised at like I guess it comes down to sort of like a tolerance for recklessness. Like I rip pretty crazy, you know? And I didn't trigger according to DraftKings, like some of the more formal steps that they'll take in some cases, including like a manual review. You have an entire staff of 50 or something people in this responsible gaming department who sometimes will manually review an account. Not that that necessarily means they'll cut you off, but whatever. They, you know, a human sort of looking at it. And I didn't trigger that. And sort of late in the process, I came to appreciate that like there's a different tolerance level for recklessness, right? And the rules guiding that are basically influenced by industry. And whether or not that's the right balance or those thresholds are right or what the threshold of what the trigger warning should be, like that is a conversation that you're starting to see now in places like Louisiana and New York, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts. You know, the attorney general in New Jersey said something the other day. So I think that is the conversation that's starting to pop up. DG: Well, and as you said, I mean, you were gambling with, you know, your company's money for a journalistic enterprise. People are gambling with their own money and it has real human costs for their families, for their well being, which is one of the reasons that I think your reporting was so important. We are gonna hear a conversation coming up next on Sports in America with former NFL safety T.J. Ward. But Jake Pearson from ProPublica, what a window into online gambling and sports gambling these days. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. JP: Thanks for having me. [MUSIC] BROADCASTER: Well, the confetti was flying tonight for the Denver Broncos, in particular that fantastic defense that had a brilliant performance tonight and all season long. DG: As T.J. Ward watched the final seconds tick down in the wake of the Denver Broncos defensive master class in Super Bowl 50, you could forgive him for thinking of the doubters he encountered in his playing career. They were out in full force in the lead-up to this game, claiming the vaunted "No-Fly Zone" Denver secondary, led by Ward, would be overwhelmed by MVP Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers. T.J. WARD: Like, "How could the 'No-Fly' even compete with this team?" And that was all the noise we got. DG: Chirp, chirp, chirp. Never mind that defense wins championships or that the Broncos had their own pretty good quarterback in future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning. The narrative was that Newton could not be stopped. BROADCASTER 1: To me, the Carolina Panthers will win because they'll start fast and they'll force the Broncos to play catch-up. BROADCASTER 2: I say 27-16, Carolina by 11; I think they're a better team. BROADCASTER 3: Panthers 34-13, Cam wins MVP, and my bold prediction: Cam Newton, the first quarterback in Super Bowl history to rush for over 100 yards. DG: And Ward's unit took that personally. TW: A lot of guys on our defense really had a chip on our shoulder, right? DG: This would not be the first time T.J. Ward had to believe in himself to follow his dream of playing football professionally. He had to be his own cheerleader when he first started playing, standing all of 5 foot 2 and weighing a buck 25 soaking wet. He had the will himself to keep going when a horrific injury in high school derailed his dreams to play for a D1 program. And he had to trust his signature hard-hitting style of play when the team that drafted him let him walk, and he had to start over in Denver. But playing in college, let alone the pros, seemed like light years away when he was rolling in agony on the field in just the third game of his senior season in California. Today on Sports in America, T.J. Ward shows us the value of being overlooked, how expecting to win changes the outcome, and just how far betting on yourself can take you. I will say it's, I'm a diehard Steelers fan, so it's always funny talking t former NFL players who really hurt me at various points in my fandom, but I forgive you. TW: Yeah, I've been hurt enough by the Steelers being in Cleveland, so I think we're even. DG: I guess that's true, yeah, that's fair. Well, I would love to kind of step back a little bit. You were a high school star and then a really serious injury affected your kind of ability to land the way you might've expected in a college program. Could you take me back to that moment and what it meant and how you were dealing with it? TW: Yeah, yeah, I'm smiling now just because I overcame it, but definitely a difficult, difficult portion of my life. I didn't play much of my junior season. When I say I didn't play much, I mean, I didn't play at all (Laughs). But going into my senior year was like all my hopes and dreams wrapped up into that season, right? To get a scholarship and go on to play D1 football. And my first two games, you know the upside was tremendous. I had an interception in the first game, had an interception in the second game, and it was looking, the future was looking bright for me. And on that third game, I was going to give my third interception what it looked to be, but instead the receiver didn't see the ball thrown, and he ran right into me. And we actually collided, knees or something. He hit my knee in some form or fashion and split it pretty much, split the bone. I had a fracture in my bone right under my patellar tendon. And that ended my senior year. So that was devastating, really a crossroads in the decision I was making going forward of whether I was gonna try to play football further and how I would do that, right? What road I would take to pursue my football future. So I ended up taking the next year off because it was like a year and a half recovery from the injury, and I had to add some more credits to my transcript anyway. I ended up going to a JC for that first semester. I didn't play football; I just took classes. And then actually I just took classes that whole year. That second semester I went up to Oregon to Lane Community College and finished up that year taking classes because at Lane it had some transferable credits that would allow me to go to Oregon the following season and walk on. So that's what I did. And uh... DG: So you were facing the possibility of not playing football, but also kind of laying the groundwork, maybe to get to Oregon and walk on at that program, kind of keeping your options open. TW: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I didn't want to; it was my dad's plan, really. I didn't wanna use up any credits playing football at a JC, or not credits, but eligibility, because back then, once your clock started, it started at a JC. Whether it was D1 or D2 or whatever, once you started playing some form of college football, your clock began. It's not like now, where you could play six, seven, eight years of college football. It was; you had five years to play. All right, five to play, four or something like that. DG: Like that. Right. So what T.J. is referring to here is back in 2005 when he was a walk-on, not a recruit at Oregon. He had this strict window of five calendar years to play college football, and that could not be paused for any reason. There were penalties levied by the NCAA for transferring. If you changed schools, you had to sit out and burn a year of eligibility. The pressure was on to find the program that fit you perfectly so you could maximize recruitment visibility and your development with the best coaches and trainers. And as a walk-on, you didn't get the red carpet rolled out like the recruits did. So what's the experience like as a walk-on? TW: Ooh, man, it's not as luxurious as it is now. You hear some of these walk-ons getting paid, right? It's incredible, right, at Oregon. At least at Oregon, some of the walk-ons are getting paid to play NIL, but. DG: That was not the case in your day, huh? TW: And what? It was like a redheaded stepchild. You were on the team, but you couldn't. There's this thing that used to be called the training table where all the scholarship players ate dinner after practices, right? Dinner provided by the school and the team. Well, walk-ons couldn't participate in dinner. DG: What? You wouldn't be eating with the team? TW: Yeah, it was a violation of the NCAA protocol where walk-ons were not provided meals that scholarship players ate. So after practice, instead of going to the training table and eating with the rest of your team, you had to figure out a meal on your own. That was probably the worst part of being a walk-on, right? DG: I can imagine. TW: No, my teammates treated me great, coaches treated me great, but that was just one of the nuances of the rules back then that. You know, we couldn't participate in training tables. So me and the other walk-ons had to figure it out on our own; that sucked. All right, cause you would go straight from team meetings straight to a training table. And instead of going in the dining hall with everyone else, I'm out the door. See you guys later. DG: It's almost like they wanna make your journey even harder than it already is, not having a scholarship. TW: Man, right? Tell me about it. So, yeah, man, that was super tough. But outside of that, you know, Oregon, they treated me great as a walk-on. They treated me great. I mean, they provided every opportunity for me to earn my scholarship. DG: Did being overlooked and having that tougher journey help you in any ways? TW: Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely, I said being overlooked started in high school, in my freshman year, being a little undersized. But even before the injury, being undersized was probably like my biggest, I think, detriment to people outside myself and my family. Back then, it was more a physical gain than it is now. So even though I was a physical guy, I was just a little undersized. I was probably like 125 my freshman year. 5'2", 5'3.” DG: But 5'2," 125 is not screaming like future Super Bowl-winning safety TW: But it definitely helped me become a better player because having to be so technical, having to be smart and know the game and use things to my advantage, being undersized. When I did get my size, and my speed and my strength, and it was equal to my peers, I think that's when I really started to excel. Outside, having more injuries, but it definitely help me with confidence, right? If I could do this at being undersized, when I got to being even becoming bigger than my peers at my position, as far as weight and strength was concerned. I got up to like 190 my freshman year, and there was guys coming in at 165, 170, under 190 in college at the DB position, especially the corner. I was 185, 190 playing corner. If you weren't... 6'2", you weren't really weighing 190, 185 at corner, not in college at this time. So, and then I could always hit. That was one of my biggest attributes was being able to hit, being physical. So that definitely helped my confidence as well. [MUSIC] DG: This ferocious style of play was not lost on NFL scouts. Despite his patchy injury history, Cleveland wanted an enforcer to bolster their secondary and give them an edgy presence to hang with the other violent defenses in their division in Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Ward was considered something of a reach by other league front offices, but Cleveland felt they could plug him in right away. I want to get to your pro career because, like as a Pittsburgher, I love AFC North football. I love those rivalries. I love, hate some of the cities, like Baltimore's. I'm a fan of the city, and I hate the football teams. That's because I'm a Steelers fan. Cleveland and Pittsburgh, I feel like, I don't know, it's like siblings. When the Browns left, the Brown's left Cleveland. Like, Pittsburghers, our heart ached for Cleveland, even though it's like we wanna hate them and that rivalry, but it's just such good football. Like, what did it feel like getting to Cleveland? Like, what were your hopes and dreams for your relationship with that team and that city? TW: I thought we had some great players on our team. And it just, when you got there, it didn't turn out how I thought it could have, right? Eric Mangini was our head coach who, you know, I thought was a pretty good coach at the time, coming from the Belichick tree and the Patriots tree. So I'm like, okay, if we can, you know, do anything like the Patriots and their precision, and you know what they did when. In a league, I'm like, we're gonna be cool. And then we won five games the first. DG: Deflating, deflating, I can imagine. TW: This is not; it's very deflated because this is like not how it's supposed to play out, right? You know, I don't know what the chemistry at that time it took to win, but it was just like having good players is not enough. DG: What is the lesson like to avoid turnover for your franchise? You just gotta, you have to commit and say, we're gonna see this through with this group and this coach and go through tough times, but not just change everything over and over again? TW: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you have to, I think you have to put up with those investment years, right? Being in a lot of business now, I realize that, you know, there's a couple of years of investments that you may not see, you know, returning in your investment ROI, but you have to stay in it to see it through. And now if it gets beyond the four-year, three, four, five-year period, then, you know, it's time to start over. But I don't think a year or two, you know, without success is the time to abandon ship and start everything all over again. DG: In 2014, TJ was coming off a career year. He was named to his first Pro Bowl. He was the heart of an improving secondary and the fans, they loved him. He rightly anticipated a big payday and contract extension. Instead, the lines went silent when it came time to negotiate. The Browns cast him aside, and it stung. It sounds like you were genuinely hurt by the Browns when you left. I mean, how do you think back emotionally about that departure now? TW: The biggest thing for me when the Browns let me walk, it was like, obviously I was one of the best players every year on that team. And they didn't even offer me anything, which was kind of baffling. And it was like, damn, I came to work every day, worked my butt off, made All-Pro my last year, Pro Bowl my last year, All-Rookie Team there. Hands down, one of the top three players on this team every year I was on it. And I just felt it was a little disrespectful not to even offer me any type of contract. But other than that, the city was great, the fans were great, fans are still great. I get a lot of love from the Browns fans and that's probably what I love most about Cleveland was the people there. Now I've built some lifelong friendships with people at Cleveland that will never end. But as far as the management at the time, and I'm not sure who the GM was, my year leaving. But, you know, they offered, I guess, Donte Whitner, who played my same position, who was from Ohio, but it just didn't make sense to me, and it didn't make sense. DG: How different was the culture in Denver when you arrived there? TW: Oh man, it was night and day. It was night and day. DG: In what way? Like what makes it so dramatically different? TW: Just walking in the building, man, and the championships are there, right? They had the two championships at the time. Peyton Manning was there. And I tell everybody, like, our first meeting there, like, everybody spoke, you know, from the head coach to the trainers, you know, to John Elway, and then Peyton Manny, you know, spoke last, and I said a lot about him as a pro. You know, what he's done in this league as a leader, but it was just an expectation of winning, not we're trying to win. You know what I'm saying? We expect to win; we expect to win a Super Bowl at the end of this year. And Cleveland is more as like, we hope to win or trying to win; maybe we'll make the playoffs. DG: Mm-hmm. I mean that says something about swagger and what it means in sports like believing that you are winners, sounds like that can make a big difference if you carry yourself that way it actually like it comes to fruition on the field. TW: Definitely, I mean, it's all, you know, they say fake it till you make it, right? Even if you don't truly believe, act like you believe. Understand that this is the NFL. Teams go from the bottom to the top all the time. But you have to truly believe that you can do it. And I don't know; I don't think there was that belief in Cleveland, at least not when I was there. By some players— a lot of players, I mean, towards the end of my tenure there, the third, fourth year— started becoming regurgitating; this losing was really starting to take a toll on me. My first two years of being eyes wide open, being in the NFL, kind of being satisfied with that, were gone, and I wanted to get back to winning. I've never been a loser in my life. I've never been a part of any team that just continuously lost, like ever. So I don't think I've, no, I know I've ever had a losing record until I got to Cleveland in my football career. DG: That winning attitude, emanating off of Hall of Famers Elway and Manning, migrated across the line of scrimmage to the Denver secondary. T.J. Ward found a home for his relentless style in this historically dominant unit, setting the tone playing center field as Aqib Talib and Chris Harris Jr. locked down the corners. He used the disrespect from the Cleveland front office as nightmare fuel for opposing receivers. [MUSIC] BROADCASTER 1: Seventh-and-third attempt, and he's intercepted by Talib! BROADCASTER 2: To keep Pittsburgh from giving those big plays. Quick toss over to Wheaton, and he is hit right away by T.J. Ward. BROADCASTER 3: Here's Brady, rolling out, rolling and throwing. It's tipped in the air, and it's intercepted. DG: I want to ask you a little bit more about the "No-Fly Zone" in Denver, like you guys just, I mean, that was the ultimate in swagger, I feel like. Was that talent, was that chemistry, like what was the key to that group? TW: Man, look, those group of guys, the confidence was through the roof. I don't think I've played with a group of guys whose confidence was as high as ours. We were the most prepared. I've never played with a group of guys who came in so prepared for ball games. We came in with our own game plan at Wednesday's meeting before we even got the game plan from the coach. It's like, okay, we've been watching film since Sunday. After our game, if, you know, one of the teams we play plays Sunday night or Monday night, we're watching that whole game, then we're gonna bust the film down on Monday and Tuesday. And we gonna come in like, "Hey, did y'all see this? Did you guys see that?" Whoopie whoop. "Coach, I think we should do this." And then we get the game plan. And then once we get to the game plan, that was like, okay. Now we just fill the holes, and we do this out at practice. We fill the five points in between throughout the week, and then we make corrections and adjustments based on what we need to do. By Sunday, it was like we knew it like the back of our hand. DG: It's such a reminder; I don't think casual football fans realize the level of kind of academic energy that you guys are spending during the week with the X's and O's and the strategizing and all of that stuff, beyond what we see out on the field. TW: Yeah, man, this is the NFL. You can't just be out there relying on your athletic ability. That's out the window. You gotta be prepared. You gotta anticipate. You have to be familiar with what the other team does. DG: In January 2016, as the playoffs unfolded, it became increasingly clear that the unstoppable force of the one-loss Carolina Panthers with their MVP quarterback in Cam Newton were gonna meet the immovable object of T.J. Ward's Denver defense in the championship. The betting money was on the Panthers. T.J. and his teammates took notice. I think everybody remembers, you know, all the confetti from Super Bowl 50. What is the moment from that championship game for you that you feel like no one talks about that we've never heard about? TW: Oh man, I think it was probably the pregame. So pregame, it's like people everywhere. It's just like a blur of people. The sidelines are packed. You don't see a gap in anything. It's just people all around the field. And it's the Super Bowl. So it's just a— DG: Is that good, or is that a distraction from, like, focusing on the? TW: It can be a distraction. So, you know, usually normal games, you may see an ex-teammate or a friend or something or go over and speak to them and, hey, how's the wife and kids, whatever, how you doing? But this game, and I knew it was going to be different because some of the Carolina Panthers were trying to talk to us while we were, because we split the field. So, you know, our backs are like this on the 50. Like, D.B.'s right here, some of the Carolina Panthers' offense or whatever. DG: And they're trying to, like, talk smack to you? [MUSIC] TW: Pat and go. I was like, "Hey man, like what's up guys?" Right now, it was like, nah, we not talking to none of y'all. And Aqib, he came over, "Man, get that friendly [EXPLETIVE] out of here. We ain't talking to none of y'all. I don't care, these ex-teammates, nothing. We not talking." And that was kind of how we went amongst that pregame. It was like we were here to do one thing before this whistle even blows, like. We've gotten all this from the media about how good the Panthers are, and Cam Newton, who is this league MVP, and offense is what they did against the Legion of Doom in the NFC Championship, just blew them up. DG: Love that kind of stuff, right? TW: Love it. They were just feeding right into our fire, just throwing wood right on the fire. So that was, you know, that was the position we held most of the year; going into almost every game, we were probably underdogs. So a lot of guys on our defense really had a chip on our shoulder. Right, and that's just kind of how we motivated ourselves and motivated each other and became great at the end of the day. BROADCASTER: Newton, now in the middle, and it is intercepted by T.J. Ward, and the Denver defense saves it at the end. DG: The "No-Fly Zone" won the day in that Super Bowl, but TJ had to evolve his approach throughout his career in a rapidly changing league. Football fans, I mean, they often grapple with their love-hate relationship with big hits. NFL Films used to make best-selling compilations of bone-crushing collisions. Glorified violence on the field was big business. T.J. Ward made his living delivering those very blows. Early on, he doled out this punishment with an undersized frame, and fans cheered him for it. Then, with brain researchers learning more about the dangers of CTE, new "defenseless receiver" rules were enacted. High hits were abolished. TJ had to adapt to all this in a hurry. You've mentioned a few times what a physical player you were. Obviously, you lived through some major rule changes in the NFL to protect player safety. I wonder, like, do you think it's even the same game anymore for someone like in the safety position like you? TW: Yeah, I do. I do because I had to adjust mid-career. I had to adjust in the middle of my third or fourth year of being in the league. So it's definitely— they're capable now. They're doing this in college now. You can't; you get thrown out of the game in college. It's even worse, right? You might get a flag and a fine in the League, but in college, you can't play anymore. Your game is over, which is a terrible rule, I may say. But it's definitely adjustable, man. You just gotta aim lower. You gotta aim lower, like, I was physical in a lot of ways. All my hits, you know, didn't necessarily come as blindside shots, right? I hit guys running with the football. You know, I tackled strong. When I hit you, you went straight down. It was no wrestling. Or I flipped you, right. I'm gonna hit you in your quad, hit you on your knee, and you're gonna flip. I get off of blocks; receivers trying to crack me. I'ma bring the contact to them, and I'm gonna throw them out my way. Physicality at the safety position is not just cracking a guy on a slant, right? It's not just taking somebody who's not looking, taking his head off, right. The physical is all around games. Like I used to go, you know, helmet to helmet with guards and tight ends and, you know, finding guys in a hole and hitting them; I like to say face to face, like, that's a physical safety. A physical safety is not somebody that just hits somebody when he's not looking, man. You gotta be physical all the way around. You gotta be physical in the pass game, in the blocking game, in the run game. And you gotta have guys that don't wanna block you. That's being physical, right? You have to get around blocks. You have to blow blockers up in the hole and don't lose any ground. It's more than just big hits that make you a physical player. DG: But how hard was the adjustment? TW: It wasn't hard. I mean, it really wasn't. I just lowered my target points. After I got a consecutive amount of fines, I think it was like three in a row, and they got bigger and bigger every time. I was like, nah. DG: It's probably the league's point. Like we're going to keep making these bigger unless you adjust your attack point. TW: Then you become a repeat offender, and now they wanna take you, like, suspend you. And game check is not a little check, right? That is somebody's yearly earnings sometimes. So it just, you just have to adjust on the fly, which really wasn't hard. I didn't get any fines when I said, look, I'm changing this, and I'm just gonna start hitting guys low. I didn't get any more fines. Like, it was pretty much done for me on that end. DG: Are offensive players, you know, grateful? Are they like, this is better for our health, this protects us from big hits? Or are some of them in private conversations like, oh, I miss the days when there could be more physicality and brutal hits. TW: Yeah, I think they would definitely rather get a concussion than a torn ligament or something like that. But at the end of the day, for your lifetime longevity, I think it's better off. I hate to say it, but I think it's better off, maybe. But you know what? Those injuries are seldom in those situations. You don't see them all the time. You see more injuries from ligaments and stuff like from horse collar tackles and things like that. There's really not guys getting hit low in those type of, you know, abrupt, you know, passing plays. Like even like when I hit Gronk low, that one toward the ACL, that was just kind of like a freak thing. His leg was coming down at the same time I was coming, but you really don't see too many ligament injuries from those. DG: When you nearly end someone's career, how hard is that for you? Like, are there guilt emotions or, like, how do you process that? TW: Not in the moment. I'll be lying to say if, you know, not in the moment, but there is sometimes, as a competitor, you know, it's like, ah, man. You hate to see guys get hurt. Like, you know, I've been hurt. I've had three knee surgeries; you now understand the journey of coming back from an injury right not only physically but mentally, emotionally, it is a lot to deal with so the empathy is definitely there. But as a competitor, we all have a job to do. Even the guys that are injured, they understand from the assailant, from the causer of the injury, right? He has a job to do, I have a job to do, and you have to respect it, right. You have to have empathy on both sides because we're all in it. We're all crossing these white lines together, right, and it is what it is. We know the brutality of this game. We all have families to feed. Now if it's a cheap shot, that's different. Right, if it's something that's laid, that's something, you know, a guy is tied up, you come and just shoot for his knee while he's blocking, while he is engaged, you know, something cheap, a hit in the back, that's completely different. There's no empathy for that. There's no respect for those types of plays. But if it is something within the rules of the game, a bang-bang play, it's part of the game. DG: In some ways, life for TJ after a prolific career in the NFL has grappled with that tension between the excitement around the brutality of the game and rigorously protecting young players. He's the host of a show where he breaks down film and evaluates defenses called, perhaps with a wink, the "Safety First Show." He hosts free football camps designed to remove the financial barriers that keep families out of the games. And he helps college-aged athletes navigate Name, Image, and Likeness deals. His project with the highest stakes? That would be raising a son. Has anything about retirement been harder than you expected it to be? TW: I think the only thing that's been harder is idle time and finding something that I'm as passionate about as I was football, which may never happen, which may never happen but something that you at least enjoy and give passion to, right? My son is one of my passion projects; I'll do anything for my son, just watching him grow. You know, instilling wisdom and just things in him that are gonna make him a better child, a better man growing up. That is my passion, right? I'm in business, I have a sports agency, it's Player Above Sports; it's on this hat. Giving that also to my clients, right. Whether it's high school guys or college guys going to the league, you know, and instilling what happens along the road in this career, the ups and downs that you may deal with, things on the field, things off the field, things in business, creating, all those things I'm passionate about, giving back. I have a nonprofit, Ward Boy Project, very passionate about. DG: That's the football academy for kids? TW: It is a mentorship, creating access and avenues for kids that, you know, normally wouldn't get those opportunities, right? So within our program, our project, we call it, we have our mentorship program, which is called the DRAW program. We have our football camps. We have scholarships that we provide to private schools in the Bay Area. So those are all the resources and the avenues that we like to provide, right. With my podcast, "Safety First," it's talking about the game. That's how I stay in the game, is talking about the game. And then also doing interviews with people in other professions. Because a lot of times, success stories are very similar, right? The journey, the struggle, the pitfalls— how did you overcome those things? So everyone that's listening is not gonna be a pro football player. But there are other things you can do in life. But just because you choose a different path doesn't mean that you won't be coming in and running into these same issues. DG: I'll finish by asking you the question you kind of brought up. How do you want to be remembered when all is said and done? TW: Oh, man. I want to be remembered as someone that played the game with 100% effort, right? Very versatile player, you know, could do whatever you ask me. Great teammate. That's how I want be remembered and person that was always willing to, you know, give information to the younger guys, right, was always helpful in the locker room. But you know just a passionate, I think a passionate and, you know, diligent teammate player. Professional for sure. DG: Well, T.J., thanks for spending time with me. TW: Oh, no problem. Thanks for having me. It's great. That went by fast. [MUSIC] DG: Next time on Sports in America, a women's basketball team from the small College of Biblical Studies made national news two years ago when they lost a game by 141 points. That set an NCAA record for the highest margin of defeat. SASHA MARTINS: It hurt to hear how people were talking about the College of Biblical Studies, and they were like, you know, "Where was God then?" DG: This loss threatened to define the team forever. That is, unless someone stepped in to make sure that didn't happen. SM: When I heard about it, I felt like this is a place that I needed to be because my purpose was to change the athletics program around here. DG: After the biggest loss in NCAA history, could new coach Sasha Martins take ownership of this team and actually turn things around? SM: That was the day that I saw my girls really flip a switch. DG: That's next time on Sports in America. This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Greene. Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler. Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa. Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our theme music is composed by Emma Munger. Our talent booker is Britt Kahn. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling. Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeartRadio app, you know, wherever you get your podcasts. And we also wanna hear from you. How about you drop us a line? You can write us at sportsinamerica@whyy.org. That’s sportsinamerica@whyy.org. Thanks, everyone. And we will see you next time for Sports in America.