David HaleESPN Writer8 minute read
CLEMSON, SC — Nick Eason was lacing up a pair of cleats he had borrowed from Clemson’s equipment manager minutes before 5 a.m. when Ruke Orhorhoro first spotted his trainer. Not that it was a shock to see Eason there. Clemson’s defensive tackles coach had promised to follow the team’s mat drills this offseason, but Orhorhoro had always been skeptical. Eason is 42, 12 years after his last NFL game, and until recently weighed 400 pounds.
“I was confused,” Orhorhoro said. “I was like, ‘What is this cat doing?’ Coaches don’t do mat exercises, it just doesn’t happen.
Mat exercises are a staple of Clemson’s off-season conditioning, a gauntlet of high-intensity progressive workouts lasting about five minutes each – rope drills, agility drills, bear crawls, flips, tumbling, sled work, footwork drills. It’s as much a mental challenge as it is a physical one, something Orhorhoro paradoxically says, “has nothing to do with football but also everything to do with football”.
When other players arrived, Eason’s presence was greeted with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief.
“They were taking side bets on how long I would last,” said Eason, who will lead one of Clemson’s units in their intra-squad spring game on Saturday.
But Eason had no intention of quitting. As he saw it, there were three ways it ended: he passed out, he died, or he ended.
Since joining Clemson in January 2022, Eason’s approach to work has been immersive. His first conversation with Orhorhoro was a two-hour therapy session, an unfolding of Eason’s own life story as a way to get to know one of his newest players. He invites his linemen to his house for dinner. He takes them to church with him on Sundays. And he’s always believed he should never ask his players for anything he’s not prepared to ask himself.
No one expected this engagement to include mat exercises, but Eason was determined. He went through the first exercise, then the second and the third and continued. He finished every station, often leading the pack.
“He’s going to do everything he can to show that nothing is impossible if you put in the work,” defensive tackle Tyler Davis said. “It was amazing.”
Eason wasn’t surprised though.
Fifteen months ago, Eason came to Clemson overweight, depressed and lost. He is now trying to regain a better balance, and the mat exercises were really just a benchmark, a chance to check his progress and gauge how far he still had to go.
He has lost 62 pounds over the past year. He has not eaten meat or dairy products for seven months. He pulled himself out of the darkest chapter of his life and found hope with his alma mater, not by trying to regain his youth, but by finding a better balance in his life.
“I look at old photos, and sometimes that’s the worst thing to do,” Eason said. “But I’m looking at the 42-year-old version of myself now, and it’s still not where I want it to be, but I didn’t get here overnight and it’s not going to be fixed du overnight. It takes a lot of patience and keeping the right perspective on the little things I’ve done just by making the effort to get up every day and keep trying.”
BACK HOME IN Georgia, food is the connective tissue that holds people together.
“When I come home it’s, ‘Come home and let’s eat,'” Eason said. “Go to church and let’s eat. Saturday in the park and let’s eat.”
But food took its toll on Eason’s family. Almost all of his relatives were overweight. Two uncles died in their early fifties. Those who survived longer often found themselves on dialysis, their bodies breaking down so drastically that their later years lacked joy. Eason remembers a time playing with the Pittsburgh Steelers when a coach asked a question: How many 80-year-old 300-pounders did he know? Eason said he didn’t know of any.
“Good,” said the coach. “They are all dead.”
Food couldn’t be the centerpiece of Eason’s existence if he was to live a long and happy life, but his relationship with food was complicated.
He is, he says, “an emotion eater”, and when times get tough, he turns to the things that have always comforted him.
Double cheeseburgers.
Little Debbies.
Oreos.
Thanks to COVID-19, Eason has actually found a healthy rhythm. He ate well. He exercised. He cut. But in the summer of 2021, things started to go downhill.
Eason was a popular player at Clemson during his college years, but had only stayed in regular contact with a few former teammates over the years. His closest friend at the time was Altroy Bodrick, a former Tigers linebacker who made a point of regularly calling Eason and driving to his games. At the end of June 2021, Bodrick had a massive heart attack and died. He was 41 years old. Eason was devastated.
Three months later, Eason’s grandmother also suffered a heart attack. Betty Holland had always been his rock, the person who inspired him to play football, to find God, to pursue his dreams. Now she was in hospice care and Eason spent two months driving three hours from Auburn, where he was coaching at the time, to visit her for an hour or two before turning around and driving home. Holland died in November 2021.
Eason fell into a deep depression. His relationships with some family members were frayed at the time, he said, and he did not feel comfortable talking about his struggles with many people around him.
“You see Nick, and everything seems perfect, but he just wasn’t right,” Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said.
Instead, he ate, and he worked, and he cried, and that was his life for almost a year.
“It’s real, man. Human,” Eason said. “I’m a human. And that’s being able to survive those tough times, and unfortunately that was my way of surviving. … I just kind of ate my depression.”
At the start of last football season, Eason weighed 394 pounds, the heaviest he had ever been.
When he went to the doctor, the conversation went as planned. They talked about heart disease, diabetes, and blood pressure medication. Eason had to change or he would die.
The truth is, Eason hadn’t really lived through the last year anyway. He had let his grief overwhelm him, and he had soothed that pain with sugar and fatty foods.
“I just thought, ‘You’re done with everything you have to do. You gotta pull yourself together or you’re not gonna live,'” Eason recalled.
AN AVERAGE DAY to eat for Eason before he changes his life:
Breakfast: oatmeal, eggs, bacon, a biscuit and, on a particularly indulgent day, pancakes.
Lunch: a plate of double cheeseburger, ideally from Mac’s Drive-In, where he’d add a few salad dogs (all the way), a sweet tea, and a milkshake.
Dinner: Varied, but Blue Heron outside Clemson was a favorite. He would order sushi or calamari to start. Then salmon, oatmeal and cabbage. A few drinks. Next, the bold hit was a double helping of their cobbler (“Best in town,” Eason said).
And then snacks: Little Debbie oatmeal pies, zebra cakes, chocolate chip cookies dipped in milk. Sodas. Oreos.
Total calories: Don’t ask.
“A lot of people turn to booze and drugs, and that’s not my thing. But an Oreo cookie or an ice cream or a juicy burger is right up my alley,” Eason said. “I just eat, eat, and eat, and I feel great. And that’s a trigger in your brain. You wake up to steak, cookies, oatmeal, and eggs. Working out is painful. I chose what was easy.”
Eason still talks lovingly about his favorite foods and restaurants, but his binge eating days are behind him. He has become a vegan and most meals are prepared for him by a vegan restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina. The cheeseburgers have been replaced with black bean burgers which he eats with homemade fries which he cooks in his air fryer. He prepares bowls of rice — only whole-grain rice, he said — and tops them with mushrooms and red peppers. He quit drinking sodas and now drinks water.
It’s a marked change in his lifestyle, but Eason said it’s just about making a decision and committing to it.
“It’s become a battleground of the mind,” he said, “and once my decision is made, my body follows.”
Orhorhoro said his roommate, Jalyn Phillips, had seen Eason recently and was so shocked by the new physique that he initially feared the trainer was ill.
No. Reason is better than ever.
It’s not just the new diet, either, Eason said. He trains three days a week at a local gym owned by former Clemson linebacker Ben Boulware. And because Swinney always prioritized family time, it allowed Eason to come back to Atlanta and spend time with his family.
“In this business, I consider myself a bad father,” Eason said. “I take care of my children financially, but you’re never around.”
Over the past year, however, Eason has been regularly at home, sitting in the stands for the majority of his son’s high school games.
More than anything, Eason opened up. He built trust with the people around him. He doesn’t pretend that everything is fine by burying his feelings under a mountain of bacon and oatmeal. He even publicly shares his journey in hopes that others will find hope in his success.
Swinney recalled her own struggles growing up in poverty with a father who often drank too much, and how openness about her journey provided a sense of peace. He sees parallels for Eason.
“Things that bothered me as a kid, later in life it helped me share them and realize there were other people like me,” Swinney said. “It’s allowed me to talk about things I never would have talked about before. Nick is the same. He knows he can inspire other people by what he’s been through.”
Eason is not at the end of the journey, he said. He still has at least 32 pounds to lose before the start of the season. But that’s just a number, really. He admits his post-NFL career has been something of a yo-yo when it comes to his weight, so any progress he’s made is just one step — a big one — in an ongoing process of research. of a better way to live and also to lead.
Nick Eason, who weighs 400 pounds, was always a good coach who loved his players. This version, however – the one that comes close to 300 pounds – doesn’t just teach its guys. He shows them the way.
“Even when he was too heavy, he had a ton of energy,” Swinney said. “But now he’s unstoppable and the players really, really like him. He’s special.”