Ray Nicholson recently got candid and opened up about how his life took a dark turn ahead of stepping into the entertainment world.
While conversing with PEOPLE magazine, the 34-year-old American actor Talked about how football played a major role in his life while growing up.
Ray said, “I really loved it. I knew I wasn’t good enough to be a pro. I worked out with guys that were good enough to be a pro, and I think I had a really big heart, but I just didn’t have the physical gifts that other people had.”
“But I definitely had the work ethic, so I thought that I was gonna be a Jerry Maguire,” he continued, alluding to Tom Cruise’s sports agent character Jerry Maguire in the 1996 movie of the same name.
According to the high school sports website MaxPreps, the Smile 2 star was a running back and linebacker in high school; however, his football career ended suddenly after he was diagnosed with a serious infection.
He shared, “My last football game, I got staph infection that turned into MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus].”
“My arm got so swollen up, they literally drew a line on my arm and were like, ‘If the infection gets past here, we have to cut off your arm.’ I lost, like, 50 pounds in a week, almost in a semi-coma, and I kind of came out of that being like, ‘Oh my God, I, I want to be an actor,’” Ray Nicholson concluded.
