Joey Tanona was a junior in high school when they told him he would go to the NFL one day.

“He was the dude,” a high school teammate says now. “You could start to see the vision.”

The projection came from a Midwest football recruiting analyst for 247Sports who compared him to hulking Miami Dolphins center Michael Deiter. The analyst said he was polished and explosive, evidenced by his all-state shot put and discus numbers.

Tanona was always big and athletic, those who know him say. But as he grew older, and bigger, and found in football what others might find in art or religion, the athleticism never left him even as the pounds flew on.

By age 15, he was listed at 6 foot 6 and 285 pounds, the starting left tackle for 6A Zionsville his sophomore year.

“He blocked for me,” says Colin Price, the team’s running back and Tanona’s friend since elementary school.

The two would often talk about playing in the pros even while their football helmets looked like basketballs sitting on their grade school shoulders. By middle school, Joey was still pushing his NFL dream.

“I’m like, ‘Yeah yeah, everyone says that,’” Price says. “But by high school it was like, ‘I believe you, bro. I believe you.’”

Word soon spread about Tanona, not yet old enough to have a driver's license, tossing opponents with facial hair onto the ground like dirty laundry. Iowa and Nebraska found him early. Then he received offers from college football royalty: Michigan, Ohio State, LSU, Notre Dame.

“You can still watch his highlights,” Price says.

Footage from that sophomore season is loaded onto Tanona’s 247Sports recruiting profile. He’s circled before every clip, but he’d be easy to find if he wasn’t. His shoulder pads clear the helmets of the rest of the line, offense and defense. In a full crouch, he’s as tall as the referees.

Once the ball is snapped, his gifts in the sport become more apparent as he piledrives the player opposite him in one direction, a 45-degree plane downfield and to the grass. Sometimes, by accident, that player takes another with him. The kid who received Tanona’s initial blow in one clip goes stumbling backward and knocks into a teammate, and they both fall down like bowling pins.

Price, wearing No. 33, scampers 15 yards down the field with only fingertips grazing him. He ran for nearly 2,000 yards that year.

The summer after, clamoring for Tanona’s commitment quieted; he announced his intention to play for Notre Dame.

“Growing up in Indiana, being Catholic,” Tanona says, “that was a place where, looking at it, that’s the goal of being a football player.”

He never played a snap for the Irish.

Joey’s mother, Kelly Bendis, remembers driving to the place where her son’s football career died like it was yesterday.

“It’s like you’re watching yourself in a movie,” she says.

She had woken early to see off Joey and her daughter, Meggie, for football practice the morning of March 14, 2022. Meggie could not be reached for this story.

Meggie had wanted to do her mom a favor, Kelly remembers, and take her younger brother to practice. She could also spend some time with him that way. She was attending Kansas University, and visiting South Bend on spring break.

The Tanona kids left the house at dawn before most of the neighborhood’s alarm clocks had rung. Then Kelly received a call; it was Meggie.

There had been an accident. Everyone was OK. Meggie had wanted Joey to call, but he was too disoriented to dial the phone and his ear was ringing.

“It makes my stomach churn as I talk about it,” Kelly says.

“I just got there, and it was the campus police and the driver of the other car, and Joey and my daughter are standing there on the curb corner,” Kelly says. “And Joey's worried about calling Josh Lugg (a star tackle on the team) and letting him know that he's going to be late for practice, but he's coming.

“And so he's clearly only got one thing on his mind, which is going to practice,” she laughs. “And that's how Joey is, like, he's not going to be the guy that's late to practice.”

They went to the hospital and ran the tests. Joey had a severe concussion, but that was all.

“At first Meggie thought I was like, gone, gone,” he says.

In the morning haze, Joey’s older sister had misjudged the proximity of an oncoming car and turned left on a blinking yellow arrow.

“We’re turnin’,” Joey says, “Car came right into my side.”

He makes a sound as if he’s describing a baseball smacked off a metal bat: “Poohng.” His two fists knock together.

His seat was reclined when it happened, and at his sister’s scream he looked out his window. In the split-second before impact, he had time for a single thought: “I was just like, ‘Shoot,’” he says.

Doctors told him it was better that he wasn’t bracing for it. The force against Joey’s body was equivalent to about 6,000 pounds.

“I was in the hospital for about a day,” Joey says. “But after that, like, thank God, it wasn’t brutal, but there were persisting issues. I had troubles with vertigo and migraines and lost the majority of hearing in my right ear. It sounds like someone screaming at you from underwater. So it’s very faint.”

He had regular meetings with team doctors, and by May, retirement was on the table. In June, it was pushed to the forefront.

“I didn’t want to do anything like that,” he says, and pauses to take a deep breath. “Like I did not want to stop playing football at any cost.”

In a game where success equals doling out more damage than you take in return, any injury a player can walk through is usually one they can play through. “You get beat up every day,” Joey says. “And you're always hurting, but you know, you always find a way.”

And for a month that fall, Joey played through it. He was brought along slowly.

“I had to relearn everything,” he says. But eventually the stopping whistle was blown too many times on Joey’s account. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t dominating his peers, but the opposite. “I was holding everyone back.”

“I think he went through the stages of grief,” Price says. “Like in denial, he was trying to come back. And then he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it.”

Joey tried to describe that consequential meeting with doctors.

“Um, that day was, rough,” he says through pauses. “Finally being told I wasn’t a football player anymore, it’s surreal.”

He medically retired that August, less than five months after the accident.

“He’s always been designed for football,” Kelly says.

She still remembers taking a middle school-aged Joey to strength and conditioning with the high school team once he’d been invited. On the way to his first lift he told her, point-blank from the passenger seat, that this was what he wanted to do for as long as he could.

“As a mom, this is your child that likes to play football,” Kelly says. “It just was sort of ‘Oh, OK.’”

Kelly had Joey with her ex-husband, Joe Tanona, a former college football player and officer in the Army. They have not been together since Joey was young, and Kelly had wanted her only son to stay far away from football. Soccer or diving was preferred – anything but football.

But Kelly says that early on, she could tell Joey would put other kids in far more danger playing soccer than he would ever face on the football field. He gravitated to tackling, and by grade school the game was his “truest love.”

“Every little kid wants to be like their dad,” Joey says.

Joey has another older sister, Caitlin, and no brothers. Two boys who lived next door in Zionsville filled the gap. The older of the two, Sam, became an older brother for Joey.

There were more brothers along the way, mostly supplied through football. Aiden Krein joined Joey and Price in seventh grade when Krein’s dad got a job with the Colts, and the three were close from then on. Krein, Joey and Price formed a group chat on Snapchat in middle school. It’s still called “Butter my biscuit,” though Price has no idea where they got that name.

When Joey’s star rose, Krein and Price said they would be at his draft party when he went pro. Joey texted the group chat about his accident in the days that followed.

“We just knew he got a concussion,” Price says. “We didn't really know the extent of it. We didn’t think it was gonna keep him out of football to where he would medically retire.”

After retirement, the chunks in Joey’s schedule that football had filled opened bare. In a few months on the precipice of his 20s, he had become a dysfunctional athlete.

“You could tell he was kind of going through an identity crisis,” Price says. “I think he lost a little bit of his confidence.”

He shed weight like a bear out of hibernation. Tanona says he weighed 235 pounds at his slimmest; Price thought his friend looked even thinner than that, about 220. At his height, he would have made a better guard in basketball at the time than in football. He kept working out, but mostly for his looks.

“He started trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life,” Price says. “He was talking about how he wanted to start writing movies. He was gonna go get an internship with Warner Bros. in California. I guess he started seeing his future, because he’s extremely goal-oriented.”

“It was going well,” Tanona says. “I was fairly decent at that.”

He would come home when he could, and when he would visit, a camera would come with him. Price says Joey would snap photos of his friends when they were together.

Still, Joey wasn't the same, and he was all too aware. In a well-to-do suburb like Zionsville that his mother describes as “competitive,” Joey felt people only saw him when he was a football star.

“I would always tell him, ‘Dude that’s not true,’” Price says. “But he would always be really persistent in telling me, ‘Dude, people only talk to me when I'm doing well, and now that I don't have it, no one messes with me anymore.’”

Joey had cleared rushing lanes for Price as long as they’d been friends and taken their team to two state championship games in high school, but now he was vulnerable.

“I was despondent,” Joey says.

Price says, “We were always trying to bring him up.”

On Saturdays, while Price played for the University of Indianapolis, Joey refused to watch Notre Dame. “He could have gone to the games for free probably, because he was on scholarship,” Price says, “but it hurt him too much.”

Joey fits cleanly into the mold of the classic offensive lineman. He’s a massive human being, hailing from an agrarian state. He’s a monster on the football field, and a panda bear off. Despite palms that could make orange juice with a single squeeze, his handshake is gentle, his approach measured.

“He’s genuine,” Price says. “He's not trying to be anyone else.”

Sporting shaggy strawberry blond hair and a fair-skinned, unassuming face, when thinking about his short list of hobbies he stammers before saying he’s “always been a Lego guy,” and flashes a wide grin with a sliver of visible teeth.

“He's such an introvert and such a typical offensive lineman,” Kelly says. Seeing him dive into his studies as a film major was like seeing him in clothes that didn’t fit. Slim Joey with a camera around his neck was like Beethoven with a paint brush.

“You're used to your kid being this big lineman,” she says. “It was an adjustment. And it was just kind of a reminder as a mom that your child is not living his dream.”

The two have always been close, ever since Kelly taught preschool and kindergarten at Joey’s school. The other teachers sometimes sent him into his mother’s classroom during recess when he misbehaved.

When Joey was in his darkest corner, she told him something simple that he remembers more than a year later.

“I asked her, ‘What do you do when things get hard?’” he says. “She told me, ‘The only thing you can do is just keep on going,’ and that’s the honest truth.”

Information from Joey often flows in drips and drops to those he loves, even his mother, and then gushes like a waterfall. When he told his friends he had to quit playing football, Price says it “hit us pretty hard” after weeks of Joey hemming and hawing the details.

He called Kelly one morning early in December 2023 to tell her he was returning to the game, nearly two years after the accident. She only knew he’d been thinking about it. He had never really stopped thinking about it, in retrospect.

“You lie to yourself,” Joey says.

Even early in his sojourn away from football, while he was completing vestibular therapy to improve his balance and manage persistent migraines and bouts with vertigo, he assumed the sessions would help him when, not if, he returned to the field.

“You gotta have a plan B,” he says now of his film studies.

“He was passionate about it, but it was not football,” Kelly says. “There was not going to be another football.”

Kelly remembers Joey telling her he planned to enter the transfer portal that December morning, which the NCAA requires of players returning from medical retirements. He’d begun to feel functional almost a year earlier, he says, and by the fall of 2023, he was comfortable in offensive line drills with his former teammates at Notre Dame. He was promptly cleared for a return by the team doctor and a neurologist in Detroit.

He also texted the group chat with Price and Krein before firing off a tweet that he was unretiring Dec. 4. Joey posted his high school highlights, followed by announcements of offers from Ball State, Bucknell, Central Michigan and Connecticut in short order.

“But he sent us a screenshot of his text to one of the Purdue coaches,” Price says. “He said that he would commit on the spot if they offered him.”

He was texting the same things to star Purdue center and Zionsville alum Gus Hartwig, now in his fifth year as a Boilermaker.

The two are longtime friends. Price credits Hartwig with inspiring much of Joey’s improvement in high school, and Joey’s family thinks they share similar a demeanor.

“My sister has listened to Gus’ interviews and she’s like, ‘Joey sounds like him,’” Kelly says. Joey was coached by Gus’ dad, given recruiting tips by his mom, and played with his brother.

“We've always had that, like, little brother and older brother dynamic,” Joey says. “He's always had to drive me around and get mad at me from time to time.”

Because of Gus, and a visit to Purdue from his high school days he looks back fondly on, becoming a Boilermaker was never a question. He committed just four days into his new life as a college football player, Dec. 8. He said on Twitter, simply, “I’m Back.”

“I think that was the moment that he kind of found his groove back,” Price says.

Joey’s mother, the same one who nudged him to soccer in his childhood, was relieved.

“Life with football is much better for him,” she says.

Since Joey’s return, he’s moved schools and homes, now living off campus in West Lafayette. He’s 300 pounds again – pull-ups and sprints are a lot harder now, he confesses – and Hartwig and his coaches say he’s come along both surprisingly well and just as expected.

“Joey’s a damn good football player,” says offensive line coach Marcus Johnson. “He never bitches about anything, he just comes to work every day and does what he’s supposed to do.”

He played 27 snaps with the second team in Purdue’s lopsided, season-opening victory Saturday, his first action in more than three years. He said he feels completely healthy. But, facing a depth role this season, Joey doesn’t know whether his path has rejoined the one of the high-schooler with the NFL written all over his future.

FCS schools like Bucknell did not bother recruiting Joey in high school. No program outside the Power 5 offered him, in fact. They would have been wasting their time on someone they couldn’t have. But the list of suitors courting the sophomore after his return suggests that perhaps Joey is as lucky to have Purdue as the other way around.

“It was kind of the uncertainty of, ‘How would he be after the injury?’” Hartwig says.

Joey leans back in his bleacher seat as he assesses this crossroads in his career. His eyes wide, he exhales to make a sound resembling a horse’s snort. “That’s a hard question. I’d say I’m definitely,” he pauses, and scratches flecks of grass from his legs. “Ah gosh. I mean, the way I play football is the exact same, the way I've always played it. Nothing really changed from that aspect.”

A player returning from an ACL tear often favors his other leg for a time, unconsciously, sapping him of reserves of explosiveness immeasurable outside of a split second shift of weight.

No stranger would know Joey knocked into 3 tons of force unless they tried speaking into his right ear.

“Right now I'm just focused on being the best player I possibly can be every day, and just focusing on play after play and set after set,” he says. “Mastering my craft.”

He still sees the NFL as his landing spot. Of course, little more than a year ago, it was Hollywood.

“But that career choice is a very hard one to get into,” he says with a smile. “Dreams can change.”

Once, his future was playing football for the top school in Indiana under the elevated arms of “Touchdown Jesus.”

Now, he bleeds black and gold.