The NFL player who didn't let a heart crisis stop him

After collapsing during high school football tryouts and having open heart surgery, TJ Carrie made it to the pros.

TJ Carrie was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 2014.

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TJ Carrie was a 14-year-old freshman in Antioch, Calif., when he passed out on the field during the first day of high school football tryouts. It would be a year before doctors found out what was wrong: an anomalous right coronary artery, a congenital heart defect that positioned the artery between his lungs. The harder TJ breathed, the more his lungs would compress the artery, decreasing blood flow and oxygen. 

Doctors gave him a choice: open heart surgery or a life without strenuous activity. With four football-loving brothers and dreams of playing in the National Football League, the latter was out of the question, he said. On Valentine’s Day in 2006, TJ had the surgery, followed by more than a year and a half of recovery. 

In his senior year, he got back on the field, eventually winning a scholarship to Ohio University and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He was drafted in 2014 by his hometown team, the Oakland Raiders. Now a free agent, TJ was most recently a cornerback for the Carolina Panthers after stints with the Cleveland Browns and the Indianapolis Colts.

In 2016, he started an eponymous foundation to provide community to children and families living with heart conditions and education for the wider community. Among its efforts is Camp Carrie, an annual, free family retreat on Lake Erie, to be held this year in July. The TJ Carrie Foundation also donates free preventive heart screenings for student athletes in underserved communities, and it will host a run-walk (either 5K or 1 mile) in Cleveland on June 1 to raise awareness. TJ and his wife, Ty’Isha, also routinely visit children in hospital, where he shows off his zipper scar and hands out Shadow Buddies, stuffed bears in his image, scar included. Their next visits will be Feb. 13 to Feb. 15. 

Now 33 and the father of three kids, TJ has an unbelievable story to tell. What I appreciated about him was not only his perseverance and generosity but also his candor about the tough parts. Read on to hear about how TJ’s scars impact his body image, how his parents felt about him returning to football after surgery, and how his fellow NFL players react to his story. 

I imagine you being this teenage kid on the football field and having this really scary thing happen to you. Can you tell me about what that was like—first getting an inkling that you had something wrong with your heart?

As a kid, it never really affected me, as I thought. It wasn't until, I would say, my high school years, going into freshman year, where I actually started to experience the shortness of breath. It would be little things, just playing around, going to gym class and experiencing like, Man, I feel that I'm not getting enough from every breath. As a kid, you don't think too much of it. You think you're just out of shape. As I gradually started to increase physical activity with track, football, you start doing some workouts, [it became more frequent]. It would be shortness of breath every now and again. Then it turned into almost every time we ran. And then it would be dizzy spells every now and again. And then it turned into dizzy spells pretty often. It wasn't until the passing out, where you lose slight consciousness and come back, to where then it became very serious. At that point it was time to start doing some further testing.

You said you had a year of tests—EKGs, echocardiograms, heart monitors, stress tests on a treadmill—before doctors began to understand what was wrong. 

They noticed that, Hey, if you don't exert yourself, then you're fine, based off of our findings. We had to make a decision. OK, you can be perfectly fine and not play sports and not fully exert yourself and you'll be fine. But if you do want to take it to the next level and you do want to become active on a daily basis as a young child, you're going to have to do a big surgery that's going to require an extensive recovery and an extensive plan behind it.

You were 15 years old at this point. How did you make that decision?

It was a lot of praying. Our family is very religious. There's five boys, and I'm the fourth. As a young kid, you watch your siblings and they become your idols and role models. They had always done football. I felt like the natural path for myself in the family was to play football as well. We're faced with a challenging time in terms of making a decision that can be life changing. You kind of don't know where to look, where to turn. We knew the overall goal was, “Hey, we're going to put things in God's hands, and we're going to move forward with getting this surgery because we want you to not be fearful of being able to achieve your dreams, but give you a chance—if there is a slight chance—to achieve your dreams.”

As a young teen, you don't know the severity of it. Of course, mom, dad, brothers, they all knew the severity of what this meant and what the outcome could be in terms of next steps. But I didn't think too much of it. I knew I wanted to move forward, and I knew I wanted to be physically active throughout my life.

You were in the hospital for a couple of months, and there was a long period of recovery after that. Especially with all your brothers playing football, did you feel different? What was that like being on this other journey?

You know what, it was very challenging. When we first had our procedure, it was hard to find outside support to help us throughout the journey of what this looked like, to help us with questions and answers. Hey, what did you do? What were the steps that you took? How did these things help you? It was a lot of doing these things on your own.

One of the biggest challenges was still trying to accomplish schoolwork because I missed quite a bit of school after my procedure. I had my procedure on Valentine's Day—what a special day to have open heart surgery. But the challenge was, okay, now you come home. I had a huge scar, a humongous scar—I call it our zipper scar—down my chest. I had staples, I had wire sutures inside my chest. For the first few months being in the hospital and not really knowing what to experience and how to feel. I woke up, I had a lot of tubes in me. Just uncertain on where do you go from here? What does this even look like? So there's a lot of fear.

In high school, TJ wore a green jersey that he said meant other players couldn’t touch him.

When you're 15, 16 years old, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know the severity of some things. You don't know the plan that it's going to take to get back to where you want to get to. You don't know a lot of these steps that you're going to have to take to overcome some of those fears. The first fear is just the mental fear of, Am I going to be okay? Am I going to need another one? Could I pass out again and faint again? Was the surgery successful? Will my scars heal? There's so much mentally that a young teen would go through, just the conscious mind trying to process this entire procedure that you went through. That's more than 80% of the battle. 

Then there's the physical aspect of it, the physical appearance. What are people going to say about this scar? Can I go outside and run? My chest looks a lot different than everybody else's now. I have other scars on my stomach that I didn't have before. You go through that phase as well. It took a year of just trying to rehab and stand up straight. One thing that I experienced is, when I had the surgery, you get the staples in your chest and you don't want to stand upright, which would allow the staples to come apart. So for the first few months, I had to walk with a slight bend because I wanted the sutures to heal. 

The process is very intense. You definitely need a support system around you that can lift you up. The challenges never have gone away. It's just you learn how to adapt and handle and speak for yourself, and your voice becomes louder in the things that you mean to say.

How do you feel about your scar today? 

My scar means everything today. Of course, that took many, many years to get to a point where I looked at my scar in a position of beauty, amazement, the battle wounds that I've had to overcome. It shows the depths of what [heart warriors go] through and how hard we had to work to get out of some of the situations. It shows courage for wanting to continue to push forward, hard work, determination, perseverance. Optimism of not thinking that since you have this scar that you aren't beautiful or you aren't great in who you are. It took a while to get to that point, but now it is truly a beacon of the light that I'm able to shine. I still get asked about my scar in my profession.

What do people say about it?

It's funny. People say, “Man, look, why do you have that scar? What is that?” When I tell people, “Man, I had open heart surgery,” they're in awe. They're in disbelief. It’s such a surreal moment for them. “You telling me you have open heart surgery and you're here now doing this?” Not to say that other people's experiences are diminished or less than. It gives them an appreciation for some of the things that they had in life that they may have thought were too much, that they now think, Man, I didn't have that, so I shouldn't complain about some of the things. I meet some people who've never had a bone broke or a surgery or anything. To see someone that has an eight- to nine-inch scar down their chest, you wonder like, Wow, that's pretty serious.

This is a weird question to ask an NFL player, but has your scar affected your body image? 

It did. My chest is different now. Since they had to cut my chest cage open, the healing of it allowed for—I wouldn't even say deformity, I would say alteration to my chest. When I initially took out the tubes in my stomach, I still have those marks from the tubes that were needed for recovery to clean out everything that was in my chest after surgery. For a while, I didn't want to take off my shirt because of this scar and how it looked. All scars are not the same. Some keloid’s a little different. Mine keloided, and the keloid didn't puff up, it just kinda zigzagged.

Can you talk about how your CHD shows up in your life today, in terms of limitations or ongoing care? 

The limitation that I always put on myself, now as I'm older, is really not to get out of shape. For me, getting back in shape, it's always hard. It's harder. It’s been like that after the procedure. I learned and I adapted to say, Okay, getting in shape is always going to be harder. So if we stay in shape, we never really get out of shape. That comes in forms of your active swimming or your active running or your yoga, your Pilates, your cardio treadmills, your cardio ellipticals and HIIT workouts. Throughout my career, I've always made it an importance that we do something active every day. Being active every day for 30 minutes is a benefit to life anyway. 

TJ launched the TJ Carrie Foundation in 2016.

People don't expect NFL players to have heart issues, although some do. How has that shown up for you in your work? How do coaches and players react to it?

I am very appreciative of the coaches, teammates, mentors, trainers, physical therapists who really opened their viewpoint to allow me to still play. It's no easy feat to allow a kid in high school, in college and in the National Football League to still play a sport so physically demanding without understanding men and women who can say, “Hey, he's good enough, let's just monitor him.” 

When I first came out of my surgery in high school, of course there were plans created for us to be more mindful of my physical activity during practices and even during games. For coaches to say, “Okay, he's good enough, and we're going to monitor him to make sure that we ease him back into the fold very, very slowly.” I'm thankful for my [high school] coaches and my trainers. I can't say today that I would be here without my oldest brother. After that process, he took it upon himself to train me with other trainers that really believed that we can do something special here, we can get you back to playing. I only played one year of high school football and still was able to get a [college] scholarship. 

As I get to the National Football League, nothing is ever given. Every year I've had to do a bunch of tests, no matter how many years I've played. 

Different from what other players have to do?

Most players have to do the normal physical. For a player like myself, normal has not been my life. There's always been the extra steps that's needed. It's never affected me. It became a normalization that I had to do extra steps, that I had to do extra work in order to still achieve a lot of things in life. Which are good characteristics to have. Your normal player would come in, he'd see your normal doctors. I would have to do an EKG, an echo, a stress [test]. Especially in my high school years. I would have to fly home from Ohio University—who I'm very grateful for for giving me an opportunity, a chance to get a full-ride scholarship—every summer I would have to go back and do an echo, stress and EKG. 

Going into the NFL draft, you had to do the combine [a four-day event where scouts evaluate eligible college players]. Fortunately enough, I had the opportunity to go. You're sitting in a room full of doctors where it's about four teams per room. You're laying on a table, 10 doctors, they're checking legs and arms and chest, and then, okay, after that, we need X-rays, echo, stress, MRI of all of these body parts. You go through that a ton of different times. That's what life is every year, trying to make sure that teams feel comfortable with still allowing you to play.

Did you ever encounter any skepticism or discrimination?

I never really experienced the discrimination or discrepancies in my ability to play. When you're going into the business sector, and everybody knows that the NFL is a business, you have to choose what you are investing in to the best of your abilities. Some teams may have looked at my situation and said, “Hey, that's a lot. That's more than we can handle at this present moment.” Some teams may have stated, “Hey, it seems okay. He's done pretty well, but don't know if we want those problems.” I can't speak for what teams did at that time, but those are things that they think about when they are in selection of certain players. [I’m] very fortunate that the Oakland Raiders selected me into the NFL, and that was a dream come true. Being a young boy from California and growing up, watching the team and the history behind that team, and then being selected by that team. To say, “Hey, we choose you, despite all the things that you went through. We choose you. And we think that you can make a difference for us and we believe in you.”

Do you talk about it with fellow players? 

Athletes themselves deal with pain in a variety of ways. We almost normalize it. You get nicks and bruises very often when you're playing sports. Even when you're younger—my finger hurts, or my ankle's a little sore, my back's a little sore. Those things become so normalized that sometimes you just forget about them. There definitely have been times where a player or a teammate may be hurting. It's like, “Hey, man, I've heard these things, and it's crazy how you came back this fast. How'd you come back from that though?” You get a lot of those questions of, how did you overcome that? No injury is more significant than the other. They're all serious. They're all difficult to come back from. Throughout my career, I've had a lot of times where I've talked about the procedure to give confidence to guys that may have struggled or are struggling through a certain injury and giving them inspiration from that moment. 

Camp Carrie is the foundation’s annual retreat for families affected by childhood heart disease.

I read that when you visit kids in the hospital, you show them your zipper scar. That made me choke up a little bit because I can think of being a kid and how powerful that would have been to see someone else with that scar.

That's the whole goal and mission behind our visits is to definitely inspire kids mentally, physically, to empower them. Our kids need to see images of other human beings that are doing what they sought out to do, despite going through open heart surgery or having heart disease in some aspect. It is a very tough place to get yourself out of, and you need other men and women to help mentor you, help shape you, help give you the confidence in yourself and the courage to want to try and do things when you may see yourself as less than in some way because of your situation. And that's never the case.

How have your parents handled this?

You know what, mom and dad are scared every time I step on that field. It's a feeling that they continue to deal with. We're always having the talks of, “How do you feel? Are you okay?” [They were] really just trying to put me in the best situation to grow and prosper in terms of whether I needed to see therapists or physical trainers or making sure the foods that I ate. One of the things that I had to adjust with was not eating fried foods, not drinking pops, and really altering my diet so that I could make sure that I stayed healthy. Those are the things mom and dad were mindful of, making sure that I had everything needed to allow my childhood to be as normal as possible, despite going through what I went through. With the fear of, are they doing enough?

That's the question that parents have a lot of: Are you doing enough? Are you putting your kids in the right situations to grow and prosper? At what point do you feel comfortable enough with them going out and playing football? That was the biggest fear for my parents at that stage too. “My son just had open heart surgery and a year later he wants to still play football.” Then it became, “Okay, we got to talk to your coaches and we got to talk to the principal about the plan and how we should do about it.” Definitely a lot of courage that mom and dad had to have, a lot of belief in their system and procedures of how they were still instilling things and to make sure that I was in the best position possible. 

It was a tough battle. Definitely my brothers played a humongous role. Everyone had to play with TJ differently. We couldn't hit TJ. We couldn't roughhouse play with TJ. TJ had to have special time with mom and dad to go to the hospitals and the doctor's office. A lot of things in my childhood were definitely shaped and catered around myself to give me the best possible outcome despite what we had went through.

TJ and his wife, Ty’Isha, have three children.

How did your heart stuff come up when meeting your wife? 

I've never really asked my wife about that. When I got into college, the explanation of my scar never really came into play with meeting people. It was something that only I talked about when there was a question asked about it. As me and my wife grew closer together, then the jokes started to come with the scar. If she touched it, I'd be like, “Aw, that hurts!” A lot of the things started to become fun and games and laughs about the scar, about my chest, about the situation that we joke ‘til today about. It's all playful. 

In the beginning stages, the best thing that I tried to always do if someone felt awkward or uncomfortable is ease their mind with jokes about what had happened. I would always tell little jokes here and there. I actually never have asked my wife about her opinion on meeting me for the first time and seeing that scar. You definitely created a conversation for tonight's talk. “Babe, how did you feel when you first seen me have my scar? What was that like?” Thank you for that one.

We've seen these recent high-profile instances of athletes suffering cardiac arrest, including Damar Hamlin and Bronny James, who was reportedly diagnosed with a congenital heart condition. Tell me about the work that you’re doing in that area. 

One of the first programs we started [at the foundation] was For the Love of the Game, Get Screened, which we started in 2018, which was our rollout of EKG and echo testing. We started with just trying to get the education of taking care of your heart just like you take care of anything else. We do all of these different checkups and tests, yet we don't check on the heart. That program gives our student athletes a chance to find out, “Hey, if I'm fine, I'm fine.” That’s great.

We used to live in a society where not knowing things was the thing to do. Nowadays we're seeing that not knowing has become more detrimental in terms of prevention. Without us knowing, we can't prevent anything from actually happening, we can't make a change. The entirety of our program is really to give our kids, especially our student athletes who are more active, the chance to know that there is something going on. It's the foundation's belief to be more of a preventative program than a reactive program.

[In December,] we screened about 30 kids, and we had one abnormality. That's one kid that we were able to save. Now that information gets sent to the doctors, and now mom and dad and doctor can talk about what actually happened and how we can improve that. If we can continue to do those things, it would be phenomenal to be changing and impacting the lives of many student athletes.

Interview has been condensed and edited.