Copyright Sports Illustrated
A disillusioned rugby lifer walks into a local pub in his small Scottish Borders hometown in 2006. But the only walks-into-a-bar joke that day is on him. For the previous 12 years, Richie Gray had worked for the Scottish Rugby Union as its development czar. Note the past tense. Earlier that month, the organization laid him off. “I was disillusioned,” he says now, 19 years later. “A real kick in the teeth.” That night, Gray gathers with his mates from childhood; rugby gladiators, all. These scarred, squatty men grew up here, in Galashiels, a town of 12,600 where textile mills churned out cashmere and Gray’s father coached the province’s team. There’s a family-run cinema, an architectural trail and manicured gardens. The town is a living postcard, its quaintness in contrast with the worn faces of the tough bastards raised on rugby. Gray orders a malt whisky, same as always. He’s more than disillusioned. He’s newly married, with a child on the way, a mortgage he just closed and no job. He doesn’t doubt he could find another gig in rugby. But that’s no longer what he wants. He’s thinking bigger, broader. After a whisky or three, Gray drops his cautious stance on his own future and says the quiet part, what he really wants, out loud. “I’m going to be different. I’m going to concentrate on contact and collision only, and I’m going to become the best in the world at it.” When these mates reaffix their respective jaws to their faces, they start … laughing. Big, belly guffaws, doubling over, wondering if he’s delusional or joking or both. “You’ll never work again,” one tells Gray. Gray, in contrast, sees the future. Contact sports, he argues, are played by ever bigger, ever faster, ever stronger people, each trained, conditioned and fortified with modern performance and recovery methods. Meaning … more collisions. More forceful collisions. And, in all likelihood, more injuries from the physics involved alone. On this night, Gray makes his argument. But stop there? Oh, no. He vows to become the world’s foremost contact/collision coach. To do that, he tells the men who laugh at him, he must stay in rugby. But he must also do something no one like him had ever before considered. “I’m going to have to be involved in the NFL,” Gray says. Everyone at the table erupts, once more, into a round of laughter. At the end of a Zoom call over the summer, Gray mentions his … branding. He has T-shirts. He rises from his office chair in Scotland and grabs one, proudly displaying it on the laptop screen. The Collision King. That is him. But Richie Gray is not some barbarian who laughs at science. He reads dense research papers for “fun.” He wants collision sports to be as safe as possible. And he has ideas, so-so-so many ideas, for how to do this, along with methodology, equipment, contacts and experience. This might sound audacious, delusional, an oxymoron—safer collision sports. His quest winds, across an ocean, over two decades, to a sport that devotes little time or resources toward the craft of tackling, despite, you know, a tackle ending the majority of plays. Gray has already done this in rugby, his approach grounded on development—of skill and technique, as humans collide with other humans. From consulting for NFL teams for almost a decade to being (brotherly) shoved into prominence after helping hone the Eagles’ Tush Push, he has always seen football as two simple endeavors: blocking and tackling. Schematics, Gray believes, long ago overtook technical accuracy in relative importance to NFL teams. “I saw an area of the game that was being ignored,” he says, “although it was the biggest single challenge in player health and safety.” As a kid in Scotland, Gray still stumbled into America’s favorite collision sport. By age 12, he knew that every Sunday, on Channel 4, the network played a tape-delayed broadcast of a featured NFL game. He’d settle into the living room, near the massive window overlooking Galashiels. He loved football collisions and fell for the sport’s best players and teams—Dan Marino, Joe Theismann, Marcus Allen, Eric Dickerson, Walter Payton and the 1985 Bears. One Christmas, he received a bona fide NFL jersey: Marino’s aqua No. 13. Valerie Gray gave birth to Richie in April 1970. He was the oldest of three tough brothers. Quaint backdrops aside, the south of Scotland was known as the Lawless Lands. It’s where William Wallace planned his raids on England. The Romans, known for their gladiator toughness, gave up fighting the lawless south. They built Hadrian’s Wall 25 miles from Galashiels for their own protection. Reivers—similar to modern-day gangsters—rode horses from town to town. Each was then constructed and fortified on principles of defense and attacking. “I’m fascinated in why we do what we do,” Gray says. “Does your history and your culture define who [you are] and why? I think it does.” His father, Johnny, now 84, introduced Richie to rugby when the boy turned 5. Johnny coached many of the country’s seminal rugby figures, and Richie became a ball boy for his father’s squads. “[I was],” he says, “brought up in collision and contact.” Richie recalls the rugby field in front of his primary school; the sport was part of his curriculum. If he or friends had a rugby ball and five minutes, they played, wherever, whenever, full contact, no warmup. They didn’t need a pitch. They used hillsides, grass patches and flat stretches of nearby woods, even if that meant occasionally running into trees—which sparked his ingenuity. They all played Border League Rugby, the oldest and perhaps most brutal league in the world. Rugby, like professional football, presented almost no safety regulations in those days. Players could jump on top of competitors, leading with their cleats, as well as punch and elbow. Richie’s scars are part of his expertise. The first: age 12, top of right ear sliced open, part of said ear ripped off, dangling. Richie was … proud. Same as the times, plural, he broke his nose. Same as the time another collision collapsed that nose into his face. Same as when he broke bones, tore ligaments, dislocations, whatever. At 18, he earned a spot on the Galashiels team. In 1999, he captained that squad to its first Scottish Cup triumph. He represented his country at high school and college levels and flirted with the national team but wasn’t quick or athletic enough—especially not after one opponent knee dropped him and tore his ACL in a college-aged World Cup appearance. To understand the Collision King’s one-of-one career, start with collision sports’ caveman era. For all his brawn, Gray also approached rugby from an intellectual bent. He completed his degree in physical education, with honors, in 1995. That same year, rugby in Scotland went professional. The Scottish Rugby Union offered a meager salary—£25,000—to make him a rugby development officer/coach. Gray didn’t have the faintest clue what that even meant. Still, no one had been paid to participate in rugby before. He spent the next five years creating a development model from scratch. This wasn’t his father’s rugby any longer. Johnny took his first coaching gig, gratis, in 1969. His approach wasn’t exactly scientific. He brought oranges for his players to consume at halftime. His pregame notes from his greatest triumph, a victory over the Australian national team, consisted of a mere four lines. Richie had access to information his father could never have envisioned, allowing the younger Gray to study the world’s best teams. He ordered books on strategy and performance training from all over the world. He collected VHS tapes, piling them near his television until the stacks stood higher than the TV. He devoured documentaries, also on performance, even one featuring Olympic rowing coaches. His family refers to Gray’s endless pursuit of knowledge as his Zombie Mode. He’d often just disappear into the garage, to begin another round of tinkering. When Gray made his first contact/collision sled, in 2010, he named it … the Collision King. It took so long to construct just one, that, after he finished, his wife said, “Yeah, you’ll not be doing that again.” Gray recently finished his 52nd contact/collision device and completed the final adjustments to another enhanced sled—Collision King II. As the rules of contact sports changed, so did the equipment Gray assembled in that garage. He now develops and sells those products internationally—tackle dummies, handheld shields, sleds, etc.—under his GSI Performance umbrella, which Gray created in 2010. His approach is based on three critical factors: equipment, methodology and analysis. Each relates to high performance, where gains occur at slim margins. To that end, Gray applied for dozens of patents, design rights and trademarks over the past 15 years. Rugby development took Gray to South Africa, to the coaching staff of its national team, the mighty Springboks. While there in 2015, he received an unexpected phone call from the head of performance for the Dolphins. Wayne Diesel told Gray that his staff had scrutinized statistics from rugby World Cups and had come across Gray’s influence. In May 2016, the Dolphins flew him to Florida for a week to assess their defenders’ tackling techniques and meld minds with Miami’s coaches. Gray didn’t attempt to fool the locker room. He delivered brutal honesty, centering his opening salvo on his passion for collisions. He wanted accurate, aggressive, dominant, physical players. Not merely the most physical in the league. The most physical on the planet. Gray spoke, as he likes to say, “from the cage.” He understood athletes, injuries, how it felt to deliver collisions and endure them. The first Dolphins visit went so well, Miami brought him back several times that season. Individual players began reaching out to Gray, asking for additional input. He approached Kiko Alonso, an early Dolphins favorite whose jersey hangs in Gray’s office, differently than, say, Christian Wilkins, the defensive tackle Miami drafted three years later. Alonso needed technique refinement. Wilkins lost force while struggling to bend. Gray helped him incorporate more offseason technique training. In 2022, Wilkins set a single-season record (since eclipsed) for tackles by a defensive lineman (98). Asked to describe a proper tackle, Gray—whose approach focuses on what he calls the Five Fights—explains: The key is stopping ballcarrier momentum. Ideally, you want to knock them back. [When that’s not possible], then you have angle tackles. You have to fight to track. [You want] to get from A to B just before you get to the ballcarrier. You’ve got to fight to prepare. [That’s] really important; that’s within 0.00 to 2.53 meters away from the contact point. Fight to connect is literally [getting a] shoulder onto ballcarriers; with control, with accuracy; shoulder, wrap, clamp, grip. Fight to accelerate is once you’ve made the connection, keeping your feet running on the ground. And then finish. [That’s] also a psychological thing. If I finish on top of you, I’m dominating you. Matt Burke, the linebackers coach for those Dolphins and now the Texans’ defensive coordinator, believes Gray connected with football players because he was both like and not like them. “He can speak to all these crazy Scottish stories, all the wild stuff. But then there’s real insight,” Burke says. “There’s research behind it, things he studied from other sports.” Gray tracked down Marino on that visit in Miami. He explained the jersey and Marino signed some memorabilia for him. At that moment, Gray thought, “I sometimes feel like I’m here for a greater purpose.” No one in Miami planned to tell anyone about Gray’s influence. But that’s not the NFL, where everyone gossips more than any Real Housewife. Adam Gase was fired as Miami’s head coach on the last day of 2018. His assistants, also let go, spread all over the league. Many took Gray’s collision gospel with them. Lo and behold, Gray soon had a tree of his own, in a sport where he knew no one two years earlier. He began consulting with franchises all over the league. Gray’s tentacles continued to spread. USA Football tasked him with writing its tackling methodology. The National Federation of High School Football adopted his program, too. College teams began reaching out. Riddell, which supplies helmets to players across the NFL, partnered with GSI on a three-year deal for exclusive manufacturing and distribution rights. So did rugby squads, like RC Toulon in France. World Rugby adopted his tackling methodology/standards, too. The beauty in Gray’s approach lay in that authenticity. He told locker rooms he didn’t know the names of the star players, that he would treat them all the same. In Miami, one such player went to the office of Vance Joseph, then the defensive coordinator, and said, “Coach, we love this guy. But does he seriously not know who we are?” Another coach introduced Gray to Don Brown, a longtime defensive coordinator and head coach in college football known as Dr. Blitz. He wanted Gray to design something for practices to ward off cut blocks. Gray had seen teams utilize a heavy orange ball, rolling it toward defenders who were taught to block the block and shift away. “But it moves in a straight line,” Gray told Dr. Blitz. “It’s not realistic to the game at all.” Gray took that starting point and fashioned an entirely new creation, a weighted foam and PVC device he called the Hammer. Coaches can throw it at players’ ankles and knees or bounce it off the ground, creating unexpected angles. After Brown received the prototype, he threw it against his office wall and immediately ordered four more. This past June, Gray visited the Giants during OTAs. Gray believes he can make any tackler around 20% more accurate, while giving them tools to further increase accuracy when he’s back across the pond. The Giants flew Gray in on a Monday. He worked with defenders from Tuesday through Thursday. Then he flew home, after impacting dozens of lives and as many livelihoods, from Brian Burns to Abdul Carter to Bobby Okereke. “He’s very detail-oriented, he has really broken down tackling and contact to a science,” says Okereke. “I’m sitting there taking notes. At this point in my career, I just love to learn. So anytime anyone’s bringing me new information that can help me level up my game, I’m all in.” Okereke says Gray’s lessons have left such a deep imprint that he will carry reminders onto the football field this season, almost as if hearing Gray inside his helmet. In a sport defined by margins as thin as fingernails, this matters. Gospel proliferated, 24 of 32 NFL franchises now utilize Gray’s equipment and methodology. Eventually, the NFL saw what could no longer be ignored. Three-quarters of its franchises found the Collision King’s expertise compelling enough to reach out via Zoom or phone calls, or fly him halfway around the world for instruction. Gray says that in one eight-day stretch in August, he spoke with the Broncos, 49ers, Giants, Packers and Raiders. Five teams in eight days. Gray’s ambitions don’t include flag football, less contact or more restrictions on defenders. He wants players he mentors to live in “that millimeter before madness.” Those who do, he says, are less likely to get injured—and less often. “I’m going to make big changes to the game, right?” Gray says. “Big changes.” Even in his playing days, Gray understood that coaches often overtrained teams, leading to upticks in injuries sustained in practice. His ACL tear was never properly treated. Caveman tendencies mattered. But that approach baked in its limitations. His doesn’t rob football of its soul. It presents a smarter, safer, more scientific approach to navigating what Gray hopes will always be a violent ethos. “You can’t change the essence of the game—and not just football,” he says. “They’re there because there is a desire, and there is a need. Because the human being loves to watch [collisions, violence]. We’re preparing players to go into that environment and not just pay it lip service. It’s gotta be the right way.” The point has never been to simply collide. Gray argues that technically accurate thumpers are safer thumpers, too. Gray is inventing new equipment that medical staffs can use to help players return and distributing protocols to ensure they do so safely. (A major university in Scotland awarded Gray an honorary doctorate last year—making him a Doctor of Collisions.) Gray used to say he wanted to “create surgeons, not butchers.” Now, he says, “You’re trying to create surgeons with a butcher’s mentality.” Johnny Gray joins for a final Zoom interview. His house in Galashiels is only half a mile from his son’s. Johnny found Richie’s NFL pivot interesting at first. He wasn’t surprised. And yet, news of the Tush Push, its international fame and Richie’s role in fine-tuning its effectiveness reached all the way back home. Says Johnny, “I quite enjoy it.” Lost in the increasingly hysteric debates over the play, Richie says he cannot find one scientific, objective study that shows the Tush Push is any more dangerous than a typical QB sneak. The real issue, Gray believes, is the name. There is a tush involved. But the two players behind Jalen Hurts aren’t there to push him forward, necessarily. They’re there, Gray says, to guide him into open space. More cocoon than snowplow, in other words. A more accurate name, Gray believes, would be Organized Mass. “A lot of the time, those two back pushers never get to Hurts,” Gray says. “The job’s done before then.” To banish the Brotherly Shove—Gray’s preferred term—24 owners had to vote to outlaw it. They fell two short. “I genuinely don’t think the sport understands the play,” Gray says. “They just see it as big men bashing other big men. [But] if you actually look down on a field, with a drone, there are angles and forces in play. They don’t [lead] with their heads. And the quarterback is actually just getting a free ride. He’s insulated.” That’s Gray’s educated opinion, and the NFL seems more and more interested in what he has to say. In March 2024, officials invited Gray to their league meetings to address the hip-drop tackle. He also spoke to officials from all 32 teams. “Very easy, really, to show that this is not a good technique to be using in the game,” he says. Soon another round of franchises called—just as his visa ran out. Gray took calls with about 15 teams over videoconference, instead. When talking to league officials, Gray included his thoughts on how football—especially contact/collision—should be played. He asked what many NFL defenders want to know: Why don’t they practice tackling, this central part of football, from January to July? He showed them clips of Wilkins, toiling all offseason, just as Gray designed. Saints director of sports science Ted Rath sees more buy-in of Gray and his approach at a league-wide level each offseason. Like others who know the Collision King, he wonders if one team will hire Gray and shut him off from everybody else. One NFL official has already told him that sooner or later, he will be forced to choose. Or there’s a broader possibility: that he will work for the league, instead. “A big, audacious goal,” Rath calls it. “But that’s how this game has been invented. Richie’s the guy to do it. [He’s] going to make the tackle more productive and more efficient and keep our guys out of harm’s way. The whole league should [benefit from] it.” Were Gray ever to be made the NFL’s contact/collisions czar, he would start by establishing a skills department for every team to make tacklers more accurate. While Gray understands why a powerful, money-printing sports league would want to keep its players safer, he also believes that the reduction in live tackling has actually made the situation worse. More than one study has found an increase in injuries each September. Gray believes that players’ bodies are not fortified in ways they could be, owing, in large part, to collectively bargained restrictions on contact. But Gray sees this callusing of bodies as the less critical of his two main prongs. Accuracy matters more—and accuracy cannot simply be summoned in training camp. It must be built. For example, a linebacker not wearing pads will start his tackle about three inches farther away from the target. NFL defenders do that for six weeks before transitioning to pads, which presents an entirely different angle, grip, wrap, clamp—an entirely different everything. “This needs to be researched, analyzed and implemented,” Gray says. Gray now accumulates airline miles the way his protégés rack up safe tackles. Before one recent flight from Newark back to Scotland, he noticed five middle-aged men dressed impeccably, in full, colorful, velour tracksuits, sitting in an airport lounge. Upon boarding, Gray was seated next to them. He introduced himself—“Hey, guys, you’re dressed like superstars”—thus hitting it off with The Sugarhill Gang. “Have you ever heard a song called ‘Rapper’s Delight’?” one asked. Of course he had! Most anyone who meets Gray, like these 60-something rappers, will ask what he does, too. “I coach contact and collision,” he says. In the U.S.? Well, yes, in fact. “Have you ever heard of the Tush Push?”
