And unfortunately for Nowinski it was a short-lived dream as well.

Two shoulder operations performed after his senior season took a career in professional football out of consideration.

The Road to WWE

With Corcoran’s aid, Nowinski submitted a video to MTV in the hopes of being chosen to compete for a wrestling contract on the station’s new reality show “Tough Enough.”

“I’d been going to wrestling school for about three months,” Nowinski says. “And at the time I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be on a reality show, because I hate them all.”

But after passing several stages of the tryout phase, the opportunity soon became one that he could not pass up.

The show featured several hopefuls living together in a house and training under the supervision of professionals with contestants being either eliminated or kept along the way based on their progress.

Under the tutelage of the more experienced wrestlers, the contestants endured grueling workouts and hours of technical training necessary for success in the sport.

“I hated it,” Nowinski says. “It was physically brutal. We went from 9 a.m. to 4 or 5 [p.m.] with constant physical activity. By the end, I thought my body was just going to collapse. Living amongst a bunch of other people who you don’t like and with no friends, no privacy. It was horrible.”

On camera, the contestants were constantly abused by the professional wrestlers, and though most were much more kind and supportive once the film stopped rolling, the harsh treatment began to wear all its targets down.

And the toll the show was beginning to take on Nowinski came out in a most public way.

With the show being taped round the clock and selectively edited, Nowinski was often portrayed in a way completely inconsistent with his usual personality.

“He was definitely held to a higher standard because he was from Harvard,” Harvard football coach Tim Murphy says.

While some of his fellow competitors were portrayed as humble, generally likeable figures, Nowinski was painted as an arrogant braggart with little connection to the other wrestlers, generating little sympathy from television audiences.

“Everyone’s got their good days and bad days,” Nowinski says. “And they caught my three bad moments and turned it into three episodes.”