Nate Ebner: From Junkyard to Super Bowl
About this episode
Nate Ebner shares his journey from working in a junkyard to achieving success in professional sports, shaped by personal tragedy and resilience.
Nate Ebner grew up between two worlds. School weeks in Columbus, and weekends and summers in Springfield, Ohio, working the family junkyard with his father Jeff. Lifting off railroad-tie dumbbells they welded themselves. Chasing robbers through the yard on Sunday mornings. Jeff Ebner was the kind of man who kept a notebook of every workout his son ever did, so they could look back together at what the work had built. He was also the kind of man who made everything an experience worth having. Nate remembers that time more clearly than he remembers most of high school. The day before Nate decided to walk onto the Ohio State football team, he had the best conversation of his life with his dad. The next day, Jeff was murdered at the junkyard. Nate was 19. He dropped out of school and spent weeks in the dark, sitting near the weights they had built together, close to something he couldn't have come back from. Then his mom walked upstairs and said a few sentences that changed the entire direction of his life. What followed is one of the more remarkable athletic careers of the last two decades. A walk-on at Ohio State under Jim Tressel. A sixth-round draft pick of Bill Belichick's New…
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