The Twilight of the Roman Empire

The world changed on the morning walk from the apartment at 12th and M streets NW, as block by block the homeless gave way to the drug dealers and then prostitutes until at last Roman Oben was safely in the halls of Gonzaga College High School with the city's elite. And yet it was the path that haunted him, leaving his mind to linger on every corner as he wondered which of these lives would someday be his.

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The one on the street or the one in the school.

"That walk made me who I am more than anything else," he said.

He was always going to be more than a football player. Even back then he knew that. Years later, long after he made it in the NFL and his teammates went home from practice to sleep, he took graduate classes. He accepted internships on Capitol Hill.

His wife, Linda, a law student, loves these things about him. It is, in fact, the reason she married him. "Roman can do pretty much whatever he wants to," she said with a trace of awe.

And yet at that moment she was sitting outside the practice facility of the San Diego Chargers, trying to feed two small boys already blossoming into tiny images of their father, and wondered in part why they were still there. How it was that the man who -- unlike many others in the NFL -- had prepared himself for a life after the game was still inside the building, showering after a training camp practice?

Oben had had the perfect exit. It came midway through the 2005 season, in a game against the Kansas City Chiefs, when he got locked into a block. His foot stuck in the ground as the other man kept pushing. Oben fell and inside his shoe something went horribly wrong.

The bone in his left foot had essentially split in half. Doctors fused it with a metal plate and six screws, then wrapped it up with a ligament from a cadaver and wished him luck trying to run normally again.

Linda thought the injury was a sign that Oben should leave football, as did his mother, Marie. He had 10 years in the game, had won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay and had spent his entire career preparing for the day he would retire. How couldn't he see the time had come?

Only Oben couldn't let go. Business opportunities loomed, television networks called. Still, the game kept its irrational hold. He was sure he had something left, and he grumbled through hours a day in the weight room to prove it.

This is an old story, an athlete who can't let go, compelled by some invisible force to keep migrating back to the locker room. Only it wasn't supposed to be Roman Oben's story.

His mother moved Oben to the States from Cameroon when he was a child and scrapped together the money to send him to Catholic schools in the hope it would make him great. "He can make an impact on any walk of life that he chooses," she said. "He can do a lot of different stuff. He's so well rounded."