For 11 years, Rey Maualuga prepared for the position he’d play in life. And in football.
From his birth at Ft. Sill’s Reynolds Army Hospital — for which he was named — in Oklahoma where his dad was serving in the U.S. Army and then back to Hawai’i for his early years and then on to Oxnard and Eureka in California where his dad, Talatoni, was pursuing a career as a Pentecostal minister, Rey realized football was his ticket. And his gift.
He also realized in grade school that “Reynold (they dropped the S in naming him) wasn’t tough-sounding or masculine enough for a football guy,” he says, “so I shortened it to Rey.”
Los Angeles was the next stop where Rey was a unanimous All-American and Bednarik Award winner on a USC linebacking crew that may have been the best in college football history and finally on to Cincinnati and the NFL’s Bengals for eight years where he was named captain before a final year in Miami.
Twenty years of his life, from Pop Warner football to the NFL. Rey was a linebacker. Tough as they come. Biggest hitter in the college game.
And then? Well, more of that in a bit.
But now? All you have to do is look at that Instagram photo Rey posted in August with his three daughters and his son.
He’s a full-time dad now. And not missing a minute of it. The big smile gives it away.
No longer is Rey ruled by the out-of-control drinking that culminated in his 2021 sentencing to 120 days in the Kenton County jail after the last of multiple incidents of driving his car under the influence through yards and mailboxes and parked cars in a couple of late-night episodes in his suburban Villa Hills neighborhood in Northern Kentucky. TMZ then, as only it can, headlined that Rey “could go to jail for 10 years” before the felonies were pleaded down with conditions.
Nor is there a thought of the arrests for bar fights — the last in 2017 in Miami, which marked the end of Rey’s NFL career.
Nor is he still doing the out-of-control eating that had Rey “door dashing” his way up to 380 pounds after playing at 260. “I carried it well,” he says with a grin, “I didn’t really look 380,” as he shows you the photo of a super-sized Rey. He’s right. He didn’t, but it was his “fat face,” he says correctly, that took the brunt of the weight hit, making him almost unrecognizable.
“I’d order a whole fried chicken – and a second meal for midnight,” Rey says. “I was bad.”
But that was then.
As for the drinking, that was then as well. No more. Rey’s August Instagram was to celebrate “four years of my sobriety,” he wrote.
He recalls the words of his USC linebackers’ coach Ken Norton Jr. about how you’ll finally get to a point where “you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
“Eleven years of preparing to get to the big show and then nine years there and, call it an excuse for my drinking and partying, but I’d tell myself I did my time, these are the fruits of my labor,” Rey would rationalize. “I don’t have to go to camp. I don’t have to work.”
But what was he to do?
“You don’t know what to do next,” Rey says, even though they often warn NFL’ers that this time would come. “You’re so used to doing it one way and now you have all that free time and when I didn’t have my daughter (13-year-old Avayah in shared custody with her mother), . . .”
Well, he only knew one way then.
That thinking carried over to his house. “Unique,” Rey calls the 6,700-square-foot place he bought in 2015 on a quiet Kentucky street overlooking the Ohio River that ends in a cemetery on property awarded to a Revolutionary War general by Virginia in the late 1700’s before Kentucky even existed as a state.
Let’s just say that if you were driving down one of those mansion-lined Beverly Hills streets and came to a palace built by an oil billionaire from the Middle East, this house would be it. And as much as it might stand out in Beverly Hills, this is Northern Kentucky we’re talking about.
“It is different,” Rey says of the home built by legendary nightclub owner Richard Schilling. But to Rey’s thinking, it was perfect with its large swimming pool in the gated courtyard with “a basement as big as the entire house,” he adds, “it looked like a great place to party.”
And now, no more of that.
“My girl was pregnant,” he says of the mother of his two youngest children and his partner, Ashley Reed, a nurse, as he was exiting jail. And how much her influence and willingness to change her life and help him, has mattered in his success in his path to sobriety.
But he was still eating.
“I’d eat my kids’ food, drink their sodas. Maybe I wasn’t drinking but I’d eat seven cookies at a time like it was no big deal. And don’t talk about fast food.”
And then that “dad” thing kicked in for Rey, who had always had it, renting apartments in suburban Cincinnati to be near his oldest daughter’s school for when he would have custody of her.
“I truly believe that if you don’t want to make a change for yourself, things will never get better,” Rey writes in commemorating the anniversary. “You have to want it. People can’t make you do anything. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to be sober, it won’t happen.”
Rey wanted to be sober. “It’s that simple,” he says. “I am sober.”
And motivated. “My kids are all I need to remind me why I don’t want to drink anymore.”
Rey wanted to be a full-time dad. And now he is. A dad of four. There’s Avayah, then Ashley’s daughter Ryanne, 12 – in their blended family. “My bonus child,” he says. Then he and Ashley have daughter Dylanne, 3; and son Malosi, 1.
Rey, looking now for all the world like he could still play for USC, starts the day with a workout, then it’s dad duties the rest of the day. Has he thought about coaching? Or life counseling with his own experience as a guide for NFL guys like him who come to the end of their playing days?
Nope. Not yet. “There are so many things I missed out on my first daughter,” Rey says of the football time demands in-season. “I only saw her on my off days. I was just always out of the picture then. Since I’ve been sober, I’ve been able to catch the moment every day — changing diapers, bottle feeding, putting the babies to bed.”
But for a football guy of Samoan heritage, one of the seminal moments for Rey was the USC game at Virginia when Hall of Famer Troy Polamalu came down from Pittsburgh and shook his hand. “Troy was like royalty to Polynesian kids,” said Rey, who would one day accompany Troy to Samoa for the football camp they hosted for youngsters there. “How do you talk to greatness?”
As for his own career, and the 120 NFL games he played with 607 tackles, seven interceptions, four sacks, 22 passes defended, six forced fumbles and three fumble recoveries in addition to five playoff games from 2011 to 2015 with the Bengals with 40 tackles, Rey’s not sure how to grade or evaluate it.
“Dan, I don’t know. I’m glad I had the opportunity. I feel like I didn’t accomplish what I envisioned for myself. There are so many ‘what ifs’ – if things happened differently, if I played somewhere else. Why are some people more successful than when they were in college and some not? Is it the schemes?”
Rey makes it clear, he’s not excusing how it played out.
“What happened happened,” he says. “It is what it is.”
But the NFL is not Rey’s concern now. His house full of kids is. But it’s not just the dad role. Rey is also a son who was able in June to gift his mom, Tina, the new house in Eureka that he’s always wanted her to have.
“Finally,” Rey wrote his mother. “It took so long because I had to face my demons before I could worry about anything else. I had to find peace within myself.”
And now with his sobriety having reached four years “and for God giving me another chance, I had to grow up … thank you for loving me when the devil got a hold of me, for loving me when I tarnished our last name. Thank you for everything you gave up to let me be who I am today… Like my Dad used to say: ‘Be smart in the head and you’ll be rewarded with good things’.”
Rey is now living up to the word “Dad” he would paint under each eye for USC games after his dad died of brain cancer when he was a freshman.
In so many ways now, Rey isn’t playing Dad, or even playing for Dad anymore. He is Dad.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.