NFL Star Darren Waller Walked Away From a Dream Life. He Says He’s Better For It.

DARREN WALLER APPEARED to be living several dreams. He was an Pro Bowl tight end for the Las Vegas Raiders and had inked a three-year contract extension worth $51 million in 2022. On his arm, his future wife: WNBA champion and model Kelsey Plum. Most important, he was five years clean from substance abuse and alcohol addiction.

Then, in November 2023, a viral infection sent Waller to the hospital, rendering him unable to stand or feed himself. It forced him to think about what was really important. “It looked like all the boxes were checked, but I was so far away from a fulfilled life,” he says. “I wasn’t doing drugs and alcohol anymore, but the hole was still there. There are still childhood traumas that needed to be unpacked.”

Waller began to dismantle the facade of a perfect life and try to live in his truth. At 6‘6“ and a chiseled 255 pounds, he still looks game ready. His body is densely tattooed, with some intricate artwork on his face. You’ll see the word serenity, a tiny line drawing of a crown, and another of a balance beam. They remind him to allow himself grace, to be positive, and to not overreact to anything.

Waller maintains a smile even when discussing weighty subjects like regret and self-perception. He’s still sober, and substance abuse treatment and therapy have helped him accept some seismic truths.

It turns out that love was at neither the core of his marriage nor the core of his profession. He realized that he’d married a woman whose alpha personality was not only the opposite of his and enviable, but similar to that of his no-nonsense mother. “I was looking at [my marriage to Kelsey] through the eyes of other people—like how it made me look,” Waller says. “Who would turn down somebody with her résumé? But being traded [to the Giants in 2023] exposed everything that was going on within me. It put me back in the space of feeling isolated. I didn’t know people in [New York]. So I just retreated back to old habits.” The couple filed for divorce in April of 2024. Working with a therapist, he’s leaning into attachment theory, a psychological framework that seeks to understand behavior by focusing on people’s relationships with their caregivers. Waller says it has helped him identify as an avoidant, someone who is insecure and struggles with emotional intimacy.

He also realized that he didn’t find joy or purpose at work. Walking away from America’s favorite sport (and $35 million on his contract) at age 31 left his peers and fans befuddled. “I don’t even know if playing football was a love. It was just that I’m good at it, and I know what it’s going to get me: some bread and for people to look at me and say, ‘Oh, that’s Darren Waller.’”

Who that really is was something he had to interrogate, starting with his substance abuse growing up in Acworth, Georgia. A nerdy lover of math, science, and piano, he says his friends were mostly Caucasian and his musical tastes more Coldplay than J. Cole. The African American kids questioned his Blackness, and girls turned away. Hypersensitivity and a confidence void birthed an internal ache for validation and acceptance.

It wasn’t until a friend found hydrocodone pills in the medicine cabinet at home and introduced Waller to them that he felt happiness. That summer of 2008, the teenager sprouted from 5‘8“ to 6‘2“ and, as a junior, started for his school’s varsity basketball and football teams. He says he was thinking, Oh. I got the formula now. Yes, I’m using, but my life is getting better.

While a wide receiver at Georgia Tech, Waller maintained a consistent diet of cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and touchdown receptions. Still, he was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in 2015. But he failed several drug tests, and the NFL suspended him for a full season in 2017. On August 11 of that year, Waller snorted fentanyl-laced pills and overdosed in his car. He committed himself to a rehab program at Borden Cottage in Maine and tried a range of therapies. A year later, he returned to the gridiron sober and played better than ever, earning himself Pro Bowl status in 2020 and that big contract. Then came the infection, the hospital stay, and the reckoning.

These days, he enjoys “a much simpler life,” he says. He spends time lifting weights, running, journaling, and meditating. The creative and competitive spirit that earned him success in the NFL has been redirected to music. “I don’t want to make music from a place of lack, like I did with football,” says Waller, whose latest EP, Internal Warfare: This Too Shall Pass, dropped last October. “Football was to fill a hole. I want to do music out of love.” The hardest work, he says, is introspective, probing his own mind and finding what he’s been searching for his entire life. “I didn’t feel like I was a lovable person,” he says. “So I tried to outsource that love to other people. I’m starting to form a relationship with myself. Sometimes I feel like a tire spinning in the mud, but I feel like I’m getting there.”

This story appears in the January-February 2025 issue of Men’s Healt