UT’s Green Beret might not be done with football yet
By Mike Finger on March 25, 2015
AUSTIN — An NFL scout told Nate Boyer he looked out of place Tuesday. He should have seen him last summer.
Sure, a 34-year-old man running through drills with a bunch of college seniors at Texas’ pro day might be a bit of a curiosity. Now picture that same guy in the middle of an Afghan desert, hunched over a dusty, scuffed American football, then firing it backwards between his legs, over and over again, until he attracted a crowd of confounded villagers.
“They’d come out and watch,” Boyer, a former Green Beret, said of his down time during one of several deployments with theU.S. Army Special Forces. “Just part of my trip.”
Boyer has a way of shrugging his shoulders and making everything he describes sound normal, even though almost none of it is. A decade ago, he decided to join the military not out of patriotism, but because he wanted to do more after serving as a relief worker in the Sudan.
