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Tuesday, Nov 05, 2019 09:39 AM
PATRIOTS.COM WRITER
A young Nate Ebner (left) with his father, Jeff, and Magnum,
their yellow Labrador Retriever.
The trial ended sooner than it otherwise
might have.
All involved seemed relieved to varying
degrees, as both temperatures and emotions were soaring. With the mercury
outside approaching a midday high of 90, the drama inside a Springfield, Ohio
courtroom reached its climax on Thursday, July 22, 2010, the fourth and final
day of proceedings.
A 43-year-old defendant familiar to law
enforcement was already in jail a year earlier on a separate parole violation
and burglary charge when authorities accused him in this particular instance of
murder, assault, robbery, and tampering with evidence – nine counts in all – in
connection with a brutal slaying. That crime occurred two years earlier, less
than a half-mile away, literally down the road from and virtually within sight
of the Clark County Courthouse where the case was being heard.
Initially, defense attorneys attempted to
establish reasonable doubt by suggesting it could have taken more than one
person to kill the victim, a rugged former rugby player 10 years their client’s
senior, who earned his living crushing old cars. However, the accused’s
unforeseen confession brought the trial to an abrupt halt.
Nearly a decade since, while the admitted
perpetrator sits behind bars, Nate Ebner takes a seat inside the Patriots
locker room. He’s in the midst of trying to rehabilitate a groin injury that
prevented him from traveling to Washington for New England’s 33-7 win over the
Redskins the previous day.
Yet, for the better part of an hour, the
veteran special teamer shares intimate details and fond recollections not only
of an eventful 2019 – his romantic wedding in Italy and poignant pilgrimage to
Israel – but also of his loving father, Jeff.
As he speaks, Ebner fiddles at times,
perhaps subconsciously, with a black rubber bracelet that’s adorned his right
wrist for the past decade. On it are inscribed, in capital white letters, the
words “FINISH STRONG.”
The type of FINISH STRONG bracelet that Nate Ebner has worn
since 2009.
Before you finish hearing the story he is
going to relate, Ebner makes one small request: that you not feel sorry for
him. He makes abundantly clear that under no circumstances does he want your
pity, well-placed though it may be. His intention in divulging his most private
thoughts and feelings is not to solicit sympathy or unwarranted attention for
himself or his family.
His hope? That you come away with a
broader perspective.
“Life is short, could be shorter. Take
advantage of every single opportunity and day and moment that you have. It’s
real... I’ve experienced it first-hand. It sounds cliché to people who haven’t
experienced that.
“I don’t need to air all my business to
make me feel better,” he emphasizes. “I’ve never really been like that, but… If
somebody wants a real message or they’ve maybe had that situation in their own
life and they’re having trouble and they want to have a real conversation, I’m
down for that all the time.”
That’s because Nate’s father, Jeff Ebner,
was a man who devoted every weekend to spending quality time with his only
child.
A man who believed his son should
understand and appreciate his Jewish heritage, but never pressured him to
practice it.
A man who encouraged Nate’s seemingly
outrageous athletic dream, when most other people, had they heard it, might
have laughed young Ebner out of the room.
A man – the very same man – whose life so
violently ended 11 Novembers ago.
Jeff and Nate Ebner take in a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game.
FAITH, FAMILY, AND
FISTICUFFS
Whenever his son came to visit, Jeff Ebner
did his level best to provide Nate with serene Saturdays. As Nate got older,
peace proved far more elusive most Sundays, which followed a familiar pattern.
First, Jeff and Nate got limber by
stretching. Then they’d lace up their cleats and pop in their mouthpieces.
Rather than going to a nearby athletic field, father and son instead hopped on
their bikes and headed to 420 E. North Street, where the family’s auto
reclamation business, Ebner Sons, has existed for as long as the NFL has been
playing professional football. Nate affectionately calls it “the junkyard.”
There, the Ebners would participate in an
extracurricular physical activity of an altogether different variety – a secret
they kept pretty much between themselves. And the authorities.
“Man, we used to chase robbers. We used to
beat the [$#!+] out of robbers,” Nate recalls wistfully, the slightest hint of
a mischievous grin forming at the corners of his mouth.
A busy, four-lane road, Springfield’s E.
North Street runs one-way toward the west of town. Several car dealerships
occupy the real estate directly across the street. Any would-be criminals
venturing onto the Ebner Sons property might therefore try their escape through
the back, by way of a wooded area and old train tracks that mimic the contours
of Buck Creek. In all likelihood, the scoundrels wouldn’t have accounted for
the proprietor and his strapping young boy ambushing them.
“Springfield’s a bad area,
man,” Nate adds with emphasis. “People were always stealing. We knew where the
holes in the fences were. We’d set [the robbers] up, basically, to run out. I’d
chase them, he’d usually be waiting for them… We did it all the time. We’d
chase them, we’d catch them, beat the crap out of them, and then we’d send them
to the police. I couldn’t tell you how many times we did that.”
Whether or not she was aware at the time
of their roughing-up of robbers, Nancy Pritchett didn’t mind at all that her
son kept company with his father, her second ex-husband. She encouraged it,
actually. Having split up when Nate was still an infant, Nancy and Jeff
nevertheless remained on friendly terms. She had primary, weekday custody of
their son in Mason, a community on the northern outskirts of Cincinnati, about
an hour from Springfield. But Jeff and Nate saw each other two or three times a
week, and many weekends as well.
“Jeff could see Nate anytime he wanted.
Jeff was a great dad, a good person,” Nancy remembers. “He and I may not have
made it, but that doesn’t mean Jeff wasn’t the person I chose to marry. He was
a great guy. Jeff’s strengths were, if you’re going to do something, do it. Do
it 100-percent, don’t do it halfway.”
Jeff’s philosophy seemed to apply to all
areas of life, including the more sensitive, spiritual side.
Raised in a practicing Jewish family, Jeff
felt it his responsibility to surround Nate with the same religious and
cultural traditions. He also regaled his son with tales of his brief journey to
Israel in 1989 as a competitor in the Maccabiah Games (a quadrennial event
commonly known as the “Jewish Olympics”).
Nate’s mother, a Christian, wholeheartedly
supported this exposure to multiple faiths.
“Jeff became a principal at the synagogue
in Springfield that he took Nate to on the weekends,” she continues. “He knew
that if he wanted Nate to understand the Jewish faith, he was going to have to
participate in that. He became very involved in it. I had no problem with Nate
being introduced to both religions and choosing whatever he felt he could
relate to.”
While proud of his dual heritage, Nate
admits, “I’m just not a super religious person.”
It didn’t take him and Jeff long to
discover they could best relate to one another – worship one another – through
sport.
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Even as an infant, Nate Ebner displayed athletic talent. Here,
his father, Jeff, introduces him to basketball in their driveway.
DRIVEN BY DEVOTION
As evidence, Nancy Pritchett recounts how
her 2-year-old once carried a tricycle up two flights of stairs in their home.
Immediately regretting her order to take the toy back downstairs, she watched
in horror as Nate mounted the miniature bike and rode it down the staircase. He
survived the inevitable crash unscathed.
Though not always the six-foot, 215-pound
specimen he is today, Nate Ebner never lacked in physical gifts.
“From the time he was very young, we
knew,” adds Nancy, “he was going to be coordinated and good at sports.”
Nate started walking at just nine months.
In organized youth sports – soccer, baseball, football – he naturally excelled,
and Jeff never missed a game. Such devotion came as no surprise to Ann Bailin,
Jeff’s younger sister and an accomplished athlete herself (she swam
competitively for the University of Indiana). Despite a 14-year age gap, the
siblings were fond of one another from the outset.
“My mom told me when I was born, he was so
excited. He wanted to hold me,” Ann explains, her wide smile discernible
through her voice on the opposite end of a phone line. “When I got older and he
could drive, he’d take me places. All the girls love a guy with a baby, and I
always wanted to go.”
Later, a teenaged Ann would take her
friends to watch her big brother play rugby matches, and when Ann got to
college, Jeff made it a point to attend her swim meets on a regular basis.
After college, Ann relocated to Tampa, Florida with their parents, but stayed
in constant touch with Jeff.
“He and I were very close. I confided in
him a lot. He was my best friend… I’d talk to him a couple of times a week.
He’d always be in the car driving to see Nate. We’d call it ‘The Nate Show,’”
she laughs at the memory of those long-distance calls.
By the time Nate reached eighth grade,
Nancy, his mom, had re-married again and moved to Hilliard, a small city of
suburban Columbus and still well within driving distance of Jeff. Nate could
have easily continued playing football, but as the new kid in town, he chose
instead to fortify the already covalent bond with his father by getting more
involved in the sport Jeff loved most.
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Jeff and Nate enjoying a day in the pool.
HOME TEAMS
Not only did he make the squad, Jeff
played both offense and defense on a team that won the state championship that
year. Drake University, four hours south on the highway in Des Moines, Iowa,
offered him a football scholarship in 1973.
One day, a friend invited him to attend a
rugby match and Jeff, frustrated by Drake Football’s frequent on-field
failures, took a shine to it. Although he remained at Drake, he abandoned
football (and his scholarship) to play on a local rugby club in Des Moines for
the next two years.
Word of Jeff’s fire-hydrant frame and
relentless hustle got back to his hometown, where the University of Minnesota
rugby team offered him a spot on its roster. Jeff transferred from Drake, moved
back home for his senior year, and helped his new Gopher teammates capture the
Big Ten Conference Championship.
Upon graduation in 1977, Jeff was accepted
to Minnesota’s law school, but didn’t end up attending. Instead, he continued
to play rugby, first in Minneapolis while working a day job, then Dallas,
Texas, where that job moved him, and later on two different clubs when he
returned to Ohio to take over his biological father’s family business (Lyla and
Jeff’s dad had divorced years earlier).
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Jeff Ebner (with the ball) took quickly to rugby after first
getting involved in the sport during college.
In 1989, Jeff competed against
international opponents on the U.S. rugby squad that took home the bronze at
the Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv. The previous December, when Jeff became a
father, he bequeathed to his son both a passion and a talent for rugby. Infant
Nate first tossed a rugby ball to Jeff while still in his stroller. Later, he
often joined Jeff on the field to take part in club practices.
Before long, as he catapulted in size
throughout his teens, Nate established himself as one of the most gifted youth
players in the United States. Between 2006 and ’08, he represented the Red,
White, and Blue as a member of the Under-19 and Under-20 U.S. National Teams
that competed overseas, including the 2008 Junior Rugby World Cup in Wales.
Team USA failed to win a match in that tournament, but Nate still managed to
earn MVP honors.
Nate represented the United States for the first time as a youth
rugby player on Team USA's Under-19 and Under-20 teams.
Not yet 20, Nate saw his options to
continue playing professional rugby expand at that point, but he had
considerable ambivalence toward any potential offers.
“My dream wasn’t really to go to France
[for instance], learn French, then have to play rugby in France,” he confesses.
“I wanted to be in the United States.”
Because as comfortable as he’d become on a
rugby pitch, Nate felt even more at home at the junkyard.
Jeff worked there with his own father
(Nate’s grandfather) and Nate spent much of his adolescent summers there. The
Ebner sons would purchase broken down cars, strip them of anything valuable,
then crush and stack them to sell off the remaining steel. Before he could
legally drive, Nate operated the heavy machinery to do the job; in his down
time, he’d tear around the yard on dirt bikes and four-wheelers. The outdoor
equivalent of a man-cave, if you will.
At day’s end, Nate and Jeff often went to
lift weights together. “Finish strong,” Jeff always encouraged his son.
Nate inevitably made friends his own age
at Hilliard Davidson High, and, less than two miles away, at sister school
Hilliard Darby, where an ambitious, athletic girl named Chelsey caught his eye.
They had friends in common and sometimes spent time with one another in group
settings.
Ironically, only much later and when a
much greater distance separated them did they grow closer. Nate enrolled at
nearby Ohio State in 2007 while Chelsey went off to Ohio University 80 miles
away. As college seniors, the two officially started dating.
“The timing just kind of worked out,” Nate
shrugs. “We liked each other and have been together ever since, pretty much.”
Just like his father before him, after one
year in college, Nate started becoming restless, though not for other women.
For years, he’d harbored a dream that, it seemed, the time had finally come to
chase.
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Wherever Nate Ebner played youth rugby, his father, Jeff, would
surely follow.
FINAL WORDS
“Super frustrated with that,” he
acknowledges. “You’re playing against the best in the world to just, a bunch of
kids that – no offense to them, but they just don’t have the same experience.
It was hard for me. I took what I did pretty seriously. I’d played on three
Junior World Cup teams. They wanted to [%^&*] around and then drink after
the game. I just never got down like that.
“But I still had at least three more years
of school. That’s when I started thinking about football. I always wanted to be
a pro football player.”
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Nate Ebner played club rugby at Ohio State from 2007-08.
On Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008, Nate and Jeff
met, as they so often did, over dinner. Jeff listened intently as Nate spelled
out his desire to try to play football for Ohio State, one of the most storied
collegiate programs in the country. Jeff, of course, followed the Buckeyes, as
most Ohioans do, but considered himself “a rugby guy” at his core.
“‘I’m all for Ohio State,’” Nate remembers
Jeff responding, “‘but I hope you’re not being persuaded by going to school
there and just want to be on the football team and wear the jersey.’ We had to
clarify that.”
The
two agreed that Nate would put his rugby career in abeyance, not give it up
entirely. If the football fantasy didn’t materialize and Nate stayed healthy,
he could always resurrect it. In the interim, Jeff’s consent came with one
non-negotiable caveat.
“‘We’re not going to half-[@$$] it,’” Jeff
demanded, true to his nature. “‘Let’s give football a real shot… try to get to
the NFL.’
“Once I had his support, I didn’t really
care what anybody else thought.”
Buoyed by his father’s blessing and the
approaching holiday season, Nate returned to campus with every reason to be in
high spirits.
Jeff must have as well. Happily remarried
to a woman named Amy, he was scheduled that coming weekend to visit his family
in Florida. His sister, who’d purchased tickets for them to attend a Tampa Bay
Buccaneers game, recalls, “I [went online and] checked him into his flight,
said we’d have a drink before we go to see mom and dad. It was going to be a
fun weekend.”
Ann Bailin believes she was the last
person to speak to her brother. For at some point after their phone
conversation on Thursday, Nov. 13, Jeff Ebner confronted an intruder at the
junkyard. An anonymously-placed 911 call led police to Ebner Sons, where they
discovered Jeff in his office, supine and severely beaten about the head.
Authorities eventually arrived at the
astonishing conclusion – and were prepared to present evidence at trial had it
gone further – that their prime suspect not only committed the heinous crime,
but also notified them of it.
Dan
Driscoll, Assistant Clark County Prosecutor at the time, would later remark to
reporters, “I don’t know if it’s… a criminal with a conscience or some type of
psychopath here.”
Coming soon –
Nate Ebner’s Fatherland, Part Two: Triumph over Tragedy, and Part Three: Peace
at Last
Photo courtesy Nancy Pritchett
Jeff Ebner shares a tender moment with his infant son, Nate.
