From a deathbed to a life mission.
Pastor. Success. Drift. Alcoholism. Recovery. And then the illness that nearly took it all.
The man before the mess
I was a pastor. I built the largest youth group in the country. I played professional football. I was a pro wrestler. A restaurant owner. An entrepreneur. People started calling me “God’s Coach” because of how many lives I’d walked through hard seasons with. From the outside, it looked like I had it figured out.
I didn’t.
Underneath the titles and the stage lights, I was drifting. Alcoholism took hold of me quietly, the way it does — a coping mechanism that became a cage. I lost pieces of myself I didn’t even realize were gone until I was already deep in it.
Recovery — and then the illness that nearly killed me
Recovery came. I thought that was going to be the hard part of the story — the part I’d tell on stages for the rest of my life as the comeback. I was wrong.
A devastating illness hit next. My liver was failing. Doctors sat across from me and told me, plainly, that I might not make it — that time was running out. I went through surgeries. I went through fear I can’t fully put into words. On April 8, 2025, I received a liver transplant.
I survived.
Surviving wasn’t the finish line
Recovery from the transplant gave me my body back. But it took time in the quiet after — away from stages, away from applause — to understand that surviving wasn’t why I was still here. There was a reason. I just had to go looking for it instead of rushing back to the life I’d built before.
“The greatest tragedy wouldn’t have been dying. It would have been surviving and going back to living the same way.”
That’s why Better Than Back exists.
The quick facts
Speaker, author, and coach. Shared the stage with John Maxwell, Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk. Author of Connect or Die with million-selling author John Milton Fogg.
Proud father of three beautiful girls. Lives in Macon, Georgia. Host of the Wake the Sheep podcast.