Arden overcomes pitfalls of life to score what matters most

As a 1st team All-Ohio linebacker, Arden is shown making a tackle during a game as a Fighting Tiger.

Redgie Arden has his photo taken on media day during his freshman season at Ohio State.

Arden’s 2002 National Championship ring.

Arden is happy and proud as he is surrounded by his wife April, daughter Aubrey and son Cooper.

In Ironton, football is more than a game. It’s a generational torch, a symbol of pride and identity.

From 1997-2000 that torch burned brightly in a tough, quiet boy named Redgie Arden.

By the time he reached middle school, Redgie was six feet tall and built for the gridiron. The attention came quickly – scouts, coaches, headlines – before he was old enough to drive.

His freshman year of high school, he was 6’4” and moved to the varsity team with some others to compete against older, more experienced kids. Everyone saw greatness in the young man. But nobody understood the pressure those lofty expectations created in his teenage mind.

Because he spoke very little and constantly drove himself to prove everyone right, nobody knew he was slowly drowning. Not even him. But that flame was much too hot.

Today, the grown version of Redgie Arden doesn’t even watch football, believing there is too much emphasis placed on the game. He doesn’t dislike it, but wants young men who bank their futures on it to understand that a dark side exists on that narrow, elusive road to imagined fame and fortune.

To be fair, it wasn’t football that crushed him. It was alcohol. It was abuse of prescription pain pills. It was a win-at-all-costs culture. It was hero worship. It was the ego that arose from the hero worship. And it was expectations — very high ones from others — that he ultimately realized were a bar too high to reach.

“People always thought Redgie was arrogant or aloof, but he just didn’t like attention,” said his mother, Sally Wood. “By the time he was in high school, there was a lot of hurt. Our family was going through hard times and I was in a dark place. I wasn’t able to be there for him the way I wanted,” she lamented. His father, Redgie Sr., was involved, but strict and often overbearing.

During his junior year at IHS, Redgie was recruited by Ohio State head coach John Cooper and committed to the Buckeyes on an athletic scholarship. This was a big deal in Ironton. In the storied history of the Tigers’ program, few players have landed at big time football schools. And very few were as hyped as Redgie Arden.

But the devil is in the details and there were many details nobody in Columbus knew. Despite his physical stature, his ability to hit like a truck, and his seemingly unshakable demeanor on the gridiron, Redgie, the all-state linebacker and tight end, was also an alcoholic.

Looking back, Sally can see everything clearly.

“It wasn’t just the spotlight at school (that got to him),” she said. “Our family life was blowing up. The rumors, the whispers. He had to deal with all of that and still play. I don’t know how he did it.”

He had knee and shoulder surgeries prior to his senior season that required four months to heal.

Back injuries persisted. Concussions piled up. “I couldn’t make it through high school without injuries and now I’m going to Columbus and intend to be successful?” he laughed, using the dry humor that is his calling card these days. “Oh, and there’s this drinking thing…”

The drinking started early in high school and was easy to hide from his divorcing parents. Law enforcement gave him passes. Adults nodded and winked. It appeared he could do no wrong.

“I tore my rotator cuff during practice before my sophomore season,” he recalled. “A lot of expectations and hype went out the window. I’ve always been an all-or-nothing guy, so not being able to play caused me to go outside the lines.”

He referred to alcohol as “a little hidden monster” that has inflicted damage on his family for generations.

“I was 16. I couldn’t play football,” he said, signaling danger was ahead.

When the little hidden monster first emerged, Redgie began a love/hate affair that would last 11 years. The free legal passes and adulation bolstered his hubris, creating a sense of superiority.

“I should have been arrested, but it was always swept under the rug,” he said. “I was pulled over several times drinking and driving and let go. I know those people thought they were doing me a favor, but all it did was reinforce that Superman syndrome I had. My high school experience was like the movie ‘Varsity Blues.’ You believe you can manipulate yourself out of the spots you get yourself into. Accountability goes out the window.”

And then he discussed the one thing he was missing. The one thing, if he could go back in time, he wishes he’d endured: “Consequences are extremely important.”

The consequences would gradually come once he arrived at Ohio State under new head coach Jim Tressel, who replaced the recently fired Cooper.

“If I was Tressel, I wouldn’t have kept me through my freshman year (2001),” Redgie said. “I had three strikes (DUI in Ironton, failed drug test, broken team rules). I would have let me go. It was obvious by my behaviors my priorities weren’t in line. He didn’t do that because he knew what direction those guys typically take. But I was going that direction anyway.”

He tried to play anyway.

“From a health standpoint, it wasn’t going to get any better. The competition was much tougher there. By the time I got there, I was maybe 70-80% of what I was before.”

From a psychological standpoint, he was much lower on the scale. Partying became more important than football. As long as he was drunk or high, he was still the hero of the story. But reality always came around the following morning. To shut it down, he called on the little hidden monster. And the cycle continued.

In 2002, Ohio State went undefeated and won the national championship, beating the Miami Hurricanes in one of the most memorable games in history. Redgie played some during that season, but very sparsely. It was the second championship game he’d watched from the sidelines in the past four years, one because of injury (Ironton versus Sandusky Perkins in 1999 in the Division IV Ohio finals).

He still has his OSU championship ring, but it’s mostly a reminder of unrealized potential and squandered opportunities. He doesn’t appear to realize how many local people are in awe of this single accomplishment.

The following season, Buckeyes coaches told him they had plans for him to be more involved in the offense as a tight end. But his tight grip on the bottle thwarted those plans. Top prospects drafted only a season earlier were topping the depth charts. Redgie’s star was fading.

By 2004, he was going through the motions, and those motions (and less than mature emotions) led to a trip to Huntington, West Virginia, a few weeks before the Thundering Herd travelled to Ohio Stadium to take on the Buckeyes.

A party. A trip to a bar. A fight with numerous members of the Marshall football team. A hospital stay. Recovery.

“15 to 1 is not good odds,” he laughed, adding he shouldn’t have ventured into the 20th Street Bar and Grill in the first place. “I was already hammered, so I’m sure I wasn’t very sociable.”

“I didn’t think my world could get any worse,” Sally said. “I walked in (the hospital room) and couldn’t recognize him. It was unbelievable. It’s a testament to the Good Lord’s strength that he survived.”

The summer after that, Redgie continued drifting downward. He left Ohio State in 2005, his body worn down and his life still a mess.

There were the arrests that finally stuck. The second, third, fourth warnings that weren’t warnings anymore. The DUI in 2002. Another in 2003 that got reduced back home. And then the one in 2007 — proof the “Superman syndrome” had finally run its course.

“A lot of people think I went downhill when I got to Columbus,” he said. “It started in Ironton when I was in high school.”

He spoke about those years bluntly, like he’d finally gotten tired of protecting the old legend.

“Something I learned about me when I was younger in the media, is I never really had a chance to reach my potential because of injuries,” he said. “Newspapers and magazines projected me as a superstar. And I bought into what they were saying.”

The hype had become as intoxicating as alcohol. And when his body didn’t cooperate, when his shoulders and knee and back kept slipping out from under him, the expectations didn’t adjust.

“I had to keep reaching for a bar I couldn’t grab,” he said. “They really blew me up to be what I wasn’t. People were expecting things I couldn’t deliver. I was young, not that assertive, wasn’t going to ask for help. I wouldn’t admit to myself or anyone else that I had a problem.”

Ohio State had resources, he said. People tried to help. He didn’t want it — not yet. Not while the myth still felt useful and the hidden monster sill helped.

And then he said the line that, in some ways, wraps a bow around the whole story.

“I shouldn’t have played after high school,” Redgie said. “And I wanted to play in the Big Ten? It was a recipe for disaster. Addiction has a way of hijacking your mind.”

He describes himself as “All-or-nothing.” No moderation in anything — football, drinking, life.

That intensity made him special on the field. It also made him combustible off it.

“Luckily for me,” he said, “I couldn’t stay out of jail. I’m more of an extreme guy. I don’t like moderation.”

He laughed when he said it, because humor is still his favorite tool, but the truth wasn’t funny at the time. Consequences hurt. But they also save.

On October 8, 2009 — eleven years and one month after he started drinking — Redgie says he quit because he’d “maxed it out.”

He was 28. No job. No transportation. He’d scared off most of the women who cared about him.

He was passing out at traffic lights, his life spiraling into consequences that finally had teeth.

“You might have a problem,” he said to himself, and then did something his pride had never allowed him to do.

He asked for help.

“The real eye opener,” he said, after scoring 16 out of 20 on an alcohol questionnaire, “was you’re never going to keep a job or stay out of jail if you don’t do something. What is causing you to fall asleep at traffic lights? What keeps getting in your way?”

He went to counseling — individual and group — for a year. Quietly. One day at a time. He calls it “active recovery,” and he talks about it the way a former lineman might talk about rehab: not glamorous, but repetitive and necessary.

“There was a lot of self-reflection,” he said. “Restless, irritable, and discontent was the title of a sad ballad I listened to for too long.”

From 2009 to 2012, he stayed with it. He worked on himself and tried to answer the question football had never prepared him for: What am I supposed to be doing? Where am I going?

He went back to school at Ohio University Southern and finished his degree in criminal justice — proof that the discipline everyone praised in the weight room could be rebuilt into something that didn’t break him.

By December 2012, he’d started working at STAR Community Justice Center, where he remains today as the Compliance Manager. His title doesn’t make headlines, which might be exactly why it fits. It’s also where he met his wife, April, with whom he has two young children.

Sally, now remarried and living in a better season of her life, still wrestles with what she remembers and what she keeps “in a drawer” shut tight.

And she sees her son not as Ironton’s torchbearer, not as a failed prodigy, but as a man who did something far harder than cracking shoulder pads on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon.

“I don’t want Redgie to carry around guilt,” she said. “The higher up you go, the harder that fall. But I have to hand it to him — he turned his life around. He told me, ‘Mom, I can’t live like this anymore.’”

Sally’s greatest hope isn’t that people remember Redgie’s stats. It’s that they learn from the parts that don’t fit on a plaque.

“I always wished he would talk to kids about his life,” she said. “I think he could be a huge inspiration. Accept it and turn it around. Use it as a positive.”

Redgie’s wife, April, sees the same thing from closer range: the quiet weight he still carries, the way he assumes the world remembers him as the kid who crashed and burned, not the man who climbed back out.

“Redge has it in his head that people have this negative perception of him,” she said, “even though he hasn’t played football in twenty-some years. I don’t know where that comes from.”

“We go places and people recognize Redge,” April said, “but he acts like it’s no big deal, as though what he has to say isn’t interesting.”

In a way, that’s the point.

The old version of Redgie Arden was built out of other people’s expectations. The new version is built out of choices: staying sober, showing up, being a partner, being a father who knows when to encourage and when to pull back, because he understands what pressure can do when it gets into the wrong hands.

“Redgie doesn’t push his kids,” Sally said. “He’s very conscious of knowing when to encourage and when to pull back. He uses good judgment and is attentive. His marriage is a partnership. I’m proud of the father and husband he is.”

When I asked Redgie why he finally agreed to speak — because for decades he wouldn’t — he didn’t give an answer that sounded like PR. He gave an answer that sounded like a man who has finally stopped trying to win a game that ended years ago.

“I just lost interest in the game,” he said. “There’s way too much importance placed on it. With injuries and everything that came with that… in the end, the only thing it brought me was injuries and disappointment. I want young guys to watch out for the pitfalls and keep their priorities in order. Have realistic goals. Don’t put football first. Obviously, stay away from drugs and alcohol.”

Redgie isn’t trying to be a symbol anymore. He doesn’t want the torch. He doesn’t want the myth. He doesn’t want kids to think football is evil or meaningless — only that it’s powerful, and anything powerful has a dark side.

He drew again on his humor to sum everything up: “I compare early recovery to the last scene of Goodfellas,” he laughed. “Busted. It’s all over.”

But he realized during that dark climb of recovery that his life wasn’t really over. It was simply changing.

And then, finally, it began.

———————

Billy Bruce covers Ohio State Buckeyes football for tristatesportspage.com