6 Years Ago He Lied His Way Into An NFL Tryout
I Can’t Believe He’s Still At It!
Core Idea:
Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
Romans 5:3-4
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to ‘suffer’ in its most basic form means: to be forced to endure.
And while we might not like it we all know deep down that being forced to endure builds every kind of strength.
If you wanna get stronger physically, force your muscles to endure more weight.
If you wanna get stronger mentally or spiritually, keep living. As long as you're breathing, you're technically forced to endure more life.
One aspect of living a good life is having a worthwhile pursuit. But once you accomplish one major goal, it won’t be long before that now-empty void has to be filled with something else. But you can’t fill it with something shallow like chasing material things, or drugs for the sake of escaping.
We’re designed to be pursuing.
We’re designed to be fruitful.
This is why we desire to accomplish things. Without that desire, we wouldn't continue our pursuits through struggles, and we would never make it out of the dormant seasons to once again produce fruit.
Also, without that desire, we wouldn’t choose the right struggles. We wouldn't choose the struggles that move us forward and transform us into the person we were always meant to be.
Today’s Football Story
Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi had many goals in life, many of which he never accomplished. The pain of that failure has been a part of his suffering, but through that, he's developed endurance, character, and guess what he produces for others now…HOPE. (Remember the verse at the beginning.)
He’s been cut and humiliated, bro he’s been homeless. But through his struggle, he’s become more than he ever imagined. Everybody loves a come-up story, and that principle’s been laid out for thousands of years.
The prelude to Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi’s story might have started with a dream, but the real story aint start until he took those first, meaningful steps toward his goals.
His dream was to become a pro basketball player, but coming out of high school, my dude didn’t get one offer. So he goes to a JUCO called Mesa Community College and tries to walk on to the basketball team, but he didn’t make the squad.
So right off the bat, he’s been forced to endure failure 2 times in this story. But if he had hung his head, he wouldn’t have seen the opportunity open up; he would have walked right past the sign that said “Track and Field Tryouts”.
So he makes the track team, but in the middle of the season, the dude is involved in a car accident. Due to an injury he sustained in that wreck, he now has to miss the remainder of the Track season. Another door slammed shut, and all of a sudden, another dream dies.
But when one door closes, another one opens, and he says Hey, there is one more sport I can try.
So Damon gets wind of a football tryout at Phoenix College and I know what you thinking. My boy was so desperate to make a sports team that he fell for a fake tryout with an online-only school? No, you're thinking bout the University of Phoenix, I’m talking bout Phoneix College, a JUCO in Arizona.
Damon goes to the tryout and feels he did pretty well, but unfortunately, he never even got a callback. They ghosted my boy! (Or at least they tried to.)
No call back is generally taken as a no, but Damon said, Well bro, they gotta call me to tell me no. Since I didn’t get a call, I didn’t get a no, so I’ll just roll up to the first day of practice.
Throughout that whole summer, he showed up to every workout. He made it his mission to finish first in all the sprints, which helped him gain the coach's attention.
When the coaches started discussing players for the final roster, they didn’t even think to ask who invited the kid who always works hard and finishes first in the sprints. None of that mattered now; they added him to the roster.
So, taking those first steps towards his goal of playing pro basketball and continuing to move forward even when things got hard, Damon now found himself on a football team, and given what it took to get there, there was no looking back.
He immediately made an impact on special teams as they turned him loose on the JUCO world.
He gained 1200 kick return yards in his very first season
and was named Juco All-American for his efforts.
The next year, he improved to 1278 yards,
which was the most in the nation.
He also had 4 kick return touchdowns
and 400 punt return yards.
It finally felt like he’d identified his mission and was moving towards that in a meaningful way, but after 2 years of JUCO, that’s the end of the line, unless a D1 school offers you a scholarship. Unfortunately for Damon, no D1 schools were interested in the Juco All-American.
So by this point, most people would have already quit. They would have quit like 2 or 3 failures ago. But Damon kept enduring and therefore building endurance, resilience, character, and dreams that are harder to kill. His options were running out, but he still had hope.
So he uses his beginner credit to apply for a credit card at the bank. He then maxes it out, paying for trips to different ‘Big Time Colleges’, in an attempt to get an opportunity with a team.
He walks in with his film and tries to meet with anybody he can, and hopes that that will turn into something more. This is the definition of a full-court shot, and like most full-court shots, my boy didn’t hit nothing!
He then does the same thing with NFL teams. Tryna walk in there and get somebody to watch his film and hopefully give him a workout. Obviously, that didn’t work, but my guy’s spirit is somehow still not broken.
He finds out about a CFL tryout here in the States, only to get there and realize it’s just a formality. He’s told they hardly ever actually sign anybody; the day he tried out WOULD NOT be the exception.
Then he says to himself I know I can play arena ball. Tries out for that and still doesn’t make it! When your goal is the NFL and you can’t even make an arena ball team, surely this has got to be the time when my boy could no longer endure the suffering of this failure. It wasn’t gonna work, give it up dog.
He wanted to play in the NBA, but could not make the JUCO basketball team.
Lost his spot on the JUCO track team.
Finally excelled in JUCO football.
But was then rejected by every D1 school.
The NFL obviously didn’t give him the time of day.
And now he can’t even make it in arena ball bro.
The only other option my boy had was flag football, so that’s exactly what he did.
In life, things often don’t go as we planned, but we still experience things that we couldn’t possibly plan.
Even as locked in and committed as Damon was, it’s hard for me to believe that he thought playing flag football would be the next step to an NFL roster. Logically, that doesn’t make any sense, but also sure he didn’t plan to not make the basketball team, lose his spot on the track team, and become an All-American in football.
We don’t get to see the entire path; all we see is the next 2 or 3 steps. If we never take those steps, then we end up stuck, but when we do, we open the path of destiny.
Damon went down the hierarchy from most to least likely path to the league. In any sain human plan he would now have to climb back up that ladder the same way he had just climbed down. But as it would turn out, this random Flag Football team was somehow his gateway to the NFL.
Here’s what happened:
So one of the flag football players that Damon played with had a friend who had a friend who heard about this secret tryout the Cleveland Browns were holding. It was an invitation-only tryout in Miami. The whole thing had just kind of come up in casual conversation. It’s just a dream to these guys, but Damon has become a person who takes action. He’s been rejected so much that rejection doesn't faze him; all he sees is an opportunity.
He pokes and prods, trying to get the address to the tryout, but the guy really doesn’t want to give it to him because it’s invite-only. But with Damon, we're talking about a guy with a different level of determination, so eventually, he gets the address out of the guy, and as he's walking off, the dude says, “Look man, since you're going up there, look for a guy named Alonzo Highsmith.
Okay, cool, he now had a little bit of information. So Damon goes and he googles Alonzo Highsmith, finds out that he's the Vice President of Player Personnel for the Browns. He burns an image of what Alonzo looks like in his brain finds out a couple of things about him. He's preparing to pretend that he knows this man. When he made it to the workout, he was met with confusion. But after he convincingly says he was invited by Mr. Highsmith, he’s let into the facility. He actually got in!
Then wisely, he immediately searched for Alonzo, found him, and went up to introduce himself. Alonso is impressed that this person, whom he does not know, has finessed his way into this workout. He's like, if this dude did all of this to get here let's let's at least see what he's got. I mean, is letting one more person try out really gonna hurt?
Now, if Damon really did his research, he would have seen that Alonso's son actually attended the same school that Damon attended. Alonzo Highsmith Jr attended Phoenix College about six years before Damon ever got there. Alonzo Highsmith Jr. would later try to make it into the NFL as a free agent. So, if Damon really did his research, he would have been smart to make Alonso aware of the similarities between himself and Alonzo Highsmith Jr. That way, Alonzo would have seen some of his son in Damon. And that could be the reason he allowed him to stick around for the workout.
When Damon lined up for the 40-yard dash, which is a make-or-break drill in many of these cases since teams can't teach speed, the former track athlete ran a 4.38, which was faster than the times of all but five wide receivers in the 2019 NFL Draft. That was big, and if anything was gonna swing this thing into his favor, that was it. The workout ended like all the others. When it was over, Damon left and made sure his phone ringer was turned all the way up.
Every other tryout he'd ever been to, from JUCO Basketball, to JUCO Football, to CFL, to Arena ball… Every other tryout, he never got a callback. But 30 minutes later, after this NFL tryout, the phone rang, and it was the guy who he was just pretending to know! Alonzo Highsmith was calling his phone for real now!
Alonzo told Damon he had been invited to the official tryout all the way in Cleveland, Ohio. The tryout would be held one week later, which was… mostly good news. Except for the fact that Damon had run out of money and could barely get to Cleveland. Not to mention, when he got there, he knew he would have nowhere to stay.
But if you remember the verse from the beginning:
we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
Romans 5:3-4
Damon’s suffering had built his endurance and character to the point that he felt nothing on this Earth could stop him.
So he spent his last little money to get to Cleveland. When he got there, he slept outside. Not outside in a car, mind you, outside outside. Check out this quote from Damon himself.
He basically just had to thug it for a week until the tryout rolled around. And despite his extremely tough living conditions, when the tryout came, he was primed and ready.
Damon had somehow scraped his way up from absolutely nothing. He scraped and clawed for every opportunity he got, and after all the ups and downs on this crazy journey, he was finally offered a free-agent contract.
But this is NOT where Damon’s story ends…
Not Where The Story Ends
A couple of months later, people worldwide would hear about Damon’s story for the very first time, when the most famous WR in the world at the time (Odell Beckham Jr) loaned Damon a pair of custom cleats for a preseason game.
Wearing OBJ’s cleats, Damon took a punt return 86 yards for a TD. He really finagled this out of eavesdropping on a conversation at flag football practice… Always remember that when you feel you haven’t had any opportunity.
Now, a quote I used to use all the time was by an old-time filmmaker named Orson Welles. To paraphrase, it says, “If you want a happy ending, that depends on where you stop the story.”
Now, when I first told this story 6 years ago, the TD wearing OBJ’s cleats hadn’t even happened yet. If you roll the credits here, you get a fairy tale ending, but you miss the real truth about life.
That truth is that the things we pursue are meant to reposition and transform us, not to reposition and recline us. The destination, unless God forbid your life ends that day, is more of a checkpoint than a final resting place.
A couple of months after this unbelievable moment, which was the culmination of years of failure, struggle, and perseverance. Damon got cut by the Browns ending his fairytale run. Now, imagine if we stopped the story there. Instead of the fairytale feel we got stopping the story after the TD, we now get the cold feeling of a sobering reality. The thing is, though, neither of these feelings is the end; they're both unavoidable scenes in a really long movie. As the cameras keep rolling, the action slowly picks back up when Damon starts pursuing once again. He goes through a similar cycle to the one he endured before. A few small wins, a whole lotta losses, and a never-say-die attitude that allows him to grow from experiences that would tear most other people down.
Let’s check out this timeline.
In 2019, he got cut by the Browns.
Later that same year, he got drafted into the XFL.
In March 2020 was placed on IR and waived.
In October 2020, he signed with the Spring League,
but that’s a league where the players don’t make money.
They have to pay just to play in that league.
So Damon went from looking to support himself via football, to having to get another job to support his football via some other job.
In September 2021, he signed with the CFL but never played in a regular-season game and was eventually cut.
In 2022, he signed with Major League Football, but that league folded before they made it out of training camp.
In 2023, Damon goes to Italy and signs with the Legnano Frogs of the Italian Football League.
In 2024, he scored his first professional TD, which was only the start of what he would do next.
He went on to lead the IFL in receptions, yards, and receiving TDs.
He was named the IFL Offensive Player of the year for 2024.
Later in 2024, he didn’t sign back with the IFL, which seems a little shocking, seeing as how he finally found some success.
But based on this quote, I know exactly what happened:
The Arlington Renegades is a UFL, which is the most recent league that Damon signed with.
My man finally got offered some decent money to play the game he loves.
Damon deals with some type of struggle in every league he joins. This time, he got injured during training camp. He was activated halfway through the season but never actually ended up recording any stats.
The purpose of this story (in the way I’ve told it today) isn’t to wow you with a “satisfying” ending. The purpose of this story is to illustrate real life, where one episode always leads into the next.
More often than not, life moves like a football game, where you make a good play and celebrate for a moment, but still have to line up for the next snap. You might struggle for the next few series before you make another play worthy of celebration.
And if I asked most of yall would probably agree with that take.
But for some reason, we still tend to move as if life works like a highlight tape, with all the bad plays and down times edited out. We love to give this false presentation to the rest of the world. So we compare our REAL film session to a person who is only uploading highlights.
Great content as usual.
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