Former Green Beret escaped dead-end path, survived combat, and is living his wrestling dreams
Roman Rozell was ready to die.
He survived countless roadside bombings and gun battles serving in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was in a Humvee that flipped. He saw friends get killed.
He got to the point that he just didn’t care anymore.
“I wished something would happen,” he said. “That I’d get killed or wounded or sent home. Just to break up the monotony.”
He can’t explain what made him drag himself out of his bunk each morning, tug on his boots, eat slop, strap into a hundred pounds of gear and drive off into the desert a half a world away from home. But he did it. He kept going. He made it through.
Today, he’s good. A husband. A father of six. A military combat veteran. An honor student. And, most improbably, a 35-year-old wrestler for one of the best college programs in the nation.
He shares his story with anyone willing to listen.
Maybe it’ll keep a kid from dropping out? Or put down a meth pipe? Or get a therapist to help calm the voices that scream inside?
Maybe.
We can say for certain that Roman has plenty to be thankful for, but his journey makes one wonder, just how much can a man take? Just how many times could he face down death and live to tell the story? And what about all the unrecognized heroes who make it all possible? What about his wife, Alicia?
The answers — all of them — start in Apache Junction.
Apache Junction and being barefoot poor
Apache Junction is a hard place.
It sits on the eastern edge of the Phoenix sprawl, halfway between downtown and nowhere, a town of about 42,000 people, nearly all of whom are white and blue-collar. About 1 in 5 live in poverty. And not too many have had it worse than Roman Rozell.
Roman doesn’t hold anything back when he tells his story.
He remembers being barefoot poor. Moving from school to school. Squatting in an abandoned trailer up in Navajo County and using a 5-gallon bucket to bathe outside with his little sister.
He thinks about finding glass pipes and lighters and plastic bags in his mother’s room. Seeing her beaten and abused. Looking for her after she’d disappear for a day or two.
He talks about drinking and using drugs himself. Smoking pot. Smoking meth. Becoming a teen dad. Joining the service. Nearly dying. Nearly dying. Nearly dying too many times to count.
He’ll tell you how that eventually led to panic attacks, anxiety and PTSD.
But he also talks about the moments and the people that got him through it all.
There was moving in with his dad and stepmom. The apartment was small and crowded, but it had running water, air conditioning and cable TV. He was stable.
There was his high school football coach, Max Ragsdale, who picked him up every day and drove him to practice.
(People who study trauma and resilience will say that sometimes just one positive mentor is all it takes to change the direction of someone’s life.)
Then there was the recruiter, Paul Bartlett, from a small school in Iowa, Northwestern College.
Roman had given up on being a college athlete. He told Bartlett, in so many words, “Look, I haven’t taken the ACT or the SAT or whatever. I haven’t turned in any college applications. I’ve been drinking and doing drugs, and I got my girlfriend pregnant. You don’t want me.”
Bartlett replied, more or less, “I’m sending you a plane ticket. You need to get out of AJ. Don’t worry about any of that stuff. We’ll figure it out when you get here.”
(Philosopher Joseph Campbell made a career of describing “the hero’s journey.” He said sometimes the hero needs to be rescued.)
There was his decision to join the Army.
Roman got his girlfriend pregnant for a second time. She told him she couldn’t raise two kids by herself while he was off in Iowa playing college boy. He dropped out and enlisted.
(Improbably, Pat Tillman played a role.)
And there was the Ultimate Warrior.
Roman turned to pro wrestling as an escape throughout his life. A chance encounter made it all real. He uses the Warrior as a source of inspiration to this day.
(Always believe, Warriors.)
Now, he talks more about readjusting to civilian life. How therapy and time management and a sense of purpose have helped him – a 35-year-old, married father of six – fulfill a lifelong dream of wrestling for Arizona State.
Shredded cheese and Taco Bell sauce for dinner
Roman Rozell remembers being about 6 years old when his parents split up.
It wasn’t long before he and his little sister had to fend for themselves.
His mom is doing fine now, but Roman talks about her addiction to meth back then. He describes it getting so bad that sometimes she’d take off. He would need to stretch whatever was in the fridge for as long as possible. There was no way of knowing how long she would be gone.
They rarely had enough to eat. He remembers once mixing together a bag of shredded cheese and some leftover Taco Bell sauce packets and calling it dinner.
Clean clothes were a luxury.
And they moved constantly. “Any time the rent was due, basically,” he said.
Roman remembers going from trailer to apartment to trailer, even squatting in an abandoned shack that didn’t have electricity or running water.
That was up near Snowflake.
Because of all the moving, he went from school to school. Two, three, even four in a year.
He remembers the looks and the whispers from adults and other kids.
He talks about getting bullied for his shoes or his pants and later for being heavy.
So, how did he get through it?
It's hard to say.
Success is a mix of complex factors, but somewhere along the line, Roman learned to dream.
Maybe, it was when he started watching pro wrestling.
ASU's version of Notre Dame's 'Rudy'
How could you not be drawn into this story, right?
At this point, you’re picturing a poor kid sitting on the floor, legs folded, elbows on his knees, chin on his hands, eyes and mouth wide open as he watches Hulk Hogan and Macho Man and the Ultimate Warrior.
They’re flexing and slamming and battling.
Hogan is screaming about saying prayers and taking vitamins.
Macho Man is embodying confidence with his trademark line, “Oh, yee-uh! Dig it?”
And the Warrior? He was constantly snorting like an angry bull, sweating, screaming and raving at the camera like a madman, defining the world of spandex and face paint and hair spray that was pro wrestling in the late ’80s.
“You, Hulk Hogan, see things as you will,” the Warrior said in a famous promo. “But I need not come from behind or take a cheap shot at anyone or anything!”
The kid sitting on the floor is all in.
He’s ignoring the rumble in his stomach. He’s ignoring the chemical smell lingering in the air. He’s imagining himself as someone strong, someone powerful enough to stare down his problems and piledrive them into submission while everyone watches and cheers.
And now that kid is 35 years old, and he’s a college wrestler.
Wait, what?
He’s a married father of six competing for one of the top wrestling programs in the nation? And he’s a combat veteran? And a Green Beret? And he’s survived a bunch of explosions and firefights? And he once was struck by lightning?
This is the same kid who grew up tough in AJ? The one who says his mom was on drugs? And he was on drugs, too?
And now he’s trying to crack the lineup at Arizona State? Does this guy think he’s wrestling’s answer to “Rudy” or something?
You surely see what I mean.
How could you not be drawn into this story?
Especially when you realize he can quote Ultimate Warrior lines from memory.
“Exit stage left!” Roman said. “Exit stage right! There is no place to run! All the fuses in the exit signs have been burned up!”
You can’t make this sort of thing up.
But can he really wrestle?
A college recruiter or divine intervention?
Flash forward a few years from elementary school to Roman trying to make a meal from Taco Bell packets and shredded cheese.
Roman Rozell was now a high school athlete.
He played football and wrestled at Apache Junction High School.
He wasn’t bad, either. He even got his name in the paper.
“Roman Rozell remembers vividly his first day of wrestling practice a few years ago,” Dave Vest wrote for The Arizona Republic in January 2000.
“The kid went for a double-leg takedown, and I picked him up and slammed him,” the Apache Junction High School freshman recalled with a laugh. “And the coach was like, ‘No! No! No!’”
The article was about how kids reconcile the difference between competitive wrestling and the stuff all over television.
Roman couldn’t have cared less.
He loved both.
He was starting to think he could grapple in college. Maybe even at a powerhouse program such as ASU.
Aside from sports, Roman had Sunday school and a church youth group.
And he and his sister were living with their father, his new wife and their two kids in a two-bedroom apartment.
It was cramped, but at least everyone had food and electricity – plus cable TV.
And his coach, Max Ragsdale, saw something in him. He pushed Roman on the days where he needed it and pushed harder on the days he needed it more.
Things were getting better.
But it still wasn’t going to be easy.
Roman already knew too much about the wrong side of the tracks.
He stayed out a lot and hung out with older guys. Before long, they were giving him beer and weed, even as they told him stuff like, “Don’t be like me, kid. You got a future.”
By the time he was a senior, he was smoking meth several times a week.
He had gotten hurt, so he couldn’t wrestle.
Recruiters stopped calling.
He lost focus on school.
And he found out his girlfriend was pregnant.
It looked bleak.
Then the phone rang.
It was a recruiter from some school in Iowa.
Or maybe it was divine intervention?
'You need to get out of there'
I imagine the call going something like this:
“Northwestern?”
“Yes. Northwestern College.”
“Near Chicago?”
“Iowa.”
“Iowa? Like Des Moines.”
“Ever hear of Orange City? Near the Nebraska and South Dakota lines?”
“Dude, I’m about to hang up.”
“No, wait! I’m Paul Bartlett. I coach wrestling and we’d like to offer you a scholarship to become a Raider.”
“Oh, dude, ha! You don’t want me. Bro, I’m trying to kick a meth habit. I’m not even thinking about my grades, and I just got my girl pregnant.”
At this point, the way Roman tells it, Bartlett was more certain than ever.
“He said, ‘You need to get out of there. I’m sending you a ticket. Don’t worry about entrance exams. Don’t worry about applications. Just finish high school and get up here. We’ll take care of all that once we get you settled.’”
It was the break Roman needed.
But was it too little, too late?
Dropping out, Pat Tillman and joining the Army
It didn’t work out in Iowa.
Roman dropped out before he ever wrestled a match.
Paul Bartlett, was true to his word, and he helped Roman get enrolled and onto the team, but Roman wasn’t eligible in time for the season.
Also, he went home to AJ for a visit, and just like that, he and Alicia had another baby on the way.
She told him he needed to come home and get a job.
He knew that was a bad idea. He was about to be an unwed father of two with no skills and no degree in a hardscrabble town where all his friends either did drugs or knew where to find them.
He would have been able to imagine life as one of those older guys getting high with high school kids.
Or bouncing from trailer park to trailer park, stealing electricity with extension cords and teaching his kids to wash up in a bucket outside.
He says he knew the Army was a possibility, in part from the story of Pat Tillman, the ASU football star who left a career with the Arizona Cardinals for life as a Ranger after the terror attacks of 9/11.
Tillman was all over the news when he died in combat in 2004.
Roman wasn’t scared of death. How many young men from towns like AJ really are?
The more he considered the Army, the more sense it made.
He was going to be on a team, like football or wrestling. He was going to travel like he would if he were a college athlete. And he could shoot guns!
He joined up in 2004, and before long he was in the Middle East dodging bullets.
'You're gonna be my boyfriend'
Roman was overseas trying to keep himself alive, but his wife, Alicia, was back in the U.S. trying to do the same thing.
She was all alone in a new place with a toddler and a high-risk pregnancy.
It was not what she pictured a couple of years earlier when she and Roman found each other.
Alicia met Roman at a diner in Apache Junction. A relative of hers owned the place. Roman washed dishes.
She had moved around a lot and was more or less the new girl in town.
They were a year apart and ran in the same circles.
Roman wasn’t seeing anybody.
Neither was she.
So, she walked up to him one day and said, in so many words, “You’re gonna be my boyfriend.”
Roman didn’t argue.
But now he was over there, and she was over here.
They got married before he enlisted.
But now she was alone on base at Fort Hood, where she didn’t know anyone. It was hard to meet people because she had to take it easy with a difficult pregnancy. The little energy she had was spent chasing around her toddler daughter.
It didn’t get much easier over time.
Roman was away a lot. He missed birthdays. Thanksgivings. Christmases.
And it seemed like every time he came home, their family got bigger.
Still, she figured out a rhythm, dragging the girls from home to school to church to soccer. Plus, she juggled doctor visits with meal planning and car maintenance and figuring out how to install car seats and fix small appliances and remembering to get extra cans of tuna and hot sauce for Roman’s care packages.
And let’s not forget that she might want a break every now and then to chat with friends or read a magazine or, hell, just stare off into space without being interrupted by some tiny, little voice screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
Alicia and Roman weren’t talking much.
Internet was sketchy in Iraq back then.
But she would write letters and send cards and generally keep everything together while he was off being a soldier.
She signed up for all that.
What she didn’t sign up for was fighting cancer alone.
Battling cancer alone and pregnant
Alicia Rozell was running the family business when she found out she might be dying.
She had to manage money. Her husband, Roman, wasn’t looking at any budgets while he was deployed.
She had to operate a transportation service. She had three small kids who all had places to be.
She was running a restaurant. That includes shopping, prepping, serving, cleanup, maintenance and customer service.
Plus, she was doing HR work with three tiny personalities to manage.
And she was pregnant again.
Alicia was scared.
The baby growing inside her wouldn’t survive cancer treatments, so she refused them.
“All I could think about was how my kids would grow up without me and all the milestones I could miss,” she said.
A month later, the day before Mother’s Day, she suffered a miscarriage.
And where was Roman?
Off somewhere training to become a Green Beret. That’s where.
He had already gone to war more times than he had to, and now he wanted to be Special Forces?
It was always something with this guy.
Sure, it would be nice to get the extra pay and benefits. But maybe they wouldn’t need so much if he was just around to help out?
And she couldn’t even talk to him because he couldn’t get phone calls during Special Forces training.
Fine.
She’d deal with it, just like she did everything else.
She scheduled the operation.
“Just had to tough it out,” she said.
“I figure everything happens for a reason, and it molds us into what we are today,” she said, later. “I’m a strong, loving mother and devoted wife and a survivor. I feel like I can handle anything the comes my way.”
It would take weeks before Roman would get to speak with her.
He found out she was OK from a letter, which he read after surviving a lightning strike.
A dream a lifetime in the making
Roman Rozell makes getting hit by lightning seem like it’s no big deal.
He was asleep under a tree. A storm came. A bolt of electricity shot from the sky and hit the tree. He could have died, but he didn’t. The doctors were stunned. But he went back to Green Beret training the very next day.
Alicia shakes her head when she hears the story now.
At the time, she was recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on her thyroid gland.
Today, she’s good. She’s a married mother of six. Her husband is a minor celebrity, telling his story to anyone who will listen.
There aren’t too many people who ask her about her life.
It’s just as well.
Roman is the cereal. She’s the milk. They work together because they have different roles to play.
Besides, their kids – five girls and a boy – are all doing great.
They’re watching Roman take on the latest adventure.
He made the wrestling team at ASU.
Then he set his sights on getting into a match.
It’s a dream he’s held onto for longer than anyone could have realized.
'ULTIMATE WARRIOR, MY NAME IS ROMAN ROZELL'
Roman Rozell used wrestling to keep himself sane overseas.
He watched an Ultimate Warrior DVD countless times. It got him through missions, training sessions and plain boredom.
There was nobody tougher than the Warrior.
He had bigger muscles than Hulk Hogan. He was crazier than the Macho Man. And his face paint, wild hair and tasseled armbands made him look like a psychedelic, kamikaze god of destruction.
The Warrior would sprint to the ring like there was fire in his veins, and he’d dive in headfirst like the spawn of Greg Louganis and Evel Knievel.
From there, he’d scream and flex and shake the ropes, sending shock waves through the audience and fans at home.
There’s no way to count how many ’80s babies got sent to their rooms for jumping on the couch when Warrior came out, but I’m certain there were plenty.
A DVD came out in 2005 that infuriated hardcore Warrior fans. “The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior” detailed his career, painting him as responsible for his impossibly brief run on top.
Count Roman among those who hated it.
So, he found the Warrior’s email address (soldiers have a lot of downtime), and shot him a note, in all caps:
“ULTIMATE WARRIOR, MY NAME IS ROMAN ROZELL ...”
(We’ll end the caps here so that it’s easier to read.)
“I am a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army D Company 3-8 1st Cavalry Division. I am stationed at Fort Hood, but currently, I am deployed to Mosul, Iraq, as the main effort in this war!!!!! I make the ultimate sacrifice every day for my three daughters and the warrior spirit that lives within. Like you, I only breathe in the air that smells of combat and you Warrior have given me inspiration!!!!! I own the DVD … called “The Self Destruction.” I see through all the propaganda … and see true honor, integrity and personal courage. … I have shared this video with other soldiers in my unit who despise pro wrestling. However, when they watch it, they are (reminded) of their childhood dreams and fantasies watching you and have a great deal of respect for you because you bring them to their childhood where they felt like the sky was the limit. Since they are grown, they have lost the hope and ambition one might have as a child. Your testimony inspires us here to sacrifice as soldiers and in the gym.”
Roman was dumbstruck when the Warrior wrote back.
“Roman, hello. Thank you for your letter and comments – and pictures … you look awesome!!” the email from Mr. Warrior read. “You inspired me, and I am proud of you and your fellow soldiers for being REAL WARRIORS.
“My family, my beautiful daughters, thank you ALL with all their heart for the incredible sacrifice all of you are willfully making to secure America’s freedoms. You are right, Ultimate Warrior made all of us feel like the sky was the limit … One day you will come home, and the military battlefield will be left behind. Don’t sell yourself short, when you get back use the discipline and principles you’ve been using to stay alive over there to build a successful, warrior-like life back here in America.”
The Warrior died in 2014. It’s too bad he didn’t get to see what Roman did next.
‘What would Pat want me to do?’
Roman Rozell did it.
He got himself into a match at ASU.
He apparently took it literally when Warrior told him to live a “warrior-like life back here in America.”
And on Nov. 15, his 35th birthday, he emerged from the curtain at ASU’s Desert Financial Arena and headed out to become the oldest Division I wrestler that anyone could remember.
It helps to picture this as a remake of the 1993 football movie “Rudy.”
The “Rudy Rozell” trailer would be just like the original. There would be a slow fade-in with ASU’s fight song playing faintly in the background and a little boy’s voice saying, “I’m going to wrestle at Arizona State.”
Then some well-meaning older guy would say what Rudy’s dad said in the movie, “Chasing a stupid dream causes nothing but heartache for you and everyone around you.”
Then Roman’s voice as a young man, while a training montage flashes across the screen, saying what Rudy said in the movie: “Ever since I was a kid, everybody said it couldn’t be done. I always listened to ’em and believed what they said, but I don’t want to do that anymore.”
In the movie, Rudy needs help from a priest to get into Notre Dame.
In Roman’s version, he needs help from ASU senior associate athletic director Don Bocchi.
Bocchi saw Roman hanging around the Carson Student Athletic Center and started asking questions.
It wasn’t long before it was Bocchi’s mission to help Roman complete his.
“I thought, ‘What would Pat want me to do?’ ” Bocchi said. He knew Pat Tillman when he was just a big-hearted student-athlete.
Bocchi wanted Roman’s story, his experience, his grit and perseverance to influence the wrestlers on the team as they pursued a national championship.
Bocchi convinced ASU wrestling coach Zeke Jones to give Roman a shot.
Who cares how old the guy is? The NCAA’s eligibility clock stops for people in the service. Eligible is eligible.
To impress his new coach and teammates, Roman started waking up every day at 4:30 a.m. so he could get to early morning practices.
And he started dreaming even bigger.
A loss, a standing ovation and meeting an idol
Roman Rozell had just gotten pinned, but it didn’t matter.
He was getting a standing ovation. Everyone in the arena realized what he had just pulled off.
This guy hadn’t wrestled consistently since high school, but he found a way to get out there on the mat for one of the top programs in the nation – as a 35-year-old.
The NCAA doesn’t keep age records, but no one could find any examples of an older Division I wrestler taking part in a match.
His wife was there. His kids were there. And so was one of his idols, Dan “The Beast” Severn.
Severn was a star wrestler at ASU.
He was one of the first stars of UFC.
He was a star in pro wrestling.
And now he and Roman are working together.
Could this be a passing of the torch?
'The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be'
Success starts with a dream, and then it gets tricky.
Roman Rozell needed a good support network.
He had that in Alicia, Coach Ragsdale, Paul Bartlett and Don Bocchi.
He needed inspiration.
Aside from the Ultimate Warrior, Roman will tell anybody that he’s a “Jesus freak.” He can quote passages from the Bible as quickly as he can quote the Warrior, but he’s also got his mom, Nancy Donley, who’s been clean for more than a decade.
He needed a sense of purpose.
He’s got Alicia and his kids for that. He remembers reassuring her when she first told him she was pregnant back when they were teens.
“Don’t worry. I’m the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be,” he said, quoting Bret “the Hitman” Hart.
Roman has tried to live up to his own bluster every day since.
He needed therapy.
The guy has enough complex trauma to be a case study.
But he had a secret weapon.
Let’s call them “Rozell’s Rally Cries”? He has a collection of favorite sayings that get him through.
“Call those things which are not as though they were.”
This one is from the Bible, Romans 4:17. It’s about speaking dreams into existence and working toward the outcome.
“Learn to be a self-reliant team player.”
This came from the military. It helped him survive explosion after explosion and gunbattle after gunbattle.
“Don’t self-select out.”
This one’s a Roman original, a catchy way of saying “never quit.”
So, what’s next?
He wants to finish his degree in sociology. He thinks he can help people who’ve been through some of what he’s been through. And he’s been through it all.
After that?
Would it surprise you if he planned to go into pro wrestling?
Because that’s happening. He had to give up the rest of his eligibility at ASU, but he has a tryout scheduled with the biggest, baddest organization in sports entertainment, the WWE.
“Oh, yee-uh! Dig it?”