Rocky Bleier: From The Steelers To Vietnam And Back

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For generations, countless men and women from around the sports world have served in our nation’s military. But none have a story quite like Rocky Bleier. Bleier won a college football national championship with Notre Dame, but during his rookie season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Three months into his deployment to Vietnam, Bleier was shot through the thigh and suffered a grenade blast to his foot. Doctors told him he’d never play football again. But Bleier would go on to rejoin the Steelers and win four Super Bowls with the team in the 1970s. In 2018, Bleier and ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi traveled to Vietnam, to the Hiep Duc Valley, where Bleier served, and where many of his fellow soldiers were killed in an ambush. Today, in honor of Veterans Day, Tom Rinaldi joins the show to recount Bleier’s incredible football comeback in the wake of a devastating combat injury, and how his return to Vietnam helped him reconcile with the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	So Tom, where do you want to start this story?
0:03.0	I think we should start in August of 2018 on the other side of the world.
0:10.0	I'm in Vietnam reporting on an assignment with our crew, and the subject of the assignment is a remarkable man in his early 70s
0:25.4	who still looks vital and strong enough to pick up a wash tub full of bricks and throw it over a fence.
0:32.9	His name is Rocky Blyer, a halfback for the Pittsburgh Steelers during their dynasty in the
0:39.1	1970s.
0:42.0	And he and I are standing in a field in the Heptuck Valley in Vietnam.
0:53.3	The temperatures are approaching 100 and the humidity is the same, where it is sweltering and smothering.
1:00.0	And there's a clearing essentially in the jungle off a dirt road.
1:08.0	We're at this exact geographical point because of what it conjures and what it represents.
1:16.6	Coming back to this area and what took place, trying to visualize what it was back then, as it is now,
1:23.6	trying to get a sense of where we were.
1:26.6	The place where an ambush from the Vietnam War happened,
1:31.3	an ambush that Rocky Blyer was caught in the center of.
1:35.3	This one firefight would change the course of his life and in many ways the meaning of his life.
1:43.3	As a man, as a football player as a veteran
1:48.1	and as he and i are walking around this field he's taking it all in and he's overcome by his emotions
1:58.0	i don't think about those guys that got killed.
2:09.6	And a short time later, he collapses.
2:13.6	Rock, I'm gonna let you stay down there for a little bit,
2:16.6	but I want this on your head, okay?
2:19.3	John, John, keep that there.
	...

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