Baruch Haba: The Early Days of Lettermen of the USA

August 23, 2026

Baruch Haba: The Early Days of Lettermen of the USA

Some stories make sense when you look back at them. This one still does not. Fifteen years later, I can point to the programs, the veterans, the families, the footballs, the wheelchairs, the homes, the meals, and the hundreds of former athletes who answered the call. I can tell you that Lettermen of the USA has now impacted more than 1,700 veterans and family members. I can give you names, dates, photographs, newspaper articles, and people who were standing there when it happened. What I still cannot fully explain is how any of it happened in the first place.

There was no master plan, no money, no office, no national organization, and no guarantee that anyone would show up. There was only a tornado, a football rivalry, a handful of former players, and a series of moments that, even now, seem almost impossible. Yet they happened. Somewhere in those early days, I began to understand that we were not writing the story. We were living inside one.

On April 27, 2011, I was on a football field in Atlanta coaching, and I was sick that day. That afternoon, the texts started coming. My then-wife wrote, “Tornado in Gadsden now. Coming across the state line. Two fatalities already in Georgia. This storm is brutal. Long night.” The next morning, two more words appeared on my phone: “Call me.” That was the moment the storm stopped being something happening on television and became personal.

Tuscaloosa was home to me. It was where a walk-on from Southside, Alabama, had been given the chance to wear the Crimson jersey and become a man on the University of Alabama football field under Coach Ray Perkins. I knew what I had to do. I was going home.

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When I reached Alabama, I worked the debris fields in the Downs area near Fountain Blue. There are things you see that never completely leave you. The destruction looked like photographs of Hiroshima or Beirut. Pieces of people’s lives were scattered everywhere. Homes were gone. Familiar landmarks were gone. Families were searching for anything they could recover. One morning, a white van pulled up. Men wearing Tyvek suits got out, quietly formed a circle around what remained of a building, and then carried a body out. That was the reality of April 27. It was not a football story. It was life and death.

When I returned to Atlanta, a Facebook message from Byron Devine at UAB was waiting for me. Byron suggested putting together a charity basketball game featuring former players from Alabama, Auburn, and UAB to raise money for tornado victims. I read the message, laughed, and typed back, “Byron, we’re football players. Let’s play a football game.” That simple reply changed my life.

On August 13, 2011, former Alabama and Auburn football players walked onto the field at Spain Park High School. Think about what that meant. Alabama and Auburn represent one of the fiercest rivalries in American sports. Men who had spent their playing careers being taught that the other side was the enemy were suddenly standing together for people who had lost everything. More than 200 former players and coaches from the two programs showed up. Nobody knew what this would become. We were simply trying to help.

That night, we raised approximately $150,000 for the Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund. But something more important happened. For a few hours, the jerseys did not divide us. They united us. The rivalry itself had enormous power. Everybody in Alabama understood that. A Crimson jersey could open one door. An Auburn jersey could open another. What would happen if we put them together? We had accidentally discovered something. Football could get people’s attention, and service could give that attention a purpose. We did not know it yet, but the foundation of Lettermen of the USA had been poured.

That December, we created a Facebook page, and almost immediately it generated more than 225,000 hits. Today, that may not sound extraordinary, but at the time it told us something important. People were paying attention. The next year, my Alabama teammate Bobby Humphrey and I went into Pratt City for the Run for Recovery. A year had passed since the tornado, and Pratt City still looked like a war zone. We helped raise money for the library and for the children of the community. Once again, Alabama and Auburn lettermen were standing shoulder to shoulder. Once again, doors opened. Once again, people showed up.

But while something new was being built around me, my own life was falling apart. I was broke. Not the kind of broke people joke about. I was financially empty and spiritually bankrupt. I had been a University of Alabama football player, a coach, a husband, and a father. I had spent my life believing I could keep driving forward, but I had reached the bottom.

Then one night, a stranger approached me. To this day, I do not know who he was. He looked at me and said, “God’s going to send His angels. You’re going to do some great things. You’re going to impact a lot of people.” I did not know what to do with those words. I was not Derrick Thomas. I was not Bobby Humphrey. I was not a famous All-American. I was a walk-on from Southside, Alabama. But maybe that was the point. God has never needed the most famous person in the room. He just needs somebody willing to go.

Then came Josh Wetzel.

Josh was from Glencoe, Alabama, not far from where I grew up. He was a United States Army soldier who had lost both legs in Afghanistan, and we learned that he was coming home on October 19. We wanted to honor him. Wayne Salem at Salem’s Diner helped us secure a football signed by Auburn legends Pat Sullivan and Casey Dunn. It sounds simple when you tell the story years later, but nothing about those days was simple.

I had to get through Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport to meet Josh at the gate. Today, if I told you that I somehow found the right airport authority, explained what we were trying to do, and made it through TSA and to the gate in roughly five minutes, you would probably say that does not happen. I would agree with you. But it happened.

I reached the gate, and then Josh came through. This young man who had sacrificed both legs for his country rose from his wheelchair onto his new prosthetic legs and walked toward us. I stood there as an old Alabama football player holding an Auburn football for an American soldier. In that moment, none of the usual labels mattered. Alabama and Auburn did not matter. Politics did not matter. Status did not matter. There was only gratitude.

I gave Josh the football. Then I turned around and saw United States Senator Richard Shelby standing there. Of all the airports in Alabama, all the gates, all the flights, and all the mornings, Senator Shelby just happened to be boarding a flight at the exact moment we presented our first autographed football to our first wounded veteran. He had witnessed the whole thing. He walked over and asked how he could help. You can call that coincidence. I stopped doing that a long time ago. That football for Josh Wetzel became the first of hundreds.

Not long after that came another moment I still have trouble explaining. I needed to get to Huntsville to present a football to another wounded veteran. I left Southside, Alabama, and drove all the way to Huntsville International Airport. Only after I got there did I realize that my identification was back in Southside. No ID usually means no security clearance and no getting where you need to go. Everybody knows that. I knew it too.

But there was a wounded veteran waiting, and I had a football that needed to reach him. Somehow, once again, the door opened. I made it through security without my ID, got to where I needed to be, and presented the football. Even today, when I tell that story, part of me thinks it cannot be right. They do not normally let people through airport security without identification. They do not normally find an airport authority in Birmingham and move you through TSA in five minutes. United States senators do not ordinarily appear beside you at the exact moment you launch a mission to honor wounded veterans. Yet all of those things happened.

That was what the early days were like. Nothing was certain. Nothing was organized. Nothing was easy. But every time we reached what looked like a locked door, somebody seemed to have the key.

Around that same time, I attended an event for Kevin Turner. At the end of the night, a man I had never met walked up to me. He owned a sports merchandise company specializing in autographed memorabilia. Among the items he possessed was an autographed Nick Saban University of Alabama football helmet commemorating the 2009 national championship victory over Texas. He handed it to me and said, “You’re on God’s team, and I want to be on yours.” That helmet became the first donated piece of memorabilia to Lettermen of the Iron Bowl.

Again, ask yourself the question. Why was he there? Why did he walk up to me? Why that helmet? Why then? I do not have an answer that will satisfy everybody. I only know what happened.

Lettermen of the Iron Bowl, which eventually became Lettermen of the USA, was never supposed to be about one man. It could not have worked that way. It was Phil Law, David Gilmer, Joe King, Big O at Auburn, Bobby Humphrey, Wayne Salem, Steve Trucks, Terry Daniels, and hundreds of Alabama and Auburn lettermen and coaches who kept answering the phone and showing up.

We learned something important. A Crimson jersey has power. A royal blue and orange jersey has power. People recognize those colors before you ever say a word. Those jerseys represent memories, fathers and sons, Saturdays in the fall, championships, heartbreak, pride, and family. But when you put those jerseys together in service to somebody who needs help, something else happens. The rivalry becomes a bridge. When faith becomes the reason for crossing that bridge, possibilities begin appearing that no strategic plan could have predicted.

We formed a relationship with Steve Freeman at the Firehouse Shelter in Birmingham, a place that served people many others had forgotten. These were hard cases, men with nowhere else to go. On Thanksgiving, we fed 56 people. Then, on December 15, more than 55 former Alabama and Auburn football players came together to cook and serve meals to more than 200 men who could not feed themselves. Think about that picture. Men who had played in Iron Bowls, men who had been cheered by tens of thousands of people, men whose names had been called over stadium speakers, were now standing in a kitchen serving plates. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody cared who had beaten whom. We were feeding people. On Christmas Day, we came back and fed another hundred. That is a winning team.

Then there was the Florida football. A wounded veteran we wanted to honor was a Florida Gator fan, and we needed a Florida football with almost no time to find one. Once again, something arrived at the last possible moment. The veteran turned out to be the cousin of two-time Auburn All-American Terry Daniels. Later, Terry presented another football to a wounded Alabama veteran. People talk about six degrees of separation. In those days, it felt more like three.

Every connection seemed to lead to another connection. Every person seemed to know the person we needed next. Every football found its veteran. Every impossible deadline somehow became possible. If you put all of those moments into a screenplay, somebody might tell you to take a few of them out because there were too many coincidences and too many things that seemed too convenient to believe.

But that is exactly why this story deserves to be told.

We did not invent them. We lived them.

In the spring of 2013, I stood before a live audience to speak publicly about this work for the first time. It was at the men’s Outback breakfast in Foley, Alabama. It was not television and it was not a national stage. It was simply a room full of men. That morning I spoke two Hebrew words: “Baruch Haba.”

Blessed is He who comes.

The words had taken on a deeper meaning for me. For nearly two thousand years after the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people were scattered. Then Israel was reborn as a nation in 1948. Jerusalem came under Israeli control in 1967. Hebrew, a language once largely confined to prayer and sacred texts, returned as the spoken language of a nation. Things the world would once have called impossible happened anyway.

Baruch Haba.

The Lord is coming.

I looked at my own life and saw a broke football coach, a former walk-on from Southside, and a man who had reached the bottom. Somehow, God was still using that vessel. Not because I deserved it. Not because I understood it. Because I was available.

Today, the organization is called Lettermen of the USA. What started with the Alabama and Auburn rivalry grew beyond the Iron Bowl because the need was bigger than Alabama football. Over the years, Lettermen of the USA has impacted more than 1,700 veterans and family members through programs including Autographs for Heroes, Wheels for Heroes, Shelter for Heroes, and other efforts.

There have been footballs, wheelchairs, vehicles, homes, meals, veterans, children, disaster victims, and families. There have been celebrities, coaches, athletes, soldiers, elected officials, business leaders, volunteers, and people whose names will never appear in a newspaper. There have also been disappointments, struggles, mistakes, closed doors, and seasons when I wondered whether the story had reached its end.

It has not.

When I look back at those first days, I no longer see a collection of random events. I see a trail. A tornado sends me home. A Facebook message becomes a football game. A football game becomes a movement. A stranger speaks into my life when I have nothing. Another stranger hands me a national championship helmet. A wounded soldier walks toward me on two new legs. A United States senator happens to be standing behind me. An airport authority appears when I need to clear security in minutes. Another airport somehow lets me reach a wounded veteran when my identification is sitting hours away at home. An Auburn football honors a soldier from my part of Alabama. A Florida football appears just when it is needed. Former rivals feed homeless men together on Christmas Day.

One unlikely moment leads to another.

For fifteen years, I have tried to understand it. Maybe I am too close to it. Maybe when you live through something, you cannot see the whole picture. I only know that there are stories Hollywood creates because audiences want to believe something extraordinary could happen, and then there are stories that actually happened.

This is one of them.

A walk-on from Southside, Alabama, did not build Lettermen of the USA. No single football player built it. No donor built it. No coach built it. No senator built it. No university built it. We were simply people who kept showing up when the next door opened. Somehow, one yard at a time, those doors became a road.

I believe God was on that road long before any of us knew where it was going. I believe He still is. The rest will happen in His time, not ours.

Baruch Haba.

To God be the glory.

Darryl