by barry horn
the associated press
coral springs, fla. | Morning prayers begin at 6:45, but Shlomo Veingrad arrives at synagogue a half hour early. Enough time, he hopes, to spiritually prepare to ask for God’s blessings.
Arriving early is a lesson drilled into him, he says, by Jimmy Johnson, his former football coach. Shlomo was known as Alan back then, an offensive lineman who toiled two seasons for the Dallas Cowboys before retiring with a championship ring from Super Bowl XXVII.
“It’s all about preparation,” he’d explained the previous night, his right hand stroking his flowing beard as he gently rocked in his seat.
“If we had a 7 o’clock meeting with the Cowboys, you couldn’t walk in at 7. If you did, Jimmy would ask why you were late.
“He’d say you couldn’t just walk in and be ready to go. You have to be early to get in the right frame of mind.”
Veingrad paused for emphasis. “If I did it for Jimmy Johnson and for football, how can I show up unprepared to meet God in prayer?”
And so this morning, Veingrad wraps himself in his prayer shawl a half-hour early. He immerses himself in studying biblical tracts and rabbinical commentaries in Hebrew. As the prayer service begins, he straps tefillin to his head and arm. The massive Super Bowl ring on his right hand looks garishly out of place.
It is the first day of the Jewish month of Elul, a solemn time of repentance in preparation for the High Holy Days. In the midst of the rapid-fire, Hebrew-only prayer service, Veingrad is called upon to lift the Torah scroll for everyone to see.
At 6-foot-5, he towers over the 50 other men in the room.
“What a blessing to be given such an honor,” Veingrad, 44, says afterward as he readies himself for a post-prayer study session.
Veingrad’s football career was born under the Friday-night high school lights in Miami. It was jump-started on Saturday afternoons at rural East Texas State University, where he was the only Jew on the football team and, he believes, the only Jew on campus. It blossomed with the Green Bay Packers and ended on the January day the Cowboys won their first Super Bowl of the 1990s.
“That’s history. This is my life now,” he says, his studies complete two hours after his synagogue arrival and his day in the financial services world about to begin.
Schneur Kaplan is the Fort Lauderdale rabbi who shepherded Veingrad’s metamorphosis from Alan to Shlomo. It was Kaplan who began calling Veingrad by the Hebrew name that he was given at birth and then stored away for almost four decades.
Kaplan calls his friend’s relatively rapid total immersion into a new way of life “rare.”
“To see his transition from living a mundane life, where the important things were boating and water sports and talking about bigger and better houses and fancy cars, to a religious life has been amazing,” Kaplan says. “But Shlomo is an all-or-nothing kind of guy. He has approached this like I’m sure he approached football — with every fiber of his being.”
Veingrad was an average high school player on a mediocre team. College coaches who mined Miami’s abundance of talent were unanimous in their indifference to recruiting the gangly lineman, whose 5.3-second speed in the 40-yard dash was an instant turnoff.
So he recruited them. He mailed letters by the dozens, accompanied by grainy game films. One of the few schools intrigued was East Texas State, now known as Texas A&M-Commerce.
Ernest Hawkins, the school’s coach, particularly liked Veingrad’s resume entry that mentioned a 4.9-second speed in the 40-yard dash. When the two finally met, Hawkins eyeballed Veingrad and asked him to run a 40-yard dash.Veingrad took a giant gulp. As Hawkins turned his back and began walking to the finish line, Veingrad took a giant step forward. He ran the remaining 39 yards in 4.9. He had a scholarship.
He loved East Texas State from the moment he reported for practice in 1981. He found himself surrounded by like-minded players from small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana whose primary passion was to become better football players.
Never, he said, did he hear an anti-Semitic remark.
And when people asked questions about Judaism, Veingrad would shrug and get back to them after calling his mother for answers.
“Like most Jewish boys, I had a bar mitzvah when I was 13 and thought I was through with religion,” he says. “I thought it was an exit service.”
Near the end of his sophomore season, assistant coach Boley Crawford called Veingrad into an office, noted his long arms that kept defenders at bay and suggested there might be a future in the NFL.
“My life changed that day,” Veingrad says. “I dedicated my entire being to becoming a professional football player.”
He was bypassed in the 1985 NFL draft, but caught on with the Packers a year later. He signed with the Cowboys in 1991 and started three games. He might have started at right tackle in 1992 if not for the emergence of Erik Williams, but he was a valuable reserve during that Super Bowl season, his last before retiring.
Veingrad’s time in the NFL ultimately led him to religion.
Whenever a football injury necessitated X-rays or tests, Veingrad sent copies to a cousin, a Miami radiologist, for a second opinion.
After retiring, he moved back to South Florida. The cousin, a religious Jew, routinely invited Veingrad and his family for Friday night dinners. Eventually, Veingrad accepted.
“There was a lot of talk at the dinner table about Jewish things, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. But it was pleasant”, Veingrad says. “Nobody mentioned ‘my new this or that.’ Nobody mentioned where they were planning to go on their next vacation or what car they were buying.”
When his cousin asked if Veingrad would consider attending a weeknight religious study class, Veingrad agreed to go to one as final payment on his medical debt.
Six years of Wednesday night classes followed. In 2004, Veingrad took his first trip to Israel. When he returned, his daily attire began to include a yarmulke and tzitzit.
Along the way, Veingrad and his family joined a Conservative synagogue, then tried a more liberal Reform congregation. They weren’t smitten, however, until they attended Kaplan’s Chassidic shul.
“Once I got over the intimidation of the long beards and the black hats and realized the message, I found authentic Judaism at its best,” Veingrad says. “I had found my religious home.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California