Page 131 - OVATION Magazine (Issue 1)

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OVATION |137
Jjay glazer looks hard. stocky, bald,
and burly, the NFL broadcaster and MMA trainer is easy to mistake for a bloodthirsty bruiser—the man spars with Randy Cou- ture, after all. But for a fighter who’s no stranger to beatdowns and broken bones, Glazer is remarkably comfortable letting his guard down, as is apparent on the up- stairs balcony of his beach-town home in Southern California.
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Glazer is sharing a single patio chair with his pit bull, Alma, and cooing to her about being “the world’s cutest rescue dog.” He reveals that it breaks his heart that his 16-year-old son doesn’t want him around at football practice (“I’m like,‘How can I embarrass you? I’m Jay Glazer!’ ”), and he tears up talking about the military veterans he works with through the MVP founda- tion he cofounded in 2015.
The overwhelming, and somewhat surprising, takeaway is that Glazer—this goatee-sporting pit bull of a man—has a serious soft side. Nothing seems to make him happier than lifting up those around him, and he works damn hard to do so. “Unrelenting” is how one of his employ- ees describes him.
For Glazer, though, it’s not just about persistence; it’s about being different.
His desire to diverge from the norm has guided him throughout his career, as he’s gone from making less than $10,000 a year covering the NewYork Giants for the New York Post to being inducted into the Na- tional Association of Broadcasters’ Broad- casting Hall of Fame. It led him to be one of the first writers in the country to break minute-by-minute sports news on the then-newfangled Internet (“The newspa- per guys were pissed!”), and, more recently, to build a cutting-edge training center in