Adam M

ESPN once ranked Myron Rolle the best high school football player in America. He never played a single down in an NFL regular season game. Today he operates on children's brains. Rolle grew up in Galloway Township, New Jersey. His parents are from the Bahamas. He went to the Hun School of Princeton and by 2006 the recruiting services had him at the top of the board, a five star safety every program in the country wanted. He picked Florida State. Then he finished his bachelor's degree in exercise science in two and a half years with a 3.75 GPA, and made third team All-American in 2008. And then he won a Rhodes Scholarship. The interview was in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Saturday, the same day Florida State was playing at Maryland. The NCAA let him charter a plane. He sat for the interview, found out he had won, got on the plane, landed in College Park and played in the game. Here is where it turns. He was projected as a first or second round NFL pick. Instead he skipped the entire 2009 season and went to Oxford for a year to earn a master's degree in medical anthropology. When he came back, the league had moved on. The Tennessee Titans took him in the sixth round, 207th overall, in 2010. Two hundred and six players went ahead of a kid who had been the number one recruit in the country. He never appeared in a regular season game for Tennessee. He spent a stretch with the Pittsburgh Steelers and got released. That was it. That was the whole NFL career. In 2013 he walked away from football entirely and enrolled at the Florida State College of Medicine. He was 26 and starting over in a field where everybody else had been pointed at it since undergrad. He graduated in 2017. Then he matched into neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, which is roughly the hardest thing in American medicine to get into. Then a pediatric fellowship at Johns Hopkins. In the spring of 2020 he was a resident working hospital floors during COVID. Today he is a pediatric neurosurgeon at Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando. He runs the Myron L. Rolle Foundation, which does health and education work for children and families who need it. Be honest about the football part. Nobody can prove Oxford cost him. Scouts had real questions about whether he would commit to the sport, and plenty of number one recruits never make it for reasons that have nothing to do with a scholarship. But here is what we know for sure. He was told he was throwing away a career. He went anyway. And the thing everybody was afraid he would choose instead of football is the reason some kid in Orlando is going to wake up tomorrow. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap