As he steps in front of the camera on FOX NFL Sunday, Jay Glazer has always expected to suffer from a panic attack. Oftentimes, he finds his heart starting to beat quickly, his hands shaking and his eyes darting back and forth amid a feeling of the walls caving in. Yet he has found a way to wrestle with his condition, which he refers to as his “abuser” in order to “live in the gray,” a term he uses to indicate finding ways to succeed amid living with mental illness, including anxiety, depression, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Glazer has sought to give a voice to the voiceless through his work, a critical reason he released his best-selling book “Unbreakable: How I Turned My Depression and Anxiety into Motivation and You Can Too” earlier this year. Shortly thereafter, he began a mental health podcast entitled Unbreakable with Jay Glazer in which he welcomes guests and discusses how to thrive when struggling with one’s mental health.
The show, which is an extension of the book and releases new episodes on Wednesdays, recently welcomed former competitive swimmer and Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps. The decorated athlete revealed his struggles with mental health over the years – including overdosing on medication following his second DUI – compelling Glazer to reveal a difficult moment he experienced in the past.
“I punched myself in the head when I [was] melting down,” Glazer said. “We put this out there and the next day, somebody reached out and DMed us saying that that saved their life…. Those messages are coming in by the week now.”
Discussing mental health is a difficult task for many who suffer from it, but is an important part of disseminating the message that no one is alone and that there are people to talk to. Since more openly talking about his struggles with mental health, Glazer has found himself experiencing fewer panic attacks when he goes on the air. When he does, he immediately tells his colleagues Curt Menafee and Howie Long in order to try to get over it, as he is unable to stop to drink water or do breath work while he is on the air.
“Every person I’ve ever talked to about [mental health] – it’s gotten me closer to them,” Glazer stated. “My people are The Rock, Michael Strahan, Randy Couture – these are the baddest dudes on the planet and none of them have ridiculed me for it. It’s gotten us closer. Open up to show you have more in common with people.”
Through his love for the game of football and success in sports media, Glazer has built a platform to spread his message regarding mental health and become a respected voice in the sports media. His relationships both as an NFL insider for FOX Sports and as a mental health advocate are built in trust and openness – and his career has helped establish his credibility and allowed him to be of service to those who yearn for assistance.
“Without the power of football, I wouldn’t have the forum to be able to do this,” Glazer said. “No one’s questioning my manhood because of that. I can be more vulnerable; I can cry openly; I can tell people when I’m struggling. No one’s going to call me a woosy; no one’s going to tell me to suck it up. You’re not questioning my manhood so I’m able to talk about it a lot more.”
Glazer matriculated at Pace University where he concentrated in speech communications and media studies. As a native of Manalapan, N.J., he wanted to remain in the New York metropolitan area so he could pursue internships and gain early professional experience in sports media. In the early 90s, he was one of the first interns at WFAN and affirms he only landed the internship because he had worked hard in his pursuit of a career – trying his hand at bartending, boxing, bouncing and performing as a standup comedian as an undergraduate student. He also worked at CBS Sports logging tape and was paid $50 per game, an early indication of his earnest determination to find a path to success.
“I was relentless,” he said. “I won’t get one internship; I’ll get four. I won’t get one job; I’ll get seven. I know what my limitations are. I didn’t go to a big school like everybody else and kind of get the experience…. I had to learn on the fly, but that’s what college did for me.”
Upon his graduation, he worked with the National Football League’s New York Giants’ official magazine called Giants Extra in which he covered the team and wrote stories about its players. From the start, he looked to be personable and professional in the locker room and was cognizant of not having the same experience as some of the other reporters. As a result, he possessed an indefatigable attitude regarding the way in which he would approach his job, seeking to outwork everyone else by a large degree.
Being able to put in 100 hours per week trying to break stories, however, would have been much more difficult if not for a friendship he cultivated from his early days in East Rutherford, N.J.
“My first friend I ever made in 1993 was this goofy guy from Germany in Michael Strahan,” he said. “He and I just grasped on to each other and I was so broke back then, I didn’t have enough money to take a Subway to the bus to Giants Stadium every day and back. Michael drove me into the city every single day from ‘93 to ‘99. It was like $28,000 in Lincoln Tunnel tolls.”
After the Giants Extra magazine ceased operations, Glazer began covering the New York Jets and New York Giants for NY1-TV, a local cable news channel, making $450 a year paid in three equal installments. When appearing on his On The Sidelines segment and on the network as a whole, he sought to build a rapport with both team personnel and viewers to gain their trust.
“I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to be a relationship guy,’” Glazer recalls thinking. “‘I’m going to start relationships.’ I kind of have more in common with the players than I did with my fellow media and I got killed for it for a while.”
At the same time, Glazer was desperately trying to land a full-time job but experienced immense amounts of rejection. Over the first seven years of his career, Glazer was not paid a salary but continued to persist through the difficult circumstances. He constantly had the gas in his apartment turned off and struggled to pay his rent and electricity bills; yet his approach was obstinate in that he would outwork all of those around him to break every story he could.
“When I walked in that Giants locker room early on, I was like, ‘I will be the last dude standing in here. I don’t care what it takes,’” Glazer expressed. “Whoever says ‘Quitting is not an option’ is a moron because it’s the easiest option in the world; you could do it every day.”
Glazer began covering the NFL on a part-time basis for The New York Post in a career move that perturbed several of his other sports reporting colleagues. At the time, reporters did not generally cross over and work in multiple mediums, but Glazer was adamant that other people would not tell him how to best provide for himself.
Glazer was not only responsible for reporting and writing the piece, but also selling it. If he was unable to do so, the story would not be posted by his editor Greg Gallo, and Glazer would lose out on the $250 he was paid per piece. The most he recalls being paid in a year working both of those jobs was approximately $9,000. In 1996, Glazer spent a summer in Albany, N.Y. working on a weekly three-hour radio show WQBK with Sandy Penner and was compensated in gift certificates to local restaurants.
“When I was at The New York Post, I had a big story that the Jets were trading Keyshawn Johnson,” Glazer said. “That came out of left field and I got no sleep that night; I couldn’t wait for it to hit the back pages…. I’m riding the Subway a lot [and] your stories on the back page of the newspapers. [That was] pretty damn cool, but that was it.”
Over the years, Glazer began gaining more experience on television, hosting both Inside the Red Zone and Unnecessary Roughness on MSG Network and appearing as a studio analyst on the New York Giants pregame show on Fox 5 New York. Additionally, he began to break a large plethora of news stories, leading him to get noticed by CBS Sports and ultimately joined the network in 1999 in his first full-time job making $50,000 a year. It was very much a validation for the hard work he put in early in his career and led to his making appearances on The NFL Today and across network programming.
While working at CBS Sports, Glazer trained and competed in mixed martial arts, sometimes fighting on a Saturday night and appearing with little to no blemishes on television the next day. When Glazer officially joined FOX Sports in 2004 though, he showed up to his first day of work with a broken rib and cuts on his face, leading network boss David Hill to tell him to cease competition in mixed martial arts.
He abided by the decision, but the thought of losing his fight team was quite difficult for him. Glazer’s passion and expertise of the sport led him, along with Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell, to begin a training program for professional athletes. NFL teams, including the Atlanta Falcons, Cleveland Browns and New Orleans Saints, began calling on Glazer to train their players in the combat sport, and the program has since trained thousands with their methodology.
The success of his training program, along with the difficulty he faced in working out in public gyms and subsequently being videotaped and judged on social media, inspired Glazer to open the Unbreakable Performance Gym in West Hollywood, Calif. The facility has attracted the likes of celebrities including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Wiz Khalifa, Demi Lovato, Snoop Dogg and Sylvester Stallone, along with a countless number of athletes who have all sought to gain something through being immersed in the Unbreakable Mindset.
The gym was intentionally built without mirrors to encourage trainees to leave their egos at the door and work together as a team, prioritizing congeniality and healthy maintenance of both physical and mental health.
“If you have a team and a community that are all training there with you, our whole thing is like, ‘We’re going to train together in here, but we’re going to walk this walk together out there and you’re going to have a team out there.’”
Glazer’s deal to join FOX in 2004 was to cover both the NFL and UFC mixed martial arts, but the network lost the UFC media rights during his second week. As a result, the network created a national mixed martial arts show and tabbed Glazer to host the Pride Fighting Championships from Saitama, Japan.
When the UFC media rights were re-acquired by FOX Sports in 2011, Glazer contributed to the network’s coverage hosting pre-fight and post-fight coverage on the network. In 2018, he signed on with Bellator MMA where he continued covering the combat sport both in the broadcast booth on Paramount Network and on the promotion’s digital platforms.
Breaking news is very much a 24-hour, seven day a week ordeal – and with the advent of social media, its dissemination occurs more rapidly than ever before. During his early days on the network, he appeared across FOX Sports Net’s regional sports networks and original programming including Totally Football, the Ultimate Fantasy Football Show and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.
Additionally, he provided breaking news to FOX NFL Sunday, the network’s pregame show which, at the time, featured Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson, along with host James Brown. Some of the breaking news included the disappearance and resulting suspension given to former Oakland Raiders center Barrett Robbins after he was not able to be found the day before Super Bowl XXXVIII; the subpoena of 10 NFL players as part of the BALCO investigation; and the return of Joe Gibbs to return to coach Washington for a second time in 2004.
In 2007, Glazer was moved to FOX NFL Sunday permanently as its NFL insider and just two weeks into the new job, he broke one of the most impactful stories of his career. He had obtained exclusive video footage of the New England Patriots illicit recording of the New York Jets’ defensive signals and aired it on the show, resulting in the commencement of a league investigation and hefty penalties levied on Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and the team.
Since then, he has continued to bring viewers stories and interviews, including Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg in 2008; Jay Cutler discussing why he wanted to be traded from the Denver Broncos; and the resolution of collective bargaining negotiations that nearly canceled the 2011 NFL season. These large news stories do not represent all of the information he has obtained though since some of it is off-the-record or on deep background.
“As an insider – at least for me – I put out a very, very, very, very small percentage of what I’m told because if somebody tells me it’s off-the-record, I honor that,” he said. “If somebody says, ‘Hey, you can’t use this but…,’ you can’t use that. It’s also information you have [so] as I’m telling a story I know what’s true and what’s not.”
Glazer ensures his stories are correct, as he is focused on being accurate in the information he obtains and presents by triangulating sources. When FOX Sports broke the story of the jersey then-New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady had donned when he won Super Bowl LI, it had been held for a few additional weeks to confirm the information was correct.
“I have missed out on way more stories than I’ve broken because I’ve waited for the third source,” Glazer said. “The reason why I do three sources is if I just talk to two guys, one of them may have told the other one [and] then it’s really just one source…. I get really, really, really conservative making sure I have three independent sources on everything. That’s me. Other people may not have that same penchant for accuracy; I always have.”
A large majority of sports news is initially reported on Twitter by top industry insiders, such as Ian Rapoport of NFL Network, Adam Schefter of ESPN and, for several years, Glazer. He does not run his own Twitter account because of the detrimental effects he has seen it have on his own temperament and those around him.
“When we got bullied on the playground growing up, it sucked for a month,” Glazer explained. “Now we’re seeing hate a thousand times a second and I don’t think the human condition is meant for that. When you used to break a story, you used to tweet it and eventually I said, ‘I don’t work for Twitter; I work for FOX. So I’m going to break my stuff on FOX; not on Twitter.’”
The platform, which is now owned and operated by Elon Musk, has inexplicably altered the way people communicate with one another. In fact, one time after a Conor McGregor fight, a fan approached Glazer and told him that he hated UFC, only to later reveal he was lying just so he could have a conversation with Glazer – acting like the conversation was taking place through a computer screen instead of being face-to-face.
“People talk to you now the way they tweet at you, and it’s not culture; it’s not okay,” Glazer said. “Where I used to kind of bask in breaking stories on Twitter, I now tend to hardly look at it because it’s more important that I take care of what’s between my ears.”
Glazer considers himself as being part of a family on FOX NFL Sunday and spends time with the cast of the show outside of the studio both during the season and during the offseason. On the show, Glazer brings fans original reporting and stories informing them about the latest around the world of professional football.
“We’re so different,” Glazer said. “We’re kind of like the first family of football. People are now watching it with grandkids and introducing their grandkids to us. It’s pretty damn cool and our ratings have never been higher.”
Some of the stories he has broken on FOX NFL Sunday include the New England Patriots violating league rules in filming the Cincinnati Bengals sideline 2019, the trade of Odell Beckham Jr. from the New York Giants and the inevitable exit of Jim Harbaugh as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. He has a stellar track record in getting stories factually accurate and effectively reporting them to his audience and was named “Media Person of the Year” by Sports Illustrated in 2007.
In addition to his television work, which has also included contributions to NFL Network, Spike TV and regular appearances on HBO’s Ballers series along with his stint writing for The Athletic, he and Nate Boyer founded the Merging Vets and Players Foundation (MVP): a non-profit organization that looks to match combat veterans with former professional athletes.
Its goal is to ease their transition into everyday life, giving them a direct teammate and a network of people going through the same transition for which they can reach out for assistance. The charity and building his mental health awareness brand, along with his work as an NFL insider, are Glazer’s genuine passions in life, and it helps him combat his own hardships as he tries to destigmatize mental health and spark an ongoing conversation.
“My levels of depression and anxiety are so bad,” Glazer said. “I’m feeling some of it but I’m working with my therapist to be able to really feel it even more because I’ve never felt worthy of praise or part of my mental health issues tells me I’m not worth being loved. I don’t know how to love myself from the inside out and I always feel like the universe hates me and it’s crashing down around me. It’s an everyday thing in my life.”
FOX has been supportive towards Glazer’s outside endeavors, inviting him to speak to the company about mental health and purchasing 1,500 copies of his book to distribute to employees. Glazer knows he has a significant contribution to make to the world that far exceeds the bounds of professional football and encourages those struggling with mental health to be open about it and find ways to withstand its associated burdens.
“Now I’m doing a lot of speaking engagements around this and traveling the country and speaking to different businesses and groups,” Glazer said. “I had a 16-year-old girl come to one of the events recently to tell me she started attempting suicide at 14. She’s now 16, and my book has changed her life and she won’t try it again. That’s way bigger than any story I could ever break, and it’s pretty damn cool.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 (or 800-273-8255) to connect with a trained counselor, or visit the NSPL website.
