Mark Bruener
Episode 299
21 OCT 2024
He is a College Scout with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was a first round draft pick in the 1995 NFL Draft and went on to play nine years with Pittsburgh and then five years with the Houston Texans. In total he played in 188 regular season games and five in the playoffs. He also served on the NFL Players Association Executive Committee. Back in his days as a student-athlete he played college football for the Washington Huskies, earning All-American honors in 1993. Five years ago, he was enshrined in the Pacific Northwest Hall of Fame.
Notable guest quotes:
“I was raised in a Catholic household… I actually went to the same Catholic grade school that my dad went to [St. Mary’s Catholic School]. And I would joke … that the same nuns that taught him were teaching me.”
“The number of times that my dad was like, ‘All right, we’re going to go to church,’ and I would drag my feet and dread to go. And then once I would get there, I was happy that he ended up making us go and was able to learn from him and learn from the priest and the church that we grew up in.”
“I played sports as a youth: soccer, little league baseball, and then basketball and flag football. My first year of contact football wasn’t until seventh grade. That’s just what was the way things were back then. So, flag football was what I played as a youth growing up and then contact football for seventh and eighth grade. But basketball was my first love.”
“I was able to catch a touchdown from Billy Joe Hobert and it was right in the back of the end zone and there was just inches between my foot and the end line. And that was the score that actually put us up and kind of gave us that momentum that we never gave up. And so many great things about that game. Obviously, you know, we beat Michigan. We were national champions that year as a result of that game.”
“We talked about my childhood and the importance of going to church in the Catholic faith and in my family growing up. That was something that my parents continued to instill in me, and I was involved with … the team chaplain at University of Washington at the time and still involved in different Bible studies and things. So, I was able to continue with my faith there at the University of Washington, which I felt very fortunate of.”
(on being drafted into the NFL) “I was very much giving praise to God and praying that I would be selected and hoped to go to the right team because you don’t know, there’s 32 teams and you don’t know who you were going to go to.”
“I’m one of those people that likes to tackle adversity head on. I know that when we hide from adversity it’s always going to be there, and I think you show your true colors when you deal with adversity, and I use my faith every day and I try to walk the walk and talk the talk to be an example of what a godly person is like.”
“It’s extremely important that you have something to fall back on, you have something that’s going to allow you to persevere. And your faith is truly tested when you are faced with adversity because when the going’s good, when everything is good it’s easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, praise God, God’s great, look what He’s doing for me, He’s doing all these great things.’ And then when you are faced with adversity … that’s when you’re really tested and you’re sitting there saying to yourself, ‘Okay God, like, what’s going on here? I thought things were really good going last week. What did I do wrong’?”
“I would lean upon my faith a lot and say, ‘Hey God, thank you for the day you’ve given me and help me to be a shining light in what you want me to be for the people that I interact with’.”
“Every day I pray for my kids and for their happiness and pray for the happiness of our entire family.”
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