Bart Schuchts on elite football culture in the NFL, Heroism, & Becoming a Man

Football, wilderness, father wounds, ministry and men finding their roar | Heroic Stories

For years, Bart Schuchts chased a version of manhood that looked powerful from the outside.

It had all the approved symbols. Big-time college football. Recognition. Women. Parties. The aura of a man becoming somebody. From a distance, it carried the glamour many young men are taught to admire. Up close, he said, it felt hollow.

“I thought this is what would make me happy,” he recalled, describing his years around elite football culture and the ambitions that came with it. “This is what I thought it meant to be a man, and it’s not enough for me. God, I need to know if you’re real.”

In his conversation on Heroic Stories, heroism is less like public achievement than as surrender, humility and the painful courage to repent. The story he told was full of football, wilderness, father wounds, ministry and fire, all around the dawning realization that a man can spend years building the wrong thing.

And even then… he can still begin again.

A hero story that begins with getting called up

Asked what kind of heroism moves him, Schuchts reached for a movie.

He pointed to The Rookie, the Dennis Quaid baseball film about a man long past his supposed moment who still hears the call to try again. The detail that gripped him was the moment the main character learns he is “getting called up.”

“There was something about being called up that struck me,” he said. “It actually brought tears to my eyes.”

It mirrored his own sense of vocation. He had spent years carrying what he believed was a call from God, while living through long seasons where that call seemed stalled out in the desert.

“I felt the Spirit of God use that call to speak deep into my heart,” he said. It was like God said to him, “There’s going to come a time when I’m going to call you up.”

For Schuchts, the wilderness was preparation, a stripping away of ego so that any future fruit could not be mistaken for self-invention.

“There was tendency to make things about yourself,” he said, reflecting on life after football. “Your own glory, your own hero.” He carried that mentality into ministry, then ran straight into frustration when his life did not unfold into the grand platform he had imagined. At one point, he said, he sensed God telling him: “When you learn to love the one, I can trust you with a thousand.”

It took years. Yet he now sees those years as formative. He learned to move toward people rather than the lights. He learned to care for the person in front of him rather than the fantasy version of himself speaking to stadiums.

The old lessons began at home

Schuchts traced the roots of his earlier ideas about manhood back to childhood. He was the sixth of seven children in what began as a strong Catholic family. Then the structure broke.

“When I was two, my dad had an affair,” he said. “When I was five, my dad left.”

The aftermath was severe. The family moved from relative comfort into poverty. His mother, armed with a high school education and a mountain of responsibility, tried to hold things together. He remembers watching her “cry herself to sleep.”

He also remembers that “I grew up with a hatred for my father, and a disrespect for authority.”

Sports became refuge, identity, aspiration, and eventually a mechanism for proving significance. He wanted to be better, bigger, harder to overlook. “I want to become somebody,” he said.

Football gave him a script, and the surrounding culture supplied the rest. Manhood, in that world, could be measured through toughness, conquest, status and appetite. If a man could reach the NFL, become a household name, make millions and live large, then he had arrived. Or so the story went.

Schuchts now describes that worldview as both common and destructive. “I didn’t know what it meant to be a man,” he said. “So I let everyone else define it for me.”

The reckoning came in a bar

The unraveling began when a woman confronted him in a bar during his senior year.

She told him that she and her sorority hated him because of the women he had hurt. He tried to defend himself, but couldn’t.

As a boy, he said, he had made an inner vow while watching his mother suffer. He would never become like his father. But in that moment, he saw the resemblance with brutal clarity. “I’m like my father,” he said. “I hated him. I hated me.”

Months later, during a brief stint with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he cried out to God again.

Then came a men’s event: the turning point of his life. In a room with about 50 men, in his brother’s embrace, he broke down. “Every man in the room was weeping,” he said. In that moment, he heard what he believes was God speaking to him: “Bart, I’m your father. Father to the fatherless. And I love you.”

He went to confession. He surrendered his life to Christ. A priest prayed with him and quoted the Gospel line that has anchored Schuchts ever since: those who cling to their lives lose them, while those who lose their lives for Christ find them.

For Schuchts, that surrender was not a burst of religious emotion that solved everything by sunset. It was the beginning of a long remaking. “A lot of healing and a lot of sanctifying,” he said. “A lot of, lot of, lot of.”

Heroism, in the end, looked like repentance

When Schuchts was asked about heroic men in his life, he could have chosen legendary coach Bobby Bowden, whom he praised as a “good man of God.” He could have chosen mentors, teammates, or his son.

Instead he chose the man whose absence had wounded him most: his father.

After Schuchts returned to Christ, he said, he was able to forgive his father. Years later, during family retreats and gatherings around illness and loss, his father began to speak openly about his sin. In front of sons, relatives and old pain, he owned what he had done. He asked forgiveness. He wept. He changed.

“That’s why I would say my dad,” Schuchts said. “He had the courage to own his sin and repent.”

In his view, that is where heroic masculinity begins. “I’m tired of wearing the mask,” he said, describing the cry he believes many men carry. “I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of posing.”

Schuchts speaks the language of fire now. His ministry logo is a fiery lion. He says he “found my roar.” Yet the roar in his story carries little to do with swagger. It is the sound of a man asking God to do what he cannot do alone.

That, for Schuchts, is the paradox at the heart of heroism. The man who clutches at greatness comes up empty. The man who admits he is broken may finally become great in the holiest sense of the word.

The heroic man, he said, is “humble enough and willing for God to do a deep work.”