DENVER — It was shortly after 6 p.m. on Dec. 2, 2006, when Tyrone Braxton slammed into his dead end.
The cops showed up to a home in Aurora, where he and three others were using drugs and, although Braxton bolted, he didn’t make it far. He was stopped by the police and caught with marijuana and cocaine.
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Six years after capping a lengthy NFL career as a Pro Bowl defensive back and two-time Super Bowl champion, Braxton was heading down a path so many of his childhood friends traveled.
Three days after his arrest, Braxton stood before a crowd of reporters in Denver and admitted he had a drug problem. (He pleaded guilty to possession and avoided jail time.) He labeled the arrest “a wake-up call” and said the Aurora police “did me a favor.” He knew he had to change because Braxton had a wife and two kids and his then-12-year-old daughter told him she hated him and didn’t want him around.
“There’s nothing worse than a dad who can break his daughter’s heart,” he would later say.
Over the last decade, Braxton, 53, has reinvented himself, devoting his life to his family and to others in Denver whose lives mirror his youth and who have made some of his mistakes. He fulfilled a promise to his mother, repaired his once broken family, earned a master’s degree and began the work he says is his true passion.
Today, Braxton counsels middle school and high schools students in the throes of addiction and hardship. Soon, the Super Bowl champ, Pro Bowler, licensed clinical social worker, addiction counselor, father and husband will add another title — one he never believed would be attached to his name: doctor.
“I can’t really say I’m surprised,” his former teammate and Ring of Fame safety Steve Atwater says. “That’s kind of been the hallmark of Tyrone Braxton.”
(Stephen Dunn /Allsport)Odds were, if you grew up the way Braxton did, you didn’t make it out. College was a pipe dream. The NFL was a fantasy.
“You ever been to Madison (Wisconsin)?” Braxton asks incredulously.
Madison, he explains, is surrounded by lakes, and the Braxton family lived in an apartment complex along a bay of one of those lakes. They were the projects, but Braxton didn’t know any different. It was home. He remembers how he and his friends used to go fishing across the bay.
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“I can remember, I swear, must have been five or six of my closest friends, and all of their dads beat their moms,” he says. “Of all of us, I’m the only one holding down a steady job right now. It’s odds. They say, ‘Well, you made it. Why can’t everyone else?’ It’s the odds. Odds are, a person who grew up in my environment isn’t going to make it.”
Braxton beat those odds, in more ways than one.
He was one of five children born to Beatrice Chatman, a young mother who was a victim of domestic violence and worked multiple jobs to keep her kids fed. Braxton watched his two older brothers run the streets and spend years in prison. Many of his friends growing up led similar lives.
Braxton believes his path took a detour in part because of Wally Schoessow, his football coach at James Madison Memorial High.
“He helped a lot of us kids from my side of town get scholarships and go to college and change their lives. A whole bunch of them,” Braxton says. “He was an older white guy. He’d pick us up, take us to practice in the morning, we’d eat at his house. He didn’t really talk to us a lot, but he really showed us how to be a man.”
At 5-foot-11 and barely 180 pounds, Braxton never envisioned a future in football. It was fun. It was a game. But football landed him a scholarship to North Dakota State, where he was a two-year starter, played on three national championship teams, earned all-conference honors as a senior and would later be inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame.
Football also led him to Denver, where he was chosen by the Broncos with the second-to-last pick (No. 334) in the 1987 draft.
The odds again said Braxton wouldn’t make it any further.
But by his third NFL season (1989), he was a starting cornerback for the Broncos and led the Super Bowl-bound team with six interceptions that year. They called him “Chicken” for his skinny legs and everyone knew Chicken.
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“I remember my rookie year was his first year starting, and the first game of the season he intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown,” Atwater says. “Tyrone, he never was the biggest, the fastest, the strongest guy, but he was always around the ball and always made plays.”
Braxton played 13 NFL seasons, starting four of his first seven at cornerback for the Broncos, then spending the 1994 season as a backup safety for the Dolphins. When he was cut loose by Miami, the 28th-ranked Broncos defense brought him back to be its starting strong safety.
Braxton went on to become the lowest Broncos draft pick to earn a Pro Bowl selection (1996) while with the team. He played in four Super Bowls; he reached the pinnacle of his career with an interception of Brett Favre in Super Bowl XXXII to set up a touchdown (the Broncos won 31-24); he followed with another ring in 1999. Braxton totaled 36 interceptions in his career — his 34 as a Bronco is tied for fourth-most in team history alongside Champ Bailey.
“I hate to admit it, but I didn’t want him,” Broncos defensive coordinator Greg Robinson said in 1997. “When this guy walked in, I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? We’re going to play this guy at safety?’ But the people in this organization knew him, knew what he was all about. We developed some injuries and Tyrone got an opportunity to show us what he could do. It didn’t take us but a few weeks to figure out that this guy was a football player.”
Braxton’s response: “That’s been the story of my life.”
Tyrone Braxton with his family in 2000. (Andy Cross/The Denver Post)Braxton left the NFL at a peak most never reach. Four Super Bowls. Two rings. The true underdog story.
Problem was, it never felt like his peak.
“My goal was never to get to the NFL,” he says. “Of course, when I got the opportunity, I wasn’t going to turn it down. But my main goal was never to be a football player. It was always, ‘What else is there?’ There was always something missing. I win the Super Bowl, win national championships — is this it?”
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His first years as a retired player led to various jobs — real estate, trucking — but also a search for himself that led him down a path toward trouble that nearly cost him his family. When football ended, so did his drive and his structure. What was familiar for so many years in Madison consumed him in Denver as he partied and drank and used.
When his daughter told him she didn’t love him anymore, he promised to do better. He had also promised his mother long ago that he would he complete his undergraduate degree. So in 2009, at age 45, he took online courses for a semester to complete his bachelor’s degree in university studies from North Dakota State.
“It was 2010 when I really said I want to help out people,” Braxton says. “But that was similar to my original plan when I went to college. My high school football coach, I wanted to be like him.”
The following year, Braxton enrolled in the Master of Social Work program at Metropolitan State University of Denver, all the while working at Gilliam Youth Services Center, a detention facility downtown where he tried to get through to teens facing a future in adult prison. He knew how this could end for them; by the time Braxton graduated high school in Wisconsin, his older brothers were in prison.
Braxton worked three years as a case manager with the Mental Health Center of Denver, helping offenders dealing with addiction and homelessness (among other things) become self-sustainable. Upon earning his license in clinical social work, he joined Denver Health, providing substance misuse therapy to Denver Public School students living in environments similar to his in Wisconsin. Today, Braxton splits his time between Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College and Thomas Jefferson High.
“A lot of it is trauma — physical and sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, drugs,” he says. “The kids see this in their household and it reminds me a lot of what my household was like. The problem is a lot of people write them off. They’re bad in class, kids are acting up and they treat them as villains and bad kids. I was that kid.
“Our society writes people off too quickly. A teenager goes and commits a crime and, ‘He’ll never be any good.’ People change, but a lot of times they’re not given the opportunity.”
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Some of Braxton’s patients deal with chronic anxiety that may never fade until their surroundings change. Some go to school each day wondering if their parents, undocumented emigrants, will be there when they return. Many deal with depression. Many see domestic violence daily. Most have turned to drugs to ease the pain.
“A lot of times kids just want someone that’s going to listen to them, and I like that it’s coming from me, a big black man whose stereotype is, ‘We’re not sensitive. We’re not engaging. We’re mean and we’re going to rob you,’” Braxton says. “I want to break down all those stereotypes.”
The therapy sessions in school aren’t geared to “fix” anything or anyone. Most have to return to their troublesome surroundings every evening. And it’s rarely the children that need the “fixing.” Braxton uses the analogy of a cruise ship.
“Cruise ships don’t turn sharply,” he says. “We just want to make slight changes to change the course.”
Tyrone Braxton, previously a case manager with the Mental Health Center of Denver, talks with men before their appearance in front of the judge. (Joe Amon/The Denver Post)Elizabeth Braxton looks back on the rough years as a blessing. She and Tyrone separated for a stretch, as she sought to protect her two young kids, but then he began to piece his life back together.
“I realized that anybody who’s lived with an addict or spent time with an addict, there’s nothing you can do, even if you spent many hours, years even, trying to change that person,” she says. “It was really hard for our family and everything, with young kids and having that be so public was really, really painful. If it was just me, I can handle that. But it was something that, particularly for our daughter, who was middle-school-aged at the time, it was pretty hard.
“But in the long run, I’m so proud of him. A lot of people when you’re an addict you either die or you get it together.”
For the past 15 years, Elizabeth has taught at Florence Crittenton High, a specialty school in Denver for pregnant or parenting teens. Most of her days are spent traveling across Denver and beyond to help young parents complete their studies. Many have faced hardship similar to Tyrone as a youth.
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The professions of Elizabeth and Tyrone intersected as their family reunited.
“I didn’t grow up around any of that stuff at all,” she says. “At the time I didn’t know what to do. But I think it has definitely helped me in my career and has definitely helped me grow as a person and realize nobody’s life is perfect. We grew up in a nice neighborhood — everything nice, nice, nice and you think everything is just perfect everywhere. But it’s really not. I think that’s the biggest lesson, that sometimes everybody’s life gets messy and it’s OK to let people help you.”
Although Tyrone’s latest move has shifted their original plans as empty-nesters, Elizabeth has embraced it. Because when he starts something, she knows, he’s all in.
Last fall, Tyrone began a Ph.D. program in health and behavioral sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. Tacked on to his days as a social worker and addiction counselor with Denver Health are four classes a semester.
“I want to show little black boys, little brown boys that it’s not just about sports or rapping or becoming an entertainer,” he says. “You can do anything. So I want to be that type of role model. A lot of kids I work with now are not doing well in middle school or high school, and I was kind of that kid. It wasn’t because I wasn’t smart. It was because I didn’t apply myself.”
Each year, Braxton typically likes to catch a few Broncos games, but he never made it out to Mile High last season. His weekends have been dedicated to reading and research. He may not see a game this year either, facing a semester packed with statistics, research methods and a colloquium. By the end of next year, he has to settle on a dissertation topic and he’s leaning toward something on children and substance abuse because he has the data and the working experience to back it. He knows it. He’s lived it.
Braxton is on a track to graduate in 2022 — shortly after his son, T.J., is expected to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. T.J., a straight-A student at Denver East High, is on an academic scholarship and is considering a career in law. His daughter, Chloe, lives in Denver and works at a Boulder pharmaceutical company.
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“It was definitely a process in repairing the family unit and coming back together in one household and everything like that,” Elizabeth says. “It was easier for my son because he was little and doesn’t really remember that much of it. It wasn’t quite as easy for my daughter, but it’s been 10 years now since we came back together. It took time, but time heals things.”
Braxton said he chose the Ph.D. program at CU Denver, in part, because it removes the focus from the patient and shifts it toward the possible causes, the social determinants of health. More of the “why” and less of the “who.”
Research says that many of Braxton’s social determinants should have led him to a life in prison, or on the streets or worse. Instead, he found a different route.
“I always wanted to help other people,” he says. “This is what I was meant to do. I just took the scenic route.”
(Top photo: Nicki Jhabvala/The Athletic)
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