He’s Never Stopped Running: Sherman Neal on Movement, Loss, and What Balance Actually Looks Like

Neal during his deployment in Iraq as a U.S. Marine. (Courtesy of Sherman Neal)

Summary

Sherman Neal II is a Marine Corps veteran, attorney, filmmaker, advocate, NIL agent, adjunct professor, Eagle Scout, marathon runner, and father of two. He spent ten years as a commissioned officer including two deployments to the Middle East, played Division I football at Middle Tennessee State University, received a fellowship to West Virginia University College of Law, and in May 2020 sat down in the foyer of his first house in Murray, Kentucky, and wrote a letter about a Confederate statue that became a national flashpoint, cost him his coaching job, and eventually cost him more than that. His documentary, Ghost of a Lost Cause, took a year and a half to produce because that’s how long it took to watch himself clearly enough to make something that wasn’t about him. He is thirty-seven. He still hasn’t unpacked all of it. He’s not sure that’s the goal.

The Bar, After Soccer Practice

The hour and a half starts with a run. Then comes the bar, after his son Jett’s soccer practice ends, where Sherman Neal II sits with his laptop open to a report on human rights violations at a federal immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades. There is a Bud Light on one side of the computer and a cup of coffee on the other. College basketball is on the television above the bar. He is also researching active litigation involving Big Cypress National Preserve. He is simultaneously, by his own accounting, doing nothing.

He took a picture of that moment because he recognized it as evidence. This is what balanced looks like for a man who has not stopped moving since he was twenty years old.

“To me, that is balance.”

Everything he loves is accounted for. His son is down the street doing something that matters to him. The litigation is real. The basketball is on. The beer is cold. The coffee is hot. He is present for all of it and distracted by none of it, because for Sherman Neal, the only two conditions under which everything else has ever dropped away were a tactical operations center in the Middle East with nothing but mission and Marines, and this bar, on a Thursday, after 6:30.

“All of this happened after 6:30 at night. So, I’m technically not supposed to be working anyway,” he says. “But to me, that is balance. I’m seeing my son, it’s something that he loves doing. I can sit in peace, have coffee, beer, and a computer, and I’m watching basketball.”

He is thirty-seven. There is more he hasn’t accounted for yet. There has always been more.

What He Was Running Toward

He grew up in Naperville, Illinois, a predominantly white suburb of Chicago. His father went to the Naval Academy. His uncles served. His brother is in the Air Force. His mother immigrated from Liberia during a period of civil war to attend school and spent her career as an immigration attorney. On both sides of who he is, service runs deep. But when he walked into a recruiting office sometime around his junior year at Middle Tennessee State University, none of that was what sent him there.

He had sixteen inches of locs, was playing Division, I football and had been quietly making a list in his head of everything he actually liked doing. He liked being outside. He liked the immediate feedback of competition. He liked being part of something larger than the individual play. He went to the recruiter because he was twenty and trying to figure things out himself.

“I was going to go figure it out myself.”

He didn’t know the difference between enlisted and officer. The recruiter noticed he was about to graduate college and redirected him to an officer selection officer. Neal assumed he was being turned away because of his hair. He wasn’t.

“God forbid you call your parents or the 99 family members that have done it. I was going to go figure it out myself,” he says.

That was a Friday. By Monday he had decided. He cut off locs, packed them into a FedEx box with a sticker that read My son’s a United States Marine, and mailed the box to his mother in Illinois. He told her he was leaving for Officer Candidate School in Virginia in about a month. She called when the package arrived.

The decision making, he acknowledges, was off a little. There are probably better ways to do these things. He was twenty years old and he had made a decision the way he makes all decisions: in a moment of clarity when nothing else was left standing. He turned twenty-one at OCS. He graduated and had two days to get from Virginia back to Tennessee, shave his head, put on shoulder pads, and return to football season. By the second day of camp he was so exhausted he collapsed. He doesn’t pull out of things. That time he had to.

Neal advocating for the removal of a Confederate monument in Murray, Kentucky during the 2020 protests. (Photo courtesy of Rural-Urban Exchange)

The Game He Missed

He was a Deion Sanders fan growing up, and his head coach at Middle Tennessee State had been a quarterback at Florida State who connected him to a program to immerse himself in the law. That connection would take him further than football ever did.

After OCS, back in Tennessee for his final semester, still playing football, still competing for playing time, he needed to take the LSAT. Every day after practice he drove to a Doubletree Hotel and studied for three to four hours. He had not yet processed what OCS had done to him.

Then he found out the only available window to take the LSAT fell during game week at North Texas. He missed the game. He took the LSAT.

“Memories of sacrificing something that I love doing.”

He passed the LSAT. He received a fellowship to West Virginia University College of Law. By the time he arrived in Morgantown he was already questioning whether he wanted to practice law at all.

“The majority of my time that I was spending playing football, and the successes that people bring up for me, are also memories of sacrificing something that I love doing, for a combination of some dream, and another cause,” he says.

He studied law, volunteered as a guardian ad litem representing children in state custody, and before class woke up and ran toward the Pennsylvania state line with a ruck on his back in the snow. Alone. Not because someone told him to. Because he was trying to get to Marine Corps Special Operations and the body doesn’t care about the enrollment calendar.

“There aren’t any other options.”

He eventually left the judge advocate program to take an open ground contract as a platoon commander. What he loved most about the Marine Corps was never the law. It was the people. As a defense attorney, he met clients after something had already broken. As a platoon commander, he had seventy Marines before anything broke. He was stationed at Twenty-Nine Palms, California. His family lived in Las Vegas, three hours away. He commuted when he could.

“There have been times in moments of clarity where there aren’t any other options, and it’s not worth pursuing anything else,” he says.

Not the Paper

Two law degrees. A master’s in sports business. Ten years of military service. A platoon. An LLM in entertainment and sports law. A documentary. A coaching career. When Sherman Neal walks into a room to advocate for someone, none of that is what he leads with. It’s not modesty. It’s tactical.

As a logistics officer at Twenty-Nine Palms he didn’t know how to fix his own vehicle. He didn’t need to. He needed to know the mechanic, understand enough to argue for them at the command level, and then step aside. The credential is what gets you in the room. The fastest way to lose the room is to keep announcing it.

“The power comes from the need to position this person for success. Not the paper,” he says. “If I walk in and the first thing they see is somebody that is different from them, or they can’t communicate with, then we’re going to fail.”

He talks about veteran defendants, Marine defendants, and a quality that’s almost impossible to explain to people who haven’t served. Every Marine, he says, has at least one moment in their life where they thought about somebody else. Even if they just flashed long enough to raise their hand. That moment is the handhold.

In civilian defense work, sometimes there is no handhold. Someone who spent their whole life in an environment where no one ever poured into them, where survival was the only curriculum. Not every case has a spark to find. The Marine cases almost always do.

Neal on a Sierra Club outdoor trip. (Courtesy of Sherman Neal)

What Deployments Leave

His daughter Skyler was born four days after he deployed for the second time. He didn’t meet her until she was seven or eight months old. In the meantime he watched her on Skype, the kind of connection that flickers and cuts before the sound ever arrives cleanly. He recorded one of those calls.

“I have the recording, and I try to understand.”

During that same deployment, the political situation shifted and he was moved to western Iraq with no communication and no certainty about the destination for close to a month. He wrote letters. To Skyler. To Jett, who had been born between deployments and spent close to a month in the NICU while Neal was away at a pre-deployment exercise. He wrote Jett instructions for how to take care of his sister. He had no reason to believe he was coming home.

“I have the recording of that, and I try to watch that to understand,” he says.

The NICU decision is the one he returns to. He chose to leave during part of that stretch because he thought Jett would be okay. Jett is okay now. But he goes back to it.

“I’m like, what the hell? What did you do that was so critical that you would even live with it if your son wasn’t here, and you were playing in the desert?”

The ISIS preparatory actions near the end of his first deployment in 2015. The airfields. The supply runs through Kuwait. None of that comes to mind first.

What comes to mind first is sitting in the dark in western Iraq with the men around him, all of them doing the same thing. Writing letters home. Eating MREs on a rock. Doing the private accounting of what they had left behind and whether it would still be there. The hardest part of being out is waking up at your own table and knowing the people who sat in the dark with you are not there.

The Foyer

It was May 2020. Neal had been in Murray, Kentucky, for about a year. He was coaching football at Murray State University, living in the first house he had ever owned, his family together under one roof. The closest thing to settled he had ever been. Then the year began in earnest.

COVID arrived in March. Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville home by officers on a no-knock warrant. Neal had already been working with advocates trying to pass what became known as Breonna’s Law, moving through city councils and official channels, watching it not move fast enough. In April he saw the video of Ahmaud Arbery being killed in South Georgia. In May, George Floyd was killed on a Minneapolis street corner in front of the world.

Neal packed his car. He told his family he was driving to Chicago where his sister was participating in protests. He got to the car. He heard about a vigil planned in Murray for Breonna Taylor. He turned around.

“By leaving, I was dodging a problem.”

He went inside and sat down in the foyer of his house and wrote a letter. About the Confederate statue on Murray’s Wikipedia page. The one he drove past. The one that had stood there for generations, defended by generations.

“By leaving, I was dodging a problem that was probably in my own backyard. And I was obligated to do something where I was at,” he says.

He expected a small response. A marker. Something to point to when his children were old enough to ask what he had done.

A local news station tweeted the letter. A petition gathered more than ten thousand signatures. A rally moved from the Murray State campus to the statue. Neal wasn’t there. He was in a CVS buying dry-erase markers, trying to sketch a response plan, when his phone rang. He picked up. It was the New York Times. He stood in the store and answered. The day after the letter, leadership at the university made clear to him that he would not be renewed.

What It Cost

What followed was twelve to fifteen months of activism with no job, no income, and a family he was away from more than he was present for. City council meetings on weekday evenings. Games on Saturdays. Film on Sundays. The most visible work of his life, playing to the largest audience he had ever had, and he was barely home for any of it. He didn’t.

“I always thought that I had time.”

In July 2021 he received an offer at Washington State University to work in the NIL space, a field the Supreme Court had only made legal that June. A month before the offer existed, the job itself didn’t exist. He says the timing made it look like a plan. It wasn’t. A door opened. He went through it. His family did not come.

“I always thought that I had time,” he says.

He says it nearly cost him his life. He says it in one sentence and the sentence carries the weight of everything that doesn’t follow it, everything he is still trying to find language for. He was alone in Washington State, across the country from his children, carrying ten years of Marines and an activism year and a separation he hadn’t seen coming, and he was also, every single day, sitting down to produce a documentary about the decisions he had made. Ghost of a Lost Cause is a thirty-minute film about Murray, the statue, the community on both sides of it. It took a year and a half to make because that is how long it took to watch himself clearly enough to build something that wasn’t about him.

“I was watching my own decisions every day.”

He watched his own face change in the footage. His wife’s face. The kids understanding some of it and not understanding the rest. A woman connected to the film lost her husband to illness after production wrapped. Another died by suicide. Couples from the community separated. And outside Murray, what they had believed they were building a floor with turned out to be the opening act of something larger.

“I was watching my own decisions, every day, knowing what the end state would be. Having to find a way not to center myself, my story, and create something that could hopefully help others do the work,” he says.

“We thought the statues were the floor. Within months, we’re seeing books getting banned, people getting erased, towns being invaded.”

Murray was not like other places he had lived. It was not the ideology that set it apart. It was the depth of it. Seven generations in the same county. The same families in the same positions of power, the same county judge executives, the same state representatives, from 1977 on down. They were not defending an abstraction. They were defending their inheritance.

“Once you’re faced with almost a fanatical adherence to preserving the status quo, there aren’t many solutions other than somebody’s got to go,” he says. “I ended up being that.”

Neal speaking before the Calloway County Fiscal Court in Murray, Kentucky, advocating for the removal of a Confederate monument. (Photo by Chris Yu)

The Work That Doesn’t Stop

He is back at the bar. The laptop is open. The human rights report is still on the screen. Big Cypress. The Everglades. The basketball game above the bar. Jett is at soccer practice down the street, and there is coffee and a Bud Light and something that functions, for Sherman Neal, as peace.

The NIL work connects back to a Deion Sanders fan trying to find his way to Florida State, which connects back to a recruiter’s office on a Friday, which connects back to a FedEx box mailed to a mother in Illinois, which connects back to a foyer in Kentucky and a letter that became something he did not plan and could not stop. Everything he has done circles the same set of questions. What does a person owe, and to whom, and what does it cost to pay it.

In August 2023 he went on a Team River Runner trip on the Lower Salmon River. He had never done whitewater before. He got thrown from his kayak in a Class IV rapid. He came out of it convinced that the outdoors could do something for veterans that other things couldn’t, and that conviction is now part of the work he does with the Sierra Club. The environmental litigation. The Everglades. The report open on his laptop at the bar.

Skyler is old enough now that the letters her father wrote in western Iraq, the month he had no communication and no certainty about coming home, are letters she might one day read. He wrote Jett instructions for how to take care of her. He had no reason at the time to believe either of them would ever hear a word of it.

“To choose not to do that. Blasphemy.”

Ask him whether he has figured out yet what all of it is adding up to. He doesn’t answer the way most people answer that question. He doesn’t point to the credentials or the resume or the lane he eventually chose. He describes the bar. He describes the run before it and the basketball above it and his son down the street doing something he loves.

“To choose not to do that. Blasphemy. It doesn’t feel right,” he says.

He still hasn’t recovered from the deployments, or the activism year, or the separation, or watching his own face for a year and a half knowing how it ends. He is thirty-seven. There is probably more he hasn’t accounted for yet. He is still running toward it.

Resources

Ghost of a Lost Cause | ghostofalostcause.com

Sherman Neal II’s documentary film about the Confederate monument conflict in Murray, Kentucky, and what came after.

Veterans Crisis Line | Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net

Free, confidential crisis support for veterans, service members, and their families, available 24/7.

Sierra Club Military Outdoors | sierraclub.org/military-outdoors

Connects veterans and active-duty service members with outdoor experiences and environmental advocacy.

National Veterans Legal Services Program | nvlsp.org

Free legal services for veterans and military families navigating benefits claims, appeals, and military justice.

Institute for Veterans and Military Families | ivmf.syracuse.edu

Career transition, entrepreneurship, and professional development resources for post-9/11 veterans.

Innocence Project | innocenceproject.org

Works to exonerate the wrongly convicted and reform the systems that lead to wrongful convictions.

About Sherman Neal II

Sherman Neal II is a Marine Corps veteran, attorney, filmmaker, advocate, and NIL agent who served ten years as a commissioned officer, including two deployments to the Middle East and assignments in military justice and logistics. He holds a JD from West Virginia University College of Law, an LLM in entertainment and sports law, and a master’s degree in sports business. He played Division I football at Middle Tennessee State University and is the producer of Ghost of a Lost Cause, a documentary about the Confederate monument conflict in Murray, Kentucky. He practices family law, criminal defense, and immigration law, works with college athletes in the NIL space, and is involved in Sierra Club environmental litigation involving Big Cypress National Preserve. He is the father of two children, Jett and Skyler.