He often woke up to find that, sometime in the night, he had filled dozens of pages with football plays and motivational speeches. He couldn’t sleep without it.”Įven with it, he didn’t sleep much-maybe four hours a night-and it was a feverish, desperate sort of sleep, his mind incapable of stopping its search for problems to worry over and try to solve. One a night at first, and then two, washing them down with beer. The only help Urban took was Ambien for his sleep. It was hard for him to admit any ‘weakness’-which, we know, that’s not what it is. When you can’t think, it doesn’t matter what somebody else is telling you. He couldn’t, when he was in the middle of it. Shelley says, “Anxiety and depression are very disabling. What the hell’s wrong with you?”Īnd yet, for all the tricks Urban's mind played on him-making him unable to sleep, making him obsess over the work he had to do, and scaring him with all the ways not doing that work would ruin everything-maybe the most dangerous trick of all was that his mind made all of this feel normal. And even as we went along, he had that attitude about what mental illness really is-or mental health, or counseling or psychiatric help.”Īll true, Urban says: “I hate to admit that, but yeah, 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I would’ve been like, C’mon, man, toughen up. Millions and millions and millions of people think that way. Shelley says, “He had an attitude of, well, you should be strong, and you should be able to handle things yourself. When it came to the mind, Urban was like many men, especially men in sports, especially back then. Jogging? Shooting pool? You had a really tough day. In their early days together, he would tease her about some of the things she said she did at work, like going for a jog with an anxious patient, or playing pool with someone who was depressed. “He never quite bought into my profession,” Shelley says. Shelley tried to talk to him about it, to use her expertise. In a black hole, you don’t see things the right way.” “When he was in the middle of it, that’s where you can’t think. He was not accepting that he couldn’t control everything. Shelley says now, “It was just a big mountain of pressure, stress, lack of control and not accepting what he couldn’t control. “You can’t take 30 minutes and go run on the treadmill?” “What’s 30 minutes less of film?” Shelley said.
His wife, Shelley, a psychiatric nurse, tried to tell him, “You’ve got to have an outlet. By 2009, he had lost 40 pounds, his pants baggy on his 170-pound frame. Meyer would come home and sit in his recliner and brood. But they didn’t win every game, and even the games they did win barely seemed to register. The Gators won their first championship under Meyer in 2006, then another in 2008.
He’s talking about how, from 2005-2010, his Florida teams won two national championships and he was as successful in every American way a man could imagine. Yet he’s sitting on a leather couch in his office, talking about things he didn’t think he wanted to talk about, more than an hour into an interview he planned to have last only 30 minutes. And he has to get a workout in at some point today. He’s had the busiest month of his life getting ready for the season his football team is talented but young. In two days, the team arrives and fall camp begins.
He’s wearing white running shoes, red Ohio State athletic shorts and a white long-sleeved OSU Dri-FIT shirt. Urban Meyer just got out of a two-hour meeting with his staff.
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