Through the eyes of Rob Pate

“Rob Pate does not like being uncomfortable,” says his wife, Dana. “But when you look at his life, there have been so many moments when the rug was pulled from underneath him…”

Adversity tops the list of overused terms in sports, yet ‘overcoming adversity’ applies to everything Dr. Rob Pate experienced on the road to finding peace in life.

Pate, a onetime football player at Auburn, has faced many daunting challenges and hardships that have shaped him into the award-winning optometrist he is today. A life filled with moments that felt like the times you lost your glasses and nobody is around to help. Except incredibly worse.

None of it went according to the plan he and Dana set out. In eighth grade, when Rob and Dana were dating, he got on one knee in her parents’ basement and told her, “one day, I’m going to ask you to marry me before we get out of high school.” Rob proposed to Dana during their senior year of high school at his hometown church at Center Point, Ala. They were married the summer before their junior year at Auburn.

Dana describes her husband as a man that hates surprises and always plans ahead.

The Pates had it all worked out: marriage, life in the NFL, then back to Auburn for graduation. Perfect.

On April 21, 2001, the NFL Draft began. Life would never be the same.

That day, the Pates were at Rob’s parents’ house in Center Point, Ala. anxiously waiting. When no NFL teams called, they took a spontaneous, one-night trip to Panama City, Fla. a few days later. Money was tight. Dana described the hotel as “a janky piece of crap.”

The future for the former All-SEC defensive back was as blurry as his eyesight without glasses or contacts. “It was another solemn moment of ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do’,” said Dana.

That weekend, intended as an escape from the distress of possibly not playing in the NFL, led to a future brighter than the Florida sun. At the hotel in Panama City, Pate had a call from his parents’ back home -- the San Diego Chargers wanted him to report to training camp at 7 a.m. Sunday.

“It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday,” Dana said.

Through the speed of his red Pontiac Grand-Am and the convenience of a red-eye flight, he made it in time. This was one surprise that worked out, but many more surprises were headed their way.

Football had been integral to Rob Pate’s life “since I was 5 years old,” he said.

Between his sophomore and junior year as an Auburn player, Coach Terry Bowden was fired and Tommy Tuberville was hired. A safety almost his entire life, the new coach changed his familiar view from the center of the field to 10 yards deep.

“My position no longer existed,” Pate said. “[Before], I would rush the passer, spend time in man-to-man coverage against the receivers. And it let me drop back as a safety and line up as a linebacker.”

Pate was moved to a ‘rover’ position in John Lovett’s 4-3 defense. The main focus of this position is to cover the opposition’s best player. “It was really an honor,” Pate said. “But at the time I viewed it as a kick in the gut. Plays were now happening away from me and behind me.”

Adapting to new positions on the field was going to take a lot of practice and work, hard work. A Texas native named Kevin Yoxall ingrained the motto “work, hard work” into every football player as Auburn’s strength and conditioning coach.

“The first thing Tuberville told us was ‘I just hired two men [strength and conditioning coaches Yoxall and Phillip Lolley] that can physically throw you out the window’,” Pate said.

With Yoxall, Pate and his teammates quickly learned they would have to endure some of the most intense strength training of their football careers.

“The biggest thing I remember was the first time we met him,” said Pate. “Coach ‘Yox’ lined us up on the sidelines and we ran three 200-yard sprints [called ‘gassers’]. All the coaches were there and they did not say a word. We would run from one half of the field to the other side line and back.”

They had to make it in certain times. Yoxall told them that was the minimum amount of running they were going to do for them that season. “We were so out of shape as a team that we had guys throw up and quit after that. I remember struggling to get under the allotted time.”

Although the workouts were brutal, Pate believed that if he could make it through them, he could get through anything in life.

“Rob was a part of a core group of guys that totally bought into the program,” Yoxall says today, adding that he was always ready to work and was mystified by his effort as a player. He describes Pate as the “classic overachiever.”

Pate saw his strength coach as a father figure and mentor who molded him to take on any obstacle in life.

“By the end of the winter, the players could run 12 gassers,” Yoxall said.

However, no amount of gruesome workouts could prepare Pate for the summer before his senior year. Dana said he spent many moments alone.

“It came out of nowhere,” said Dana. “We were headed to the beach with some friends and he got really sick. The whole time we were there, he was feeling it.”

That whole summer, no one knew what was wrong with Pate. He spent a majority of his summer at the doctor’s office. No diagnosis was ever offered.

“I just had so many problems with my muscles,” Rob said. “I was constantly having muscle spasms and muscle cramps.” Doctors rotated different medicines and even injected him with steroids. The side effects made it a constant battle just to get out onto the practice field.

“I remember having to adjust a lot of his workout schedule because fatigue and loss of strength was a huge part of this,” Yoxall said.

“It consumed him, mentally,” says Dana, her voice cracking. “As a wife, I didn’t know what to do.” She was helpless, watching her husband suffer with no way to alleviate his pain.

He’d lay in bed for days. His family worried.

He didn’t want to talk about it.

He wanted to be left alone.

“His natural state is a quiet and introverted thinker,” Dana said. “Before game days he would internalize a lot of what was going on.”

Pate knew every day that passed with him in bed and not on the field sent his NFL stock value down.

However, after many quiet days of not knowing the illness, he miraculously got healthy and was able to play the first game of his senior year. Things were going Pate’s way again.

He played well, but felt even better after discovering Dana was pregnant with their first child, Claire, before facing Georgia nine games later.

“I had an interception in that [Georgia] game, then one against Alabama and one in the SEC Championship,” Pate said. “That news of my kid was a good luck charm.”

Now, throughout the years, he’s had five good luck charms: Claire, Ellie, Jenna, John and James.

Becoming a father of five comes later, though. There was still another mountain to climb. That came during Pate’s time as a San Diego Charger in 2001.

As a signed free agent, no starting position was guaranteed. He was already uncertain of his future because he could be cut at any time. “I told them, ‘If you’re going to cut me, cut me now.”

If Pate was cut from the Chargers too late, he would miss the deadline to apply for the fall semester at Auburn and delay his plans to get his degree.

Sometimes though, life hits you back in the most staggering ways.

“The best play I made in a Chargers uniform was my last football play ever; We were running a blitz, and I was covering the slot receiver man-to-man. The quarterback saw [it] was going to be the man-to-man cover, so he threw a lob pass to the receiver, and I met him right as he caught the ball. I hit him hard and the stadium made that ‘oooh’ sound.”

When he hit the ground, his shoulder came out of his socket; when he got back, up it popped back into place. He left the field and didn’t return for halftime. He was released the next day after the team doctors claimed he could still play.

He discovered back in Auburn that he required surgery to play football. This led to him filing a grievance suit against the Chargers. “They ended up paying me for 10 games,” he said. “NFL teams can’t cut you when you’re injured.”

Rob had missed the fall cutoff to reapply to Auburn by two weeks. “Dana and I were married, and we just had our first child,” he said. “I honestly just had enough.”

He knew football wasn’t going to last forever. But, back in Auburn, Dana said they were on the floor of their two-bedroom home on McKinley Avenue in Auburn saying “what are we going to do?”

Rob landed a job at Cooper Tires in Auburn, but, again, it was going to take a lot of work—8 a.m. to 5 p.m. hard work. Dana worked at a daycare so she could watch over Claire.

“In every endeavor I’ve seen in his life--in our relationship, our marriage, our children and even when he was at the tire store,” said Dana, voice faltering, “the fabric of his nature is to compete, to perform, to pour himself in and do his best.”

Toward the beginning of 2001, the former NFL player was back in school. He graduated from Auburn in 2002 with a bachelor of science degree, then graduated from UAB’s optometry school in 2007.

His competitive spirit got him an offering to be sports director for the Andrews Institute at Pensacola, Fla. He was also offered a job to stay in Auburn with Basden Eyecare. But the young alumnus wanted to go where he was most comfortable, and that was back to Birmingham.

Pate served patients for eight years at EyeCare Associates in Hoover, Ala. before joining Basden EyeCare in the familiar city of Auburn, where he currently works.

He has also written about his struggles and achievements in great detail in two books. A Tiger’s Walk: Memoirs of an Auburn Football Player tells Pate’s entire story, starting when he first picked up a football. The Way of the Athlete explains itself on the cover: “The role of sports in building character for academic, business and personal success.”

Finally, free of uncertainty, his present and future are as clear as a fresh pair of lenses.

“The valleys are surrounded by mountains and we keep climbing,” Pate says today. “We put our faith in God, so I find my peace in knowing that I’ve given it everything I’ve got.”

Pate has won a lot of football games, and also won the 2014 Young Optometrist of the Year Award from the American Optometric Association. But he is now just focused on winning in life and finding peace. Many times, just like throughout college, it is done when he is alone, but now Pate has his family behind him as well.

“At times, I’d be on the bus seeing people tailgate and just have a knot in my stomach,” Rob says. “You think it would be nice to switch places. But I know it opened so many doors for me, and if I could go back again I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Experiencing so many difficult situations has always let Pate know he will see the other side. He knows he can’t control everything life throws at him, so now his goal is to find peace with it.

“In totality, I wish I could always say it was from peace with God,” said Rob. “But in reality it’s been performance. Peace has come from being able to perform well for people, make good grades, be a good doctor, being able to impress a girlfriend or just people in general. I am past that now though; my peace has come from my salvation, my faith and my family.”