Montee Ball shed extra joyful tears in 2025 than in some other 12 months in his life. Greater than his dynamite years at Wisconsin. Or as a Denver Broncos working again.
That 12 months, on Jan. 15, Ball obtained a small congratulatory card. He set it down on the carpet and snapped a photograph. It learn: “Of the 5.78 million who’ve performed and coached in school soccer since 1869, only one,093 gamers and 233 coaches have been inducted into the School Soccer Corridor of Fame. Welcome to the membership, Montee!”
Then, in September, 9 months later, Ball obtained discover he was additionally going to be inducted into the Rose Bowl Corridor of Fame on New Yr’s Day 2026.
“It means extra to me,” Ball stated, “due to the autumn.”
Ball stated there was “no room for transparency” in soccer when he was taking part in. (Courtesy of Ball)
It’s the chilly of the concrete ground he vows by no means to neglect. It despatched a sudden shiver up his backbone, from the soles of his naked toes straight into his still-intoxicated thoughts.
Within the early-morning hours of Feb. 5, 2016, the record-setting former Wisconsin star working again was being processed right into a jail in Madison, Wis., after a bodily altercation with an ex-partner in a lodge led to his arrest.
The chilly concrete shocked his system. It’s the place he went nose to nose with all-time low, a gathering a number of years overdue after years of alcoholism. What eats at him nonetheless, all these years later, is how he responded within the altercation. He pushed his ex-partner, who hit a desk and lower her leg.
“I’m not the sufferer,” he stated. “I acted like a coward. And I walked away a coward.”
4 months earlier than that arrest, Ball obtained a cellphone name from Broncos staff president John Elway. The NFL Corridor of Famer, who first known as Ball in 2013 to draft him, was now calling to chop him. Elway had informed him that his alcohol dependency, the frequenting of bars throughout city each week, gave the group no different selection however to maneuver on.
“I used to be in denial,” Ball stated, “and I didn’t consider any of it till my toes touched the ground of that jail.”
Two days after being arrested, the TV contained in the jail aired Tremendous Bowl 50. Ball spent your entire weekend at Dane County Jail. The Broncos, the staff he had grown up dreaming of taking part in for sooner or later, the staff that finally drafted him, had been overwhelming the Carolina Panthers en path to victory.
Simply two years prior, Ball was within the Broncos backfield towards the Seattle Seahawks in Tremendous Bowl 48. Now he was in a distinct shade of blue, in a crowded jail cell sharing a rest room, with a water fountain overflowing with spit and bile, with nothing however his errors, his alcoholism and his fragile, now-fractured ego crowding his thoughts.
“Your actions all the time lead you to the place they’re going to steer you — and so they’re your actions,” Ball stated.
Now, greater than 10 years later, Ball is a self-described open e-book. He has no different selection. It’s what bought him away from the bottle, away from the depressing particular person he’d grow to be drunk, and what has led him to the place he’s right this moment — again within the Denver space, working his personal nonprofit group designed to teach coaches, directors and fogeys on psychological well being and habit teaching applications for younger athletes.
Ball, 35, can also be a board member of 5280 Excessive College, a project-based studying faculty for teenagers in restoration from substance abuse. He’s within the technique of lobbying for a invoice on the Colorado State Capitol that will require youth coaches to take psychological well being coaching programs. His nonprofit, the Sport Plan Life Basis, is spearheading an occasion targeted on athlete psychological well being on Sunday, March 8, in Broomfield, Colo.
The group plans to start out implementing these eight-hour occasions quarterly annually. They’re going to be free to whoever needs to take part, Ball stated, and so they’re scheduled to be funded solely by his basis.
“For individuals in restoration — and actually all people, too — the perfect medication is service,” Ball stated. “Giving again not directly, someway.”
Reasonably than level fingers elsewhere, Ball took accountability and stated that essential step in restoration helped lead him down the trail towards being an outlet for others.
School soccer followers keep in mind Ball from his years because the centerpiece of Wisconsin’s always-punishing speeding assault. Ball rushed for five,140 yards as a Badger — third all-time at school historical past — and in 2011 matched Barry Sanders’ NCAA single-season file for 39 touchdowns. He’s the one participant within the historical past of the Rose Bowl to hurry for 100 yards in three consecutive appearances.
As usually as Ball might make blitzing linebackers miss with a sudden bounce lower or bulldoze a security down the sphere, there was no solution to shirk the bouts of hysteria that led him to depend on alcohol. Jameson whiskey, he stated, calmed these spells of hysteria that usually percolated as soon as he bought to school.
That 2011 season — a historic one on the sphere — was considered one of his worst off the sphere.
He felt there was no room for transparency for what he was going by within the tradition of soccer. He feared shedding his spot on the high. Greater than something, he feared exposing his anxieties and searching weak. Alcohol fed the ballooning ego that, for each shot, quelled the fixed uneasiness he felt when sober. Which is why within the decade since his life modified in 2016, he has been working to implement guardrails for coaches and fogeys to choose up on warning indicators for his or her student-athletes as they grow old.
It pains considered one of Ball’s former teammates, Wisconsin fullback Bradie Ewing, to say it now, however he by no means observed a crimson flag till Ball’s collection of arrests was made public. “He did a very good job of separating these two elements of his life,” Ewing stated. Ball’s habit to alcohol grew to become so pervasive that he consciously lower meals out of his weight loss program, figuring out he was going to be ingesting the energy he wanted to stay at a sure weight.
“Because the starting of time, the operate of sports activities has been to entertain individuals,” stated Dr. Mark Allen, a sports activities psychiatrist primarily based in Denver who has achieved work with the Broncos, the Los Angeles Dodgers {and professional} wrestlers within the WWE. “And because of this, there’s a way the place you need these athletes to really be superheroes, and also you neglect they’re truly human beings off the sphere.”
Allen, who’s writing a e-book with Ball about his journey, stated there are at the moment greater than 25 athlete psychological well being nonprofit organizations nationwide. The pattern of serving to athletes, no matter age, perceive their anxieties or triggers is healthier than it ever has been. However beginning on the youth stage, he says, is the proper “long-term play” since athletes who’re empowered to talk up from a younger age will develop up extra more likely to really feel snug being clear.
It’s going to all the time make Ball surprise how issues may’ve turned out otherwise for him if he felt he might’ve voiced his anxieties at such a younger age, relatively than burying them deep inside. It’s why he needs his personal story to have the ability to make clear how rapidly issues can tumble, irrespective of the place you might be in life.
Throughout his time as an everyday within the Broncos backfield, he was spending almost $1,000 each two weeks on the liquor retailer close to his dwelling. The affinity for whiskey shifted to Everclear and Patrón tequila, which he was consuming as a lot as 4 to 5 nights every week in the course of the season.
One follow, Ball jogged into the huddle and remembered Peyton Manning shaking his head as he acknowledged the reek of alcohol from the night time earlier than.
The habit that overpowered his thoughts for thus lengthy wasn’t defeated that weekend in jail. Two months later, he violated his parole by being caught in a bar in Whitewater, Wis., and was arrested once more that April. Former teammates puzzled about Ball’s future. Former Broncos working again CJ Anderson posted on social media, “Praying 4 my brother MB man” with three prayer hand emojis.
Following his arrest in February 2016, a former girlfriend accused Ball of assault in 2014. In August 2016, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail and pleaded responsible to disorderly conduct and battery for his position in each home disputes. Ball additionally served 18 months of probation.
His final drink was in June 2016. Within the decade since, he’s labored as a neighborhood outreach specialist in Madison. He lived in a Finest Western for 9 months, serving to the unhoused neighborhood in the course of the top of the COVID-19 pandemic. After shifting again to Colorado in 2022, he labored as an account supervisor for Sandstone Care, which offers substance abuse and psychological well being therapy in Colorado, Maryland and Virginia.
Now his objective is to have greater than 1,000 coaches and directors attend the psychological well being seminar sponsored by his nonprofit over the subsequent three years.
“It’s superb how he’s keen to share his story to assist not solely himself, however hopefully others which have already gone by one thing like this or are going by one thing like this,” Ewing stated.
One among Ball’s go-to soccer analogies is sensible contemplating the peak of his stardom meant avoiding coughing up the ball in any respect prices. However he tells everybody he meets battling habit that after you fumble, you’ll be able to nonetheless attain down and decide the ball again up.
“I wish to assume I’m a fairly good particular person, however goodness gracious, habit can simply blind you, man,” he stated. “I beat the percentages.”
