A.J. Francis

The call began with a question. 

“Are you by yourself?” 

Anthony Francis’s doctor told him to have someone drive him to the office. 

“Why? What’s going on?” 

The doctor would tell him when he arrived. 

Francis sat quietly in the passenger seat as trees and houses blurred past. The whole ride, he wondered what he was walking into. 

A blood test taken for an unrelated reason revealed dangerously high blood sugar. He later learned, he said, that he could have gone into a diabetic coma at any time. 

“I was dying from diabetes,” Francis said. 

The Type 2 diabetes diagnosis came in 2023. What followed required a new kind of discipline: changing how he ate, learning more about his body, and managing his medications. 

His health journey is separate from The Trust (Powered by the NFLPA)’s work, but it underscores how life after football continues to bring new challenges. As a recently named Trust Captain, Francis helps other former players connect with resources and services through The Trust as they navigate their own transitions. 

Francis knows the value of that support firsthand. After leaving the NFL, he accessed The Trust's health and wellness resources and attended Wraparound. He became involved through his connections with friends and former teammates Will Davis and Cam Johnson. 

“I moved to Houston. They needed a new Houston representative [to serve as a Trust Captain], and I put my name in the hat, and thankfully I was picked,” Francis said. “It feels good to know that they have that much trust in me.” 

He understands how easily available support can get buried in the daily flood of information. He helps make resources more visible and creates direct connections. 

“I probably get 1,000 emails a day,” he said. “How many times am I going to read 1,000 emails? Not many times. A lot of guys don’t even know the benefits they can take advantage of. You miss a lot of stuff.” 

Francis helps close that gap by reaching out directly, meeting former players in the community, and connecting them with benefits and opportunities they might otherwise miss. His own life beyond football has given him plenty of experience finding a new direction. 

As a child, he watched professional wrestling with his father on Saturday mornings. Images of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock decorated his birthday cakes. Even then, he wanted to be a wrestler more than a football player. 

That passion resurfaced in college, where he considered wrestling a possible next step if the NFL didn’t work out. Football did work out. After going undrafted, Francis spent six seasons in the league, with stops in Miami, New England, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Washington, and New York with the Giants. 

After his final game, he began wrestling training, turning down practice-squad opportunities to commit to the pursuit that had captivated him long before he reached the NFL.

The work took him into hot, sweaty warehouses, where he learned to take falls, communicate discreetly in the ring, and tell stories that pulled the crowd into the action. Each repetition brought him closer to another goal. 

He wrestled in WWE as Top Dolla before moving to TNA, where he continued building his career. 

Francis has built a life around pursuing his ambitions—and putting in the work to make them real. Sitting in his recording studio with records hanging on the wall, he said he feels blessed to have accomplished so much. But the public sees only a fraction of what those achievements required. 

That commitment also shapes his community service. Each year, he organizes a canned-food drive at the University of Maryland for Sarah’s House, a Fort Meade shelter serving families in crisis. He brings together donations of nonperishable food and baby supplies from himself and fans, using his platform to help meet practical needs close to home. 

“I’m not alone in the ability to affect my community,” he said. “I’m just alone in the platform to do it on a large scale.” 

Through the food drive and his role with The Trust, Francis uses the relationships and platform he built through football to help others. Alongside wrestling, making music and hosting, that service remains part of the life he continues to build. 

Managing his health remains part of the life Francis continues to build. He says changes to his diet and a better understanding of his body have allowed him to reduce most of his medications. 

“I don’t need most of those medications anymore,” he said. 

That discipline is one thread in his post-football journey; through The Trust, he has also found ways to stay connected and help other former players find resources of their own. 

The experience made him recognize the importance of caring for himself so he can be here for a long time. He still has ambitions to pursue—and people he wants to help along the way. 

Rob Knox, a freelance writer for The Trust, is an award-winning professional, a member of the Lincoln (Pa.) Athletics Hall of Fame, and adjunct instructor at Temple University. In addition to having work published in SLAM magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, and Diverse Issues In Higher Education, Knox enjoyed a distinguished career as an athletics communicator for Lincoln, Kutztown, Coppin State, Towson, and UNC Greensboro. He also worked at ESPN and for the Delaware County Daily Times. Knox was honored by College Sports Communicators with the Mary Jo Haverbeck Trailblazer Award and by the NCAA with its Champion of Diversity award. Named an HBCU Legend by SI.com, Knox is a graduate of Lincoln University and a past president of the College Sports Communicators, formerly CoSIDA.