OSUBasketballJunkie
Never Forget 31-0
Dispatch
2/25/06
2/25/06
Football behind him, Miller achieves success
Five years later, he has built career in insurance sales
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Tim May
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
SHARI LEWIS | DISPATCH PHOTOS Dee Miller, who played receiver for Ohio State from 1994 to 1999, now sells insurance in Hilliard.
After playing for the Buckeyes, Miller spent the 1999 and 2000 seasons in the NFL and played in the XFL in its only season, 2001.
A practice field in a suburb of Memphis, Tenn., on a cold, gray January morning is about as far from a mountaintop as a man can be, yet that’s exactly where Dee Miller found clarity in his life.
Since he was old enough to remember, he’d always wanted to be a pro football player.
Standout in high school, standout in college, standout in the NFL, take care of his mom, live the good life — it’s the career path he had set out on long ago in Springfield, Ohio.
"I was no different than most guys who are good enough to play major college football," Miller said. "You think it’s never going to end."
It started out great. He had been a standout receiver at Springfield South and was touted as the second coming of Cris Carter when he signed with Ohio State in 1994. But because of a knee injury that had bugged him since grade school, the dream started to unravel.
He had some great moments at OSU, but he still became the "other" receiver to David Boston. Because of concerns about the knee, he slipped to the sixth round of the 1999 NFL draft before being taken by Green Bay. Then he was cut by the Packers and a couple of other NFL teams before winding up on that practice field in 2001, just trying to make the Memphis Maniax of the start-up XFL.
"My knee was hurting, I was getting ready to make what, $30,000, $40,000, maybe, that season. I was about as far from my dream as you could be," Miller said.
"I finally told myself, ‘I think I’m done.’ "
He had no trouble telling the Maniax, his agent and even his friends. But the call he dreaded making was to his mother. Which is funny now, he said, "because when I told her, she said, ‘Thank God.’ "
"Oh, I remember that moment very well, because I had been praying for it to happen," Patricia Miller said. "He had been hurting for so long, I didn’t want him to hurt any more.
"Most people when they think of a football career, if that’s what you want to call it, they think about the lives of the superstars. They don’t see what a person like Dee had to go through, to go from team to team, to be rejected, to see his emotions go up and down.
"Yes, I had been praying for him to be able to make that decision."
But that big decision led to another big question.
"Now what?" Dee Miller said. "I was 24, and, really, without football, I asked myself, ‘Who am I?’ "
He didn’t have his college degree. He didn’t have a clue, really, what was coming next in his life. Driver’s education never prepared him for such a fourway stop.
Or as he put it, "I’d never had a real job."
He laughed about that the other day as he leaned back in the chair in his office at the Dee Miller State Farm Insurance agency near old Hilliard. Now he has got a job that sometimes demands 10- or 12-hour days.
"I do it gladly, because we’re building something here," Miller said. "It took a lot of work to get to this point, and it’s really just starting."
His successful second life started by happenstance. While he returned to Ohio State to gain his degree in sociology, a friend in Springfield, Mike Ward, urged him to work part time for the Ohio Youth Advocacy Program.
There he dealt with children "who had challenges much greater than I had ever faced," Miller said. "The relationships I built there ended up working both ways. I helped them and they helped me."
Then came an off-hand remark from someone, he said, who noticed that with the way he dealt with those children he might consider selling insurance.
"They thought I had a way with people," Miller said.
His being a former Ohio State football player got him the chance with State Farm, but that’s about it.
"I tell players all the time that having Ohio State football player on your resume will get you to the door, but after that, you’ve got to show those people how you’re going to affect positively their bottom line," Miller said.
He went through an intense training period and extended apprenticeship before landing his own agency. He learned to talk the talk.
"I just had a man in here because his financial adviser told him he might want to think about an umbrella insurance policy to protect his assets," Miller said. "He wasn’t interested in stories about playing in the Rose Bowl and stuff. He wanted to know what I could do for him."
Back in Springfield, meanwhile, Miller’s mother is as proud as if he just started in the Super Bowl.
"I have always noticed that Dee had great people skills, that he could talk with anyone," Patricia Miller said. "My main concern was I wasn’t sure how he would bounce back from not being able to play football any more. It seems to me he’s bounced back just great."
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