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The remarkable, improbable career of Stephen Neal

How the CSUB wrestler became a world champion and Super Bowl ring bearer

By California State University, Bakersfield

January 26^th, 2022

This is the second in a series of 2022 CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame profiles.

When he was an assistant wrestling coach at CSUB, Darryl Pope was famous for subjecting his freshmen to a frightening Cobra maneuver to teach them what position not to get into.

Most wrestlers got up from it petrified. Not Stephen Neal.

“Instead of being this little puppy dog that’s scared, he gets up and his eyes are watering and he’s foaming at the mouth,” Pope recalled 28 years later. “He comes right back after me and I’m like, ‘This kid’s got what it takes.’”

But few could have predicted just how far Neal’s talents would take him in sports – all the way to the Super Bowl.

Neal went from fourth in the state wrestling championships his senior year of high school to winning two collegiate national titles and compiling a career record of 156-10 at CSUB.

He was undefeated in 1998 and 1999, two of only four perfect seasons in CSUB history. In 1999 he won the Dan Hodge Trophy, the Heisman of wrestling, and the World Wrestling Championship in Ankara, Turkey.

And in a sport where less than 2 percent of draft-eligible college athletes make the NFL, according to 2019 data, Neal made the league without playing any college football. Not only that, he spent 10 years protecting one of the league’s all-time greatest quarterbacks, Tom Brady, and playing for one of its all-time greatest coaches, Bill Belichick, as an offensive lineman with the New England Patriots.

“They don’t come any better than Steve Neal,” Belichick said when Neal retired in 2011. “In terms of improvement and development as a player, Steve may have accomplished more than any player I have ever been around.”

The remarkable, improbable career of Stephen Neal

During all that time, Neal never forgot where he came from. He has not only helped raise money for CSUB Wrestling, which for many years was solely community-funded, but mentored staff, given talks at camps, traveled to meets, and even rented out his Bakersfield condo to coaches at a discount.

“Any time, any way he’s able to help, he’s willing to do it,” said first-year CSUB Head Wrestling Coach Luke Smith. “And he doesn’t want any recognition. He just does it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Four males having fun

Neal grew up in San Diego, the second of three boys born to Jack Neal, a house painter who played college basketball for the University of Maryland, and Illys Neal, who worked in the cashier’s office at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

Neal, left, and his brothers, David and Michael, as young boys.

Neal loved football as a kid but didn’t play Pop Warner because it was too expensive to put all three boys in it. So the brothers played recreational soccer and every other sport, from basketball to football to pickleball, with their dad every weeknight and weekend.

“When you have four males you can figure a lot of things out, have fun,” Neal said.

At San Diego High School, Neal lettered in football, swimming, track and field and wrestling. He dreamed of playing college football but his high school team wasn’t very successful, so he didn’t have much opportunity to play for a Division I football program.

But he did have opportunities to compete for a wrestling one.

Neal learned about CSUB when Dick Bailey, head of the San Diego Wrestling Association, took him to a meet between Fresno State and Bakersfield. The Fresno kids ranked higher but the Bakersfield kids were tougher and won, and “that put Bakersfield on the map for me,” Neal said.

When he visited the schools recruiting him, which also included Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cal State Fullerton and the University of Oregon, the only team practicing was Bakersfield and he knew “that’s where I needed to go to get better than fourth in the state."

Terrible technique

No one would have looked at Neal back then and imagined the career that would follow, said Brad Hull, then a wrestler from Porterville who came to CSUB on the same recruiting trip as Neal in 1994. Neal was nice, quiet and at 6-feet-4-inches tall and 190 pounds looked more like a basketball player than a wrestler.

“He was a tall, gangly, goofy looking guy and I was like, ‘Man, they must not think very highly of me if I’m coming with this guy,’” joked Hull, now assistant principal at Bakersfield’s Highland High School.

He also had “terrible, terrible, terrible” technique, said Pope, who recruited Neal for his fight, attitude and likely-to-fill-out frame.

Here’s how Neal looked when he first got to CSUB, says longtime friend and fellow former CSUB wrestler Brad Hull.

Neal sat out his first year at CSUB and that’s when he really learned how to wrestle. Competing every day in a “tough room of really tough, big guys,” he got better and better.

“You could either quit and give up or fight and get better,” Neal said. “And so we all just kept fighting."

And he kept learning, Pope said.

“He was just so coachable,” said Pope, now principal of Bakersfield’s Warren Junior High. “He was so hungry and eager. He worked hard and he was like a sponge. He just wanted to learn.”

Neal, far right, with fellow wrestlers (l to r): Raphael “Noodle” Davis, Matt Corona, Brad Hull and Mike Mendoza.

Neal said his strategy for success was setting higher and higher goals for himself, like pinning every opponent he wrestled his senior year. He fell short of a lot of those goals, he said, but setting them made him work harder and stay motivated.

Neal also benefited from a strong, supportive family, great coaches and a fierce competitiveness that also shows up when he’s shooting hoops, playing video games and planning road trips, Hull said.

“When he drives from San Diego to Bakersfield, he times it,” Hull said. “He doesn’t speed but he’ll find the best route to get here. He’ll change roads every time just to find the fastest way because that’s how competitive he is.”

Neal’s first NCAA heavyweight title was an expected 20-5 win over Trent Hynek of Iowa State. Far more storied was his 1999 national championship win over the University of Minnesota’s Brock Lesnar, whom Neal later described to the Boston Herald as “just this big, strong, powerful man the wrestling world hadn’t seen.”

Neal looks back at it with regret that he didn’t attack more and win by a larger margin. He thought Lesnar was going to come after him more because if he’d won, Minnesota would have won the team championship.

“Once I got the lead, I was waiting for him to come and he never came,” Neal said. “And then the match ended 3-2 and that was the closest match I had had in a year and a half. I should have gone out there and attacked and tried to win by a whole lot more.”

Neal went on that year to win the U.S. Open and then his crowning achievement in wrestling, the World Championships in Turkey.

If you’re going to the worlds, he thought, you might as well try to win. So he took advantage of his conditioning and scored a lot of points, “overcoming those guys that got tired at the end of the match.”

In the finals, Neal beat Andrey Shumilin of Russia, who’d been the 1993 and 1998 world bronze medalist and finished fourth at the 1996 Olympics.

The crowds in Turkey were enthralled by Neal’s moves, Pope said. Heavyweight matches are usually boring because there’s a lot of pushing and power but not a lot of intricate moves. But Neal, he said, had moves like a lightweight.

After every match, Pope said, the entire arena would stare at Neal as he gathered up his things and walked out.

“He was a celebrity because they had never seen a guy that big drop his hips and shoot double legs and shoot single legs and shoot low singles,” Pope said. “He wrestled like a lightweight and people loved seeing a heavyweight wrestle like a lightweight."

Darryl Pope, left, and Neal practicing in 1999. Photo courtesy The Bakersfield Californian.

Pope, left, and Neal on a rainy day in Paris training for the 1999 world championships. A week later they departed for Turkey, where Neal became a world champion.

Pope and Neal after the New England Patriots beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX.

Home run in the NFL

In 2001, the Patriots learned about Neal from agent Neil Cornrich. They invited him to work out with them and said if he passed a conditioning test, they’d let him into training camp.

“He absolutely hit a home run in the workout,” said Dante Scarnecchia, the Patriots’ offensive line coach at the time. “It was, ‘Oh my god, will you look at that.' A guy that’s 6’4, weighed about 290, could run really fast, was really athletic and explosive.”

Needless to say, Neal made it into camp. While some players complained of soreness and low pay, Neal had a blast.

The Patriots put Neal on defense and he lasted about a week, Scarnecchia said. He just wasn’t very good. Belichick was going to cut Neal but Scarnecchia wanted to see what he could do on offense first. He liked Neal’s smarts, humility and wrestling history.

The Patriots put Neal on the practice squad and let him sit in on offensive line meetings to learn.

“Steve, being the human sponge intellectually that he is, tried to get as much information as he could,” Scarnecchia said.

Dante Scarnecchia coaches a Patriots game. — The legendary Dante Scarnecchia coached for the New England Patriots for 34 years, including as an offensive line coach during Neal’s years on the team. He has Kern County ties; he attended Taft College. Photo courtesy of the New England Patriots.

The Philadelphia Eagles took Neal off the practice squad and kept him until the last three weeks of the 2001-02 season. Then the Patriots took him back, which required them to put him on their active roster.

Neal made his first career start as a guard against the Green Bay Packers in Week 6 of the 2002 season. Guards keep defenders away from the quarterback while he decides whether to throw or hand off the ball.

But Neal tore up both his shoulders before halftime and not only sat out the 2002 season – a Super Bowl-winning one – but the following season. He admits to battling some self-doubt, but others bucked him up.

“The coaches and the trainers all assured me, ‘Hey, you’re going to be fine,’” Neal said. “When I went out there and played, I did a lot of great things in that short amount of time. So I think they saw the potential and kept me around.”

Neal started the final 14 games of the 2004 season including the playoffs and 24-21 Super Bowl win over the Philadelphia Eagles, capturing his third ring. He started all 16 games in 2005, 13 in 2006 and eight of 2007 including all three playoff battles and the 17-14 Super Bowl loss to the New York Giants that is considered one of the all-time greatest Super Bowls and sports upsets.

Pope would watch him closely on TV and marvel at how on any given play, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to hit three different people in defense of the QB.

Neal never made the Pro Bowl but there’s no mistaking his value to the Patriots, said former CSUB Associate Athletics Director Karen Langston.

“He was a starting member of the offensive line in front of Tom Brady all those years,” said Langston. “Those guys don’t get a lot of notoriety but the guy that they’re protecting? He’s still playing.”

Neal played off and on, continuing to struggle with his shoulder, before retiring in March 2011. He’d paste strips of "black plaster" – tape covered with Bengay – all over his body to relieve soreness.

“And then you have these rookies, second-year guys running around having fun,” he said. “Their bodies are all fresh, you know, and you’re just like, ‘It’s time.’”

Neal retired from the Patriots in 2011. Photo courtesy the New England Patriots. — Neal retired from the Patriots in 2011. Photo courtesy of the New England Patriots.

Scarnecchia summed up Neal’s pro career by saying he had “a really good” one that could have been “really fabulous” had it not been for injuries.

“But I think he’s satisfied with it. I know we were satisfied with it,” Scarnecchia said. “I think we truly got everything out of this kid there was to get and I think everything you could ever ask for he gave us back ten-fold.”

A family of athletes

Neal and his wife, Jodee, met in a dance class for physical education majors at CSUB. They were able to juggle sports, school and dating in part because both understood the life of a student-athlete; Jodee played softball for the `Runners.

“When you date another athlete it’s easier because you understand what the expectations are, the training, what you have to give up,” she said. “I understood he had to go to practice and he understood the same for me as well.”

Stephen and Jodee Neal as CSUB students in 1999. They met in a dance class; Stephen still can’t dance, Jodee says.

They dated for six years before Neal proposed on Valentine’s Day 2002. Jodee jokes he was “pressed for time” because he wanted her to join him in New England but she wouldn’t leave her job and benefits as a Bakersfield school teacher without a commitment.

The Neals married at the Bakersfield Museum of Art on July 13, 2002.

Jodee attended most Patriots home games and made sure to take each of their three kids to at least one game a year. Taking more than one at a time was heavy lifting.

Her favorite Super Bowl memory is of taking their then 4-year-old daughter, Colby, to Super Bowl XLII in Arizona because “it was like watching Christmas through the eyes of a child.”

“The offensive line was a tight-knit group, not just guys-wise but family-wise,” Jodee said, noting her and Stephen’s family were back in California. “So that was our family. We did Thanksgiving, we’d get together for Christmas. We were fortunate to be with a great group of people.”

Jodee and Stephen Neal at the 2005 Super Bowl ring party.

Neal was as present a dad as he could be given the schedule and demands of an NFL player, Jodee said. On Tuesdays, his day off, he’d always take the kids and give her a break. Had he not been such a good dad, Jodee quipped, she wouldn’t have gotten on board with his desire for a third child.

Colby is now a freshman volleyball player at the University of Oregon. The Neals’ second daughter, Jillian, is a junior in high school and also plays volleyball while their son, Gunner, is a freshman who wrestles.

The Neals live in Poway. Stephen says he only has a few gray hairs because life is not very stressful but Jodee says he’s the busiest retired person she knows. He gives his testimony at middle and high schools as a speaker with Fellowship of Christian Athletes, volunteers his time with Poway and CSUB wrestling, and of course supports his kids’ sporting careers.

On Sundays during the season, Neal watches multiple football games on multiple television sets tuned to NFL Ticket. He roots for the Patriots because Belichick is still there, the Tennessee Titans because it’s coached by Mike Vrabel, a onetime teammate and a wrestling advocate, and the Arizona Cardinals because Coach Kliff Kingsbury was a workout partner.

He says he continues to support CSUB wrestling because the program has given him and countless other student-athletes so much. He’s really excited about the future of the program given CSUB’s reinvestment in it.

The university fully cut its funding of wrestling and three other sports in 2010 to ensure the financial sustainability of the Athletics Department budget as it entered the Division I era. While CSUB Wrestling continues to rely on community support to be the best it can be, the university funds it in the same way it funds all of its other sports.

The department budget covers wrestling operations, personnel, travel and equipment. Generous supporters including Neal fund most of the wrestling scholarships.

“I cannot thank Stephen enough for sticking with us during the years we were a self-funded, community-supported program,” said CSUB Athletics Director Kenneth “Ziggy” Siegfried. “We are now in a new era of CSUB Wrestling, and I believe there is no limit to what we can accomplish.”