Dov Levi - Alan Veingrad

COVER STORY
opportunity to date Jewish girls. To Alan,
who had never forgotten his mother’s
exhortations that he must marry only a
Jewish girl, that was the clincher. He accepted
the offer and joined the Dallas Cowboys.
Alan traveled to Dallas, where he spent
the next two years. Dallas won Super Bowl
XXVII in 1993.
Veingrad tells us:
It is the dream of every American child
who begins playing in junior league: to
win a Super Bowl and rise to fame. But
there are only a select few who ever end
up seeing that dream become a reality.
Millions of people all over the United
States follow the Super Bowl games
closely. You would be hard-pressed to find
any media or entertainment program that
can boast such a large and avid following
anywhere in the world. In fact, the Super
Bowl game has become an unofficial
holiday of sorts in American culture and
many people travel to join family and
friends to watch the games together. For
those not immersed in secular culture, the
consuming passion these games generate
is simply incomprehensible.
After the game, we all had a chance
to have our photograph taken with the
coveted Vince Lombardi trophy. We were
all flying high. We had conquered the peak
of the mountain, had reached the pinnacle
of success -- or at least that’s what I
imagined at the time. If someone would
have approached me at that moment,
after my photo-op, with a picture of myself
in 18 years’ time I would’ve laughed out
loud. I would have insisted that this was
impossible. There is no way in the world
that one would go from winning the Super
Bowl and attaining all that honor and
glory to becoming a full-fledged Chassidic
Jew.
Not long after his team won the Super
Bowl, Alan decided that enough was
enough. Professional football pushes a man’s
endurance to the limits, and then some, and
Alan sensed his body would not hold up if he
pushed himself any further.
In his words:
Athletes who remain in football for
too long eventually have their bodies and
minds crushed and turned to mush.
Football is the most physically
taxing sport there is. Imagine sustaining
repeated, simultaneous blows from ten
300 pound monsters who are trying to
get you down.
An athlete’s tenure in football lasts
an average of three years, and I had been
playing the game for twice as long. I still
suffer the after-effects of the relentless
blows today, 15 years later, and I
sometimes need to apply an icepack to my
shoulder to relieve the pain. Football is a
physically brutal sport, more so than any
other team sport. But, still, what doesn’t
one do for fame and glory
Alan retired in 1993 and satisfied his
mother by marrying a nice Jewish girl. “As
Jewish as I was at the time,” Alan says. They
moved to Fort Lauderdale, and, as Alan
describes it, they began living the “good life.”
Ever since I began playing football in
college up until I retired, everything in
my life revolved around the sport. I had
a hectic daily schedule and the stress
only increased over the years, along
with my success. There were practice
sessions, game sessions, meetings, press
conferences. The frenetic pace of that
lifestyle kept me immersed in the sport
24/7 and gave me no time to breathe.
Even when the football season was
over, our work wasn’t. We were required to
work out constantly, carefully monitor our
weight and muscle mass, eat nutritiously
and prepare for the next season.
But then came retirement, and I was
faced with a whole new kind of life. I had
plenty of money and plenty of friends to
spend time with. I took out my golf clubs
and dusted off the fishing poles and began
living a life the average American only
dreams of, a life of luxury, leisure and
fun. We had our first child, and I began
dabbling in real estate, but Judaism was
not on my mind at all.
Today, professional athletes are known
to retire with hefty bank accounts that
provide them with a solid financial cushion
for the rest of their lives. But Alan wasn’t one
of those. He explains:
Fortunately and unfortunately, I
retired right before the bank opened
up and guys doubled and tripled their
salaries. Things really became big time.
Although, the guys who played before me
would say the same thing (about me).
When I retired, I had savings and
money I could live on, but not for the
rest of my life. I didn’t have that kind of
money saved up. I had never earned that
kind of money. I came into the NFL at the
entry level, so my first year in the NFL, in
1986, I made $85,000. The base salary
for someone who wasn’t drafted out of
college was $60,000. That’s the least
that they can pay you and that’s what I
accepted. And because I played a lot and
I got bonuses, I made $85,000.
In my second year, I made a little more
than that. Then I signed a new contract
and they doubled and tripled my pay and
things started to progress from there.
I didn’t start making some good money
until I went to play for the Cowboys.
Now I was a free agent, and I was able
to negotiate. However, when I retired, my
bank account didn’t have enough zeros.
In other words, I was in no way
guaranteed the good life (in secular
terms) forever after because I had been
an athlete. But there was still enough
money for me in there to sit back for a
while and figure out what I wanted to do.
Meanwhile, I spent my time playing golf
and going fishing.
A Phone Call from a Cousin
After a while, Alan began feeling an inner
restlessness. Despite all the leisure activities
Memorabilia from Alan’s days as an NFL player and
the various trophies he won; in his house in Florida.
he had time to pursue on a daily basis, a
lingering emptiness began gnawing at him.
“There was a newspaper in Texas, where
I had played and won the Super Bowl,”
Shlomo recalls, “that had a write-up about
what I was doing with all my free time,
now that I was retired. The article detailed
the fishing trips I went on, the golf games I
played, and the various other inane activities
I occupied myself with. Reading through
that article, a stark thought flashed through
my brain. ‘Was this really what my life was
all about Was I really this superficial and
empty’ My self-analysis forced me to face
some uncomfortable conclusions which I
didn’t like.”
144 | ZMAN • July 2011
ZMAN • Tamuz 5771 | 145