Growing up in Ontario, Tyrone Crawford never dreamed of football. He played every sport he could, but his heart was set on making the Olympics in basketball. It didn’t take long for him to realize that wouldn’t be easy, and that’s when Crawford made a choice. “I decided to just kind of go with what I guess God blessed me with, and just try my best at football.”

But when Crawford moved to California to play at Bakersfield College, he had no idea how close he would come to losing it all. On an episode of the Football Related podcast, Crawford recounted a lesser-known incident from his college days, one that ended with him being stabbed.

“I ended up getting stabbed going, you know, to the wrong place at the wrong time. And when I say stabbed, I got stabbed 17 times,” Crawford recounted.

Crawford said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he didn’t explain how he ended up there. He had told the full story back in 2020 on the One Shot podcast, explaining that he and his friends were around local gangs at the time and attended some of their parties, though they weren’t affiliated with them. Gangs like the Crips were active in the area during the 2000s.

One night, while celebrating a close friend leaving junior college, Crawford and his group ended up at a party. As Crawford recalled on One Shot, “We’re all talking to girls and you know they kind of got heated because of you know the girls we were talking to.”

Sensing that things were coming to a head, the group tried to leave, but it was too late. Attackers with knives showed up. And as Crawford recalled on Football Related, it only got worse.

“I made bad decisions, right? The story was bad. We got in a fight, you know, and the scuffle got towards me where I was like, ‘Hey, I can’t go to the ground or I’m going to die.’ You know what I’m saying? So, I didn’t go to the ground. got stabbed a bunch of times, but got away and [these] heroes of mine, I guess we’ll say, brought me to the hospital at like 135 miles per hour in the back of the truck.”

For a young man who had traveled all the way to California for a shot at football, this wasn’t where he expected to end up. He had watched his mother, Tara Crawford, work long hours at a car-parts plastics plant in Windsor. So when he saw the doctor, he pleaded for just one call.

“I get to this bed and and I’m like, ‘Doc, am I going to live or am I going to die? Let me call my mom.’ And he’s not answering me.”

Crawford kept fading in and out of consciousness. As he recalled, “And I wake up and he’s like, ‘Hey, call your mom.’ He’s like, ‘You asked me 500 times if you can call your mom. I couldn’t tell you if you were going to live or die.’”

When Crawford finally reached his family, the Bakersfield community banded together to bring his mother out within hours. Crawford was out of danger, but it had all come at a cost.

Extensive nerve damage left Crawford unable to move his arm for a few months. Most people around him believed his pro football dreams were over, but Crawford didn’t give up.

“I got with a trainer, Eric Mahanke in Bakersville, California, my guy. And he was like, ‘No, we’re going to get it going. We’re going to get you going again,’” Crawford said. “If I was in college at that point and that happened to me and I already had made 8 million, like who knows how I would have reacted at that point. You know what I’m saying? But at that point, I went harder than I ever did. I was like, ‘Oh, my arm going to move.’”

Growing up with a single mother who worked long hours to raise her children, Crawford knew there was a payoff to a career in football. And it worked. Just three months after his grim prognosis, he was bench-pressing 400 pounds. That number only increased to 450 pounds by 2016. 

That same work ethic translated on the field too. He not only finished his junior college career at Bakersfield but also earned All-American honors before transferring to Boise State in 2010. Asked why he picked Boise over schools like Michigan and LSU, which showed heavy interest during recruiting, Crawford said letters from head coach Chris Petersen and defensive line coach Pete Kwiatkowski earned his trust.

“They wrote me every single game and talked and in that letter that I got on like Tuesday after the game was telling me about like, hey, like some of my technique stuff and you know, like some of the things like and I put all these letters on like my window shield and all these letters and they pretty much spoke right to me, right?” Crawford said. “Whereas I didn’t hear a word from Michigan State.”

In two seasons at Boise State, Crawford played 25 games and recorded 76 total tackles, including 27 tackles for loss and 13.5 sacks, and forced four fumbles.

He had set his sights on at least making the Canadian Football League, but the Dallas Cowboys drafted him in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft. He spent his entire nine-season NFL career in Dallas, playing in eight of them after a season-ending injury, before retiring in 2021.