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The 26-year-old has played the game since 2007, when he started in a flag football league in his hometown of Mannheim. He moved on to tackle football a year later, and was so smitten by the game that he made sure his family took in an Edmonton Eskimos home game during a Canadian vacation in 2008.

Though the GFL is the deepest, strongest league in Europe, it doesn’t pay everybody well enough to make a living off the game. So Hor holds down two jobs and clings to a theory that hard work and persistence will pay off in the realization of his dream.

That’s why he sent more than 1,000 emails to NCAA football officials in 2012; about 50 per day until he ran out of names.

“Every head coach, defensive co-ordinator, D line coach and guy in the personnel department. I heard from a guy at (the University of Texas at El Paso), he was a video man, a German guy who helped me out. I just wanted an opportunity to come to the states and prove myself, to get a scholarship.”

The best he could arrange long distance, with limited video of himself to show, was a roster spot at a junior college, Diablo Valley in California.

“I was happy that it worked out,” he said.

The six-foot-two defensive tackle showed up at the team’s 2014 training camp at a massive 340 pounds and played his freshman year at 325. His coaches considered him one of their hardest workers and asked him to shed some pounds.

He went home to Mannheim in the off-season, basically spent the summer in the weight room and came back to Pleasant Hill, Calif., at 285 pounds, basically remaking himself. He was more mobile and as the 2015 season began he thrived under better coaching than he’d ever had in Germany. He was on his way.