Tom Hruby remembers the nights.
The nights he spent underneath his bed with his brother, hiding from his father, an abusive and rage-filled alcoholic.
He also remembers the days.
The days of intense training — sometimes up to 20 hours of excruciating exercises — that eventually gave way to missions in Iraq. And Afghanistan. And the Philippines.
But before those long hours and those deployments, before donning the Northwestern uniform and returning to football a decade after he left it, there was high school fullback Tom Hruby, the product of a single-parent household fractured by alcohol.