The running back who can no longer run: Isaiah Pead’s fresh life is better than no life

Published on Jun. Nineteen, two thousand seventeen | Updated on Jul. 17, 2017

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Isaiah Pead had the word “Faith” tattooed on his left palm while preparing for an NFL career.

Five years later, it provides even more inspiration now that his playing days are over.

Pead is a running back who can no longer run.

His left gam was severed and right gam was badly bruised in a November car accident that left him just moments away from death. Eight subsequent surgeries have followed.

A former high school track starlet whose top five times among running backs at the two thousand twelve NFL Scouting Combine helped him become a second-round draft pick, Pead remains relegated to crutches until his prosthetic gam is fitted later this year. The dude who ran the 40-yard dash in Four.47 seconds and the three-cone drill in 6.95 at the combine now weighs one hundred sixty pounds, having dropped almost one quarter of his figure weight from last fall, when he last suited up for the Miami Dolphins.

“I’ve got my muscles but I’m just light,” Pead recently told Sporting News from the living room of his grandparents’ home in Columbus. “I went from four percent assets fat, and I’ve most likely got none now.

“But I still work out. I stay on my push-ups — my bread-and-butter right there. With me being so light, it’s effortless … It’s just irritating.”

It would be understandable if Pead were consumed by self-pity. He’s a 26-year-old whose entire world turned as topsy-turvy as the two thousand eleven Cadillac CTS that tumbled forty feet down an embankment with him in it, after careening off the side of a highway.

Pead, tho’, has refused to wallow in sorrow from the moment he awoke in the hospital and became aware of the accident and harm suffered.

“He was still talking the same way he was the day before, smiling and laughing and cracking jokes,” said Ruby Bowman, Pead’s gf and mother of their seven-month-old namesake son nicknamed “Deuce.”

“It astonished me a lot. I was jumpy and startled for how he would adjust to no longer being able to have football. Everyone thought maybe he’s still in shock or doesn’t truly know what happened and wouldn’t get it until living a normal life. But he’s still going strong.”

Pead will rely on that strength while attempting to climb on a comeback more difficult than the one he finished in the NFL.

“Isaiah had already conquered football,” Pead’s mother, Leshawna, said. “This is something totally fresh. It’s even more of a challenge in a good way.

“It’s like, ‘Ooh, this is a fresh chapter. Let’s write it.'”

The book had almost closed on Pead’s NFL career before he pried it back open.

As the 50th player selected in his draft class, by the Rams, Pead never came close to being the same kind of difference-maker he was at the University of Cincinnati. A rough rookie campaign was followed by a disappointing 2nd season that began with Pead serving a four-game suspension under the league’s substance-abuse policy.

Coming in the two thousand fourteen offseason, Pead rededicated himself and worked stiffer to build up the trust of Rams coaches, whom he believes had not shown much faith in him. A period of fasting followed by a dietary switch — crimson meat was substituted by chicken and fish — led to Pead feeling his best during OTA sessions.

“I was nice,” Pead said with a laugh. “I was shocking myself. The film didn’t lie.

“Nobody could deny it — and I had been being denied my entire time there.”

But it wasn’t long before Pead was denied again. A violated pinkie that sidelined him early in training camp was followed by a season-ending knee injury suffered in his very first game back.

The Rams cut Pead early in the two thousand fifteen season. Another chance with Pittsburgh later in the year ended with his release after less than a month.

Pead’s NFL future remained in question until he drew attention from Miami during the two thousand sixteen offseason. Seeking depth at running back, the Dolphins signed Pead following an exceptional workout.

Before the contract was signed, Miami’s hierarchy wished to make sure Pead understood the chance he was being given.

“We said, ‘Hey, just look at this as a fresh begin,'” Dolphins coach Adam Gase recalled in a latest interview with Sporting News. “The past is what it is. Just do the right thing every day, come in here and work and challenge. You’re going to get as fair of an chance as you can ask for.”

The Dolphins were true to their word. After a strong preseason, Pead stuck on the 53-man roster. He debuted as a backup against Cleveland in Week Trio, carrying five times for seventeen yards, and followed that with snaps the following game at Cincinnati.

Following Miami’s 1-4 embark, Gase lodged on a tightened running back rotation, and Pead was released.

Still, Pead was back on the NFL radar, and a signing seemed inescapable after subsequent tryouts with Washington and Kansas City. Gase also said Miami very likely would have re-signed Pead had injuries hit his team’s running back team.

“Just being able to come back and make a roster and figure out a way to rival at this position, he made it truly rough on us as far as determining who was going to play,” Gase said.

Pead said he was scheduled to come back to South Florida and resume training while waiting for another chance to play.

The tour was never taken because of what happened two days prior in the early morning of Nov. 12.

Wesley Richardson is the only one who can recount the details of exactly why.

Richardson very first met Pead when both played at Cincinnati. They were Columbus natives a year apart in school. They had adjoining lockers and lived in the same apartment complicated. Pead wore jersey No. 23; Richardson, a defensive back, was No. 24.

The two remained close after Pead pursued an NFL career and Richardson branched into a bank job involving money-laundering investigations. Returning home for the weekend after being stationed in Charlotte on a work assignment, Richardson met with Pead for what was planned as a night on the town.

The two hopped into Pead’s car — the one slated to receive a tire switch the following week — but found nothing appealing at the catches sight of they hit after getting off to a late embark. Pead and Richardson then determined to meet with a group of friends at a Waffle House near the former’s house.

Pead said he wasn’t impaired, and the police report states there were no signs of alcohol or drug use. Pead, however, admits he was driving “a little over the speed limit” while approaching a curve heading eastbound on I-670 near the East 5th Avenue exit.

“I hit a bump and lost control,” Pead said. “I lost consciousness. [Richardson] never lost consciousness so he tells me the story.”

Richardson said the car hit a divot, which offset the weight distribution. Pead attempted to correct the vehicle but fishtailed left and right before crashing through a guard rail and plummeting down a strongly forested area into the neighborhood park below.

“I had my seatbelt on and he did not,” Richardson told Sporing News in his very first interview about the accident. “It’s crazy because the paramedics who were the very first responders told me the seat belt saved me, and him not having the belt on saved him, because they most likely would have had to cut him out of the car and he would have bled out by the time they were done.”

Richardson escaped relatively unscathed, with a concussion and some abrasions. He was discharged from a hospital not long after his admission.

Pead wasn’t almost as fortunate. The guard rail that came through the driver’s side severed Pead’s left gam and pinned his right one, causing all three knee ligaments and hamstring to rip. Pead was ultimately ejected and found thirty feet from a vehicle riddled with branches. The disconnected bumper was left stringing up high in the trees.

Richardson said he primarily did not know where Pead was once the Cadillac eventually stopped.

“I was screaming to see if he’d react,” Richardson said. “I looked to my left and witnessed his gam right there in the middle of the car on the arm rest going toward the back of the car. I didn’t know if he was punched into the back and his gam was sticking out, but the entire back of the car was smashed down. If anyone was sitting there, they would have been crushed.”

Admittedly thinking “all bad things,” Richardson climbed out of the gaping fuckhole that was created on the driver’s side. Richardson then responded to the yelling he heard from women atop the embankment who had witnessed the accident.

The subsequent quick nine hundred eleven call, combined with the quick deeds of paramedics from a fire station located just blocks away from Cassady Park, saved Pead’s life. So did the surgeries and transfusions in the aftermath.

“They said I had about three to five minutes to live because I was bleeding out,” Pead said.

Life, tho’, would never be the same.

Leshawna Pead knows her son doesn’t take well to hearing “No” for an reaction.

Each time he would awake from a drug-induced sleep, Pead would instantaneously begin attempting to ask where he was and what had happened before gasping on the post-surgical tube sticking down his mouth. Pead would then be sedated again.

Less than two days into this cycle, Leshawna insisted on violating the news to her son, with Richardson by her side, against the wishes of the hospital’s medical staff.

“Isaiah has always been a straight-to-the point kind of person,” Leshawna said. “What you can’t do is not response him. They said, ‘Don’t upset him. Don’t tell him yet what’s going on,’ but he was so relentless I told him.

“My son is not your average patient. You have to tell him or this wasn’t going to stop.”

Once the account was given, Leshawna said her son “closed his eyes for a minute and opened them back up.” Pead then gestured for a pen and paper to communicate what he was thinking.

What happened next told Leshawna that Isaiah was going to be OK.

“He wrote, ‘My whip game is decent,'” Leshawna said with a laugh. “It switched the entire mood of everything.”

Richardson, too, was stunned at how Pead treated the situation.

“I was panicked because I didn’t know how he would react when he woke up,” Richardson said. “He was making a living with his gams. It’s not like somebody who can go back to a normal job and make money the way they had been. His entire life was about to roll upside-down. We honestly thought he was going to pervert out and go crazy over it all.

“He did twenty times better than all of us combined.”

“I’m used to performing under pressure, but this wasn’t pressure of a game,” Pead said. “This was, ‘How am I going to react with all these eyes that are looking at me but also counting on me?’

“My decision wasn’t rushed. It seems rushed, but I accepted it right then.”

Isaiah Pead celebrates Cincinnati’s win over Pittsburgh in December 2009. (Getty Pics)

Pead would stay strong in the upcoming weeks while hearing from well-wishers and receiving surprise visits from guests that included Bearcats trainer Bob Mangine, who brought him a crimson No. Twenty three Cincinnati jersey, and agent Rick Smith. Upon getting released from the hospital, Pead began a rehabilitation program for his right gam with the same mindset that he used when recovering from his ACL surgery.

This time, thoughts of returning to the field were not inspiring him, but rather the son who was born shortly before Pead’s accident.

“That’s my man,” said Pead, who sees Deuce during the day while his gf works. “Sometimes I get so tired of the crutches that I hop around. He’ll fuss and sob and I’ll come hopping around the corner. He’ll see me hopping and just commence kicking and stuff. It’s the funniest thing in the world.”

Pead also spends time working on expanding what he hopes will provide his post-football livelihood, a vehicle-moving service called Stampede Trucking. Another step in making the transition is buying a house and moving with his instantaneous family to the Columbus suburb of Pickerington.

Once he regains the mobility that will come with a prosthetic, Pead plans to become more active in attempting to provide inspiration to others who have suffered a physical calamity.

“I want to proceed to be a motivator to whatever I come across,” he said. “That starts with myself, looking at myself in the mirror every day — a total bod mirror.

“You can see, you know, half of me. I’m my own inspiration, literally.”

What is inked on Pead’s arm strengthens that drive.

“I don’t think about the ‘What if’ because I don’t regret anything I went through when I had two gams,” Pead said. “I came to work every day and put my best foot forward and let things fall where they fell. They just didn’t fall in my favor.

“I can accept that because I have faith in God, who has a fatter plan. I’m just here to live it out.”

The running back who can no longer run: Isaiah Pead s fresh life is better than no life, NFL, Sporting News

The running back who can no longer run: Isaiah Pead’s fresh life is better than no life

Published on Jun. Nineteen, two thousand seventeen | Updated on Jul. 17, 2017

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Isaiah Pead had the word “Faith” tattooed on his left palm while preparing for an NFL career.

Five years later, it provides even more inspiration now that his playing days are over.

Pead is a running back who can no longer run.

His left gam was severed and right gam was badly bruised in a November car accident that left him just moments away from death. Eight subsequent surgeries have followed.

A former high school track starlet whose top five times among running backs at the two thousand twelve NFL Scouting Combine helped him become a second-round draft pick, Pead remains relegated to crutches until his prosthetic gam is fitted later this year. The stud who ran the 40-yard dash in Four.47 seconds and the three-cone drill in 6.95 at the combine now weighs one hundred sixty pounds, having dropped almost one quarter of his figure weight from last fall, when he last suited up for the Miami Dolphins.

“I’ve got my muscles but I’m just light,” Pead recently told Sporting News from the living room of his grandparents’ home in Columbus. “I went from four percent bod fat, and I’ve very likely got none now.

“But I still work out. I stay on my push-ups — my bread-and-butter right there. With me being so light, it’s effortless … It’s just irritating.”

Pead, tho’, has refused to wallow in sorrow from the moment he awoke in the hospital and became aware of the accident and harm suffered.

“It astonished me a lot. I was jumpy and funked for how he would adjust to no longer being able to have football. Everyone thought maybe he’s still in shock or doesn’t indeed know what happened and wouldn’t get it until living a normal life. But he’s still going strong.”

Pead will rely on that strength while attempting to climb on a comeback more difficult than the one he finished in the NFL.

“Isaiah had already conquered football,” Pead’s mother, Leshawna, said. “This is something totally fresh. It’s even more of a challenge in a good way.

“It’s like, ‘Ooh, this is a fresh chapter. Let’s write it.'”

The book had almost closed on Pead’s NFL career before he pried it back open.

Coming in the two thousand fourteen offseason, Pead rededicated himself and worked firmer to build up the trust of Rams coaches, whom he believes had not shown much faith in him. A period of fasting followed by a dietary switch — crimson meat was substituted by chicken and fish — led to Pead feeling his best during OTA sessions.

“I was nice,” Pead said with a laugh. “I was shocking myself. The film didn’t lie.

“Nobody could deny it — and I had been being denied my entire time there.”

But it wasn’t long before Pead was denied again. A violated pinkie that sidelined him early in training camp was followed by a season-ending knee injury suffered in his very first game back.

The Rams cut Pead early in the two thousand fifteen season. Another chance with Pittsburgh later in the year ended with his release after less than a month.

Before the contract was signed, Miami’s hierarchy desired to make sure Pead understood the chance he was being given.

“We said, ‘Hey, just look at this as a fresh embark,'” Dolphins coach Adam Gase recalled in a latest interview with Sporting News. “The past is what it is. Just do the right thing every day, come in here and work and contest. You’re going to get as fair of an chance as you can ask for.”

Following Miami’s 1-4 commence, Gase lodged on a tightened running back rotation, and Pead was released.

Still, Pead was back on the NFL radar, and a signing seemed unavoidable after subsequent tryouts with Washington and Kansas City. Gase also said Miami most likely would have re-signed Pead had injuries hit his team’s running back team.

“Just being able to come back and make a roster and figure out a way to rival at this position, he made it indeed raunchy on us as far as determining who was going to play,” Gase said.

Pead said he was scheduled to comeback to South Florida and resume training while waiting for another chance to play.

The tour was never taken because of what happened two days prior in the early morning of Nov. 12.

Wesley Richardson is the only one who can recount the details of exactly why.

Richardson very first met Pead when both played at Cincinnati. They were Columbus natives a year apart in school. They had adjoining lockers and lived in the same apartment elaborate. Pead wore jersey No. 23; Richardson, a defensive back, was No. 24.

“I hit a bump and lost control,” Pead said. “I lost consciousness. [Richardson] never lost consciousness so he tells me the story.”

Richardson said the car hit a divot, which offset the weight distribution. Pead attempted to correct the vehicle but fishtailed left and right before crashing through a guard rail and plummeting down a strenuously forested area into the neighborhood park below.

“I had my seatbelt on and he did not,” Richardson told Sporing News in his very first interview about the accident. “It’s crazy because the paramedics who were the very first responders told me the seat belt saved me, and him not having the belt on saved him, because they very likely would have had to cut him out of the car and he would have bled out by the time they were done.”

Richardson escaped relatively unscathed, with a concussion and some abrasions. He was discharged from a hospital not long after his admission.

Richardson said he originally did not know where Pead was once the Cadillac eventually stopped.

“I was screaming to see if he’d react,” Richardson said. “I looked to my left and eyed his gam right there in the middle of the car on the arm rest going toward the back of the car. I didn’t know if he was punched into the back and his gam was sticking out, but the entire back of the car was smashed down. If anyone was sitting there, they would have been crushed.”

“They said I had about three to five minutes to live because I was bleeding out,” Pead said.

Life, tho’, would never be the same.

Leshawna Pead knows her son doesn’t take well to hearing “No” for an response.

Each time he would awake from a drug-induced sleep, Pead would instantaneously begin attempting to ask where he was and what had happened before gagging on the post-surgical tube sticking down his mouth. Pead would then be sedated again.

Less than two days into this cycle, Leshawna insisted on violating the news to her son, with Richardson by her side, against the wishes of the hospital’s medical staff.

“Isaiah has always been a straight-to-the point kind of person,” Leshawna said. “What you can’t do is not reaction him. They said, ‘Don’t upset him. Don’t tell him yet what’s going on,’ but he was so relentless I told him.

“My son is not your average patient. You have to tell him or this wasn’t going to stop.”

Once the account was given, Leshawna said her son “closed his eyes for a minute and opened them back up.” Pead then gestured for a pen and paper to communicate what he was thinking.

What happened next told Leshawna that Isaiah was going to be OK.

“He wrote, ‘My whip game is decent,'” Leshawna said with a laugh. “It switched the entire mood of everything.”

Richardson, too, was stunned at how Pead treated the situation.

“I was frightened because I didn’t know how he would react when he woke up,” Richardson said. “He was making a living with his gams. It’s not like somebody who can go back to a normal job and make money the way they had been. His entire life was about to spin upside-down. We honestly thought he was going to weirdo out and go crazy over it all.

“He did twenty times better than all of us combined.”

“My decision wasn’t rushed. It seems rushed, but I accepted it right then.”

Isaiah Pead celebrates Cincinnati’s win over Pittsburgh in December 2009. (Getty Pics)

This time, thoughts of returning to the field were not inspiring him, but rather the son who was born shortly before Pead’s accident.

“That’s my fellow,” said Pead, who witnesses Deuce during the day while his gf works. “Sometimes I get so tired of the crutches that I hop around. He’ll fuss and sob and I’ll come hopping around the corner. He’ll see me hopping and just embark kicking and stuff. It’s the funniest thing in the world.”

Once he regains the mobility that will come with a prosthetic, Pead plans to become more active in attempting to provide inspiration to others who have suffered a physical calamity.

“I want to proceed to be a motivator to whatever I come across,” he said. “That starts with myself, looking at myself in the mirror every day — a total figure mirror.

“You can see, you know, half of me. I’m my own inspiration, literally.”

What is inked on Pead’s palm strengthens that drive.

“I can accept that because I have faith in God, who has a thicker plan. I’m just here to live it out.”

The running back who can no longer run: Isaiah Pead s fresh life is better than no life, NFL, Sporting News

The running back who can no longer run: Isaiah Pead’s fresh life is better than no life

Published on Jun. Nineteen, two thousand seventeen | Updated on Jul. 17, 2017

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Isaiah Pead had the word “Faith” tattooed on his left palm while preparing for an NFL career.

Five years later, it provides even more inspiration now that his playing days are over.

Pead is a running back who can no longer run.

His left gam was severed and right gam was badly bruised in a November car accident that left him just moments away from death. Eight subsequent surgeries have followed.

“I’ve got my muscles but I’m just light,” Pead recently told Sporting News from the living room of his grandparents’ home in Columbus. “I went from four percent figure fat, and I’ve most likely got none now.

“But I still work out. I stay on my push-ups — my bread-and-butter right there. With me being so light, it’s effortless … It’s just irritating.”

Pead, however, has refused to wallow in sorrow from the moment he awoke in the hospital and became aware of the accident and harm suffered.