Briana Scurry, a retired soccer star, is recalling one of her darkest moments.
Briana Scurry is getting candid about a hard moment in her past.
The retired soccer goalkeeper is recalling a low moment after a career-ending traumatic brain injury in 2010 when she had to pawn the two Olympic gold medals she won at the 1996 and 2004 Games.
"That moment was one of my darkest moments in my life, and I've had a few," Scurry recently said on iHeartPodcast's Amy & T.J. "I think it's because my first gold in '96 at the Atlanta Olympics was the culmination of all the times that my mom and dad spent driving me from A to B, driving me here, supporting me there, and all the people that I played with and everyone that's ever supported me, my coaches, my teammates."
"I felt that when I was on the verge of pawning that I actually wanted to turn around and not do it, but I was like, I've got to do it. I have to. I don't have stability," she added. "I'm in a dark crater, and I'm sinking and I'm sinking, and this is the only way I saw financially that I could get some stability."
Scurry continued by clarifying that she pawned the medals and did not sell them, noting, "I still had ownership as long as I'm making that payment."
"But yeah, I did it, and I hated it," she said. "After I took the medal to the shop in downtown New York, I got back in my car and I cried. I cried for like an hour. I mean, the tears just rolling off my face. I was in such a bad place."
Scurry said she "really grew" from the experience and is "grateful for it," especially since she got them back after about eight months.
"My current wife found out," Scurry recalled of Chryssa Zizos, whom she wed in 2018. "I told her. She was the only one I told. I didn't tell anybody that I did this. She's the only one I told. And literally, in the next 72 hours, I had them back. She's like, 'Where are they? Let's go right now.' She was not messing around."
Scurry noted that she "absolutely" planned to get the medals back all along, and was just waiting to have "some stability" in her life before she did so.
"I was tired of depending on the kindness and the consideration, generosity of my landlord," Scurry said. "I kept only being able to pay partial payments of my rent, because the insurance company that was paying me disability would decide on a whim to not pay it, and then I'd have to go to court and fight them for it, and that would take months."
"It was just such a nerve-wracking situation. I went through all my savings," she continued. "I was a little bit proud, I'm not gonna lie. I was a little bit proud to ask for help. I was in this hole, in this place, and I just felt bad. I'm sure I could have asked my teammates for help and they would have done it, but I just couldn't do it."
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