Ex-Cowboys linebacker Jeff Rohrer to marry partner: 'Openly live the life I was born to live'

Tom Schad | USA TODAY

A former Dallas Cowboys linebacker will become the first known NFL player to be a part of a same-sex marriage when he weds his partner this weekend, according to The New York Times.

The newspaper reported Wednesday that Jeff Rohrer, who played in 83 games over six seasons with the Cowboys, will make history Sunday when he marries Joshua Ross a little more than two decades after playing his final NFL snap.

"If I had told the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980s that I was gay, I would have been cut immediately," Rohrer told The Times. "It was a different world back then; people didn’t want to hear that."

A second-round draft pick out of Yale in 1982, Rohrer played sparingly when he arrived in the league but went on to record double-digit starts at linebacker in each of his final three seasons with the Cowboys, picking up 7.5 sacks along the way. He missed the entire 1988 season due to back surgery and was released in 1989.

Rohrer told The Times that he was "completely in the closet" before he met Ross, a skin-care expert who founded a company called SkinLab, at a bar in 2015 — "and if not for Josh, I’d still be in there," he added. Rohrer, 59, has two children from a previous marriage and was divorced roughly 10 years ago, according to the newspaper.

"When I got divorced, I said the hell with it, I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do," Rohrer said. "Then I found Josh, and began to openly live the life I was born to live."

Rohrer joins the handful of former NFL players who have come out as gay after their careers ended. Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to be drafted by an NFL team, participated in training camp with the St. Louis Rams and briefly signed on to the Cowboys' practice squad but never appeared in a regular-season game.

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.