The sun bounces off the ground on another sweltering day in Iraq in 2009. Machine Gunner Michael Cain sits on his perch on top of the armored truck peering out at the Iraqi landscape.

His roommate and fellow road dog calls out for the sandy blonde haired, 21-year-old Navy sailor to check out two silver soda cans on the left side of the road.

Cain investigates from his vantage point for a moment, before playfully yelling back, “Man, what are you talking about?”

The conversation helps break up the monotony of life for a military man wearing fatigues in 100-degree heat.

Cain returns to staring at the unfamiliar terrain. As the Loudonville native studies the road his truck is churning across, he notices an unfamiliar object.

Suddenly Cain couldn’t talk.

He kicks his driver, bringing the truck to a grinding halt.

The driver glares up at Cain, demanding to know why Cain was kicking him.

Cain points down to the truck’s monstrous tires, inches away from a roadside bomb.

***********

Six years later, Michael Cain can’t move.

Cain was frozen in fear, staring at a foreign landscape.

Finally the referee signaled that Cain could check into the game.

The 28-year-old forward was ready to make his college basketball debut for the Ashland University Men’s basketball team.

The scoreboard above the mostly empty bleachers at Kates Gymnasium indicated a 40-point lead for the purple and gold over Silver Lake College.

But Cain, the Iraq War veteran who served five tours of duty in the US Navy and was inches away from death, had never felt more nervous.  

“I was so nervous that I didn’t even hear the horn blow,” Cain said. “And when the referee told me I could come in, I almost ran in with my warm-up still on.”

Two seconds after he checked in, Silver Lake called a 30 second timeout.

“I was already so tired,” Cain said with wide smile across his bearded face.

With under a minute left to go in the contest, Brandon Wanger stole the ball for AU.

Cain streaked up the left side of the floor on a two on one fast break. As his teammates rose from the bench with excitement, Cain caught the pass on the left block. Cain was in perfect position to lay the ball in for his first collegiate points.

Instead Cain tried to pump fake the defender, fell off balance and heaved a shot off the top of the backboard all in one motion.

Cain finished the game with one-shot attempt and one rebound in four minutes of action.

But Cain’s story isn’t about an Iraq war veteran snatching up rebounds in college basketball games next to teammates a decade younger than him.

Michael Cain’s story has nothing to do with his performance of the Kates Gymnasium floor and everything to do with his path to become a member of the AU basketball program.

For most people, a near miss with a roadside bomb is the defining moment of their life.

For Michael Cain, a brush with death is just one obstacle on a bumpy path to suiting up for the Eagles.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Cain said. “But somehow I made it here.”

***********

Cain uses a single word to describe his childhood.

“Rough,” Cain said. “There were some tough times growing up.”

Cain was born on December 13^th, 1987 to parents Darralynn and John Cain of Perrysville in southern Ashland County.

During the early part of his childhood it wasn’t Darralynn or John who did the bulk of the parenting. Instead much of the parenting duties fell to Michael’s grandmother.

Cain’s strongest memories as a young child are with his grandmother. His parents often dropped Michael and his younger sister, Hanna, off at their grandmother’s house so they could spend the night drinking the troubles of their marriage away.

At the time Cain didn’t think anything was odd about spending many nights, and even some holidays with his grandmother rather than his parents.

“I don’t even think we realized what was going on with them,” Cain said. “We were just excited to go visit Grandma. She was the one who raised me and my sister when we were little.”

On the nights where Cain’s grandmother could not babysit, Cain recalls a much different babysitting arraignment.

“We’d be in the bar, and me and my sister would be playing with the pool table,” Cain recalls. “We just thought it was normal. It was a small town so we knew everybody. We were just having fun. Looking back at it now, its crazy to think they brought me there.”

Daralynn and John’s marriage began to crumble as the children aged. The couple that had missed much of their children’s beginning years at biker rallies and bars began to feel as if there marriage was a party that had gone on too long.

The divorce came when Michael was in middle school, bringing an end to the parties. While Cain’s parents became much more involved in his daily life, their demons followed them.

Cain initially lived with his mother following the spilt and Daralynn continued to struggle with alcohol. For young Michael, his mother’s struggles with alcohol failed to register with him, in part because of her tremendous work ethic.

“I don’t think it clicked until later, maybe high school, that she was an alcoholic,” Cain said. “She was working 60 hours a week, giving violin lessons, paying all the bills so I don’t think I knew until I got older.”

As Cain moved into high school, he chose to live with his father.

In his junior year, Cain was approached to join the football team as a tight end. Cain knew that his father disapproved of the sport and tried to keep Michael away from the game because of a devastating knee injury that ended the elder Cain’s high school football career. Michael decided to join the Loudonville Redbird football team in secrecy.

“Something happened and he ended up finding my jersey,” Cain said. “And instead of getting mad, he was real excited about it. He put me on an eating plan, and I got my grades up.”

Cain followed in his father’s footsteps as a punter for the team. Emulating his father on the gridiron strengthened their father-son bonds. 

“He would ask me every day if I practiced,” Cain said. “It made him so happy and we became really close.”

As the trees grew bare in Central Ohio in Cain’s junior year, Michael traded his football pads in for basketball shorts as a reserve forward on the Redbird basketball team.

During the midst of a historic season that would see the Redbirds reach the state semifinals, tragedy struck Cain away from the floor.

On Sunday January 30^th, 2005 Michael Cain was in the city of Ashland to watch a basketball game with a friend. From the gym, he talked on the phone with his father about their household chores.

“He wasn’t a strict parent at all,” Cain said. “But he was just telling me what I had to do when I got home. He told me to have fun and hung up the phone.”

Cain left Ashland that evening and arrived to an empty house.

“I got back and I couldn’t get a hold of him,” Cain said.

“So I called and called. Finally somebody found his body.”

John Cain had passed away at the age of 47 due to a massive heart attack.

As Michael prepared for the most difficult goodbye a person can deal with, the Redbird basketball season carried on. On the night of February 4^th, Michael gathered with his family and others for his father’s funeral in Loudonville. Down the road, the Redbirds prepared for an important late season conference matchup.

As Michael tried to come to terms with the life of his father being taken too soon, his teammates celebrated another victory in front of their loved ones. In a cruel twist of irony, Parent’s Night for the Loudonville High School basketball team happened within hours of Michael saying goodbye to his father for the final time.

Michael, who had worked hard in school that year to remain academically eligible for football and basketball and make his father proud, struggled to come to terms with his father’s passing.

“I pretty much said I was done with school,” Cain said. “I quit going to school for two weeks, and I just basically withdrew from everybody.”

Cain was on the brink of dropping out before Redbird head basketball coach Mark Schlabach sat him down and convinced him to return to classes.

“Something clicked during that meeting,” Cain said. “He told me whenever I was ready to come back I should. So I went back. And I am glad I did now.”

Cain went back to school, and found work in summer before his senior year of high school at a canoe rental business in Loudonville. One day on the way to a canoe pickup Cain had a conversation he wasn’t prepared for.

On the way to the pickup, the driver told Michael about the tragic story of his friend who had passed away after suffering a heart attack. When Michael asked for the name of that man, he was shocked to learn that it was John Cain.

“He felt so bad,” Michael said. “He told me that my dad had a drug problem.”

Michael was shocked to find out that his father was not only using drugs, but that drugs led to his death.

“I didn’t have a clue,” Michael said. “I had no idea that he was a drug addict. But it seemed like most of his friends knew. It was a rough thing to find out.”

Michael tried to ignore that piece of information as he began his senior year of high school living with his mother. But the dark cloud of addiction continued to follow him.  

“Me and my sister hated the alcohol,” Cain said. “My mom would try to lie and say she wasn’t drinking but you could smell it on her.”

While Cain’s mother had always dealt with issues with alcohol, the problem became more serve as Michael’s senior year progressed.

“She was spiraling out of the control pretty bad,” Cain said. “One night I asked her to move her car and, she doesn’t remember any of it because she was drunk, but she kicked me out of the house. And me being stubborn, I ended up moving in with a friend and lived in the basement.”

Cain’s struggles at home carried over to his schoolwork. He was ineligible for football his senior year because of poor grades.

Cain thinks that he may have graduated based more on pity than merit.

“I’m not even sure how I graduated honestly,” Cain said. “Sometimes I think they let me graduate so they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.”

After graduating from high school, Cain was unsure of what to do with his life. Cain was working a temporary job at a factory in Loudonville, the same factory his mother had worked at for years and going out to the local bars at night.

Cain knew the dangerous and dark path he was heading down.

“Honestly if I had stayed I would probably still be working a factory job in Loudonville, going to the bar every night,” Cain said.

Cain wanted to leave behind his difficult upbringing when the promise of free food changed his life.

Cain had a chance encounter with a Navy recruiter who promised him a day off from work and a free lunch if he came and took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test.

“Now I wish I had taken the test more seriously,” Cain said. “But I passed and a week later my factory job told me they didn’t need me. I had already wanted to get away so a week after that I left.”

Cain headed for basic training for the United States Navy in Chicago without telling any of his family.

Michael Cain was ready to leave behind his difficult childhood in Loudonville.

************

In the summer of 2010, Michael Cain couldn’t sleep.

Less than a year after being a tire rotation from death, Cain was stationed in San Diego. The 22 year old struggled with bad dreams at night, and those demons often followed him into his everyday life.

After returning from his deployment to Iraq, Cain slipped into an old dangerous family habit, drinking and partying almost every night of the week.  

“At that point in my life, I believe I was an alcoholic,” Cain said. “We were going out, and going out and going out and I didn’t think anything of it.

While Cain turned to alcohol to help him cope, he still struggled to fall asleep.

In July of 2010, Cain and a group of friends sat down to watch a pay-per-view UFC fight. Cain looked forward to a night of relaxation.

Instead Cain’s night terrors, usually reserved only for his sleeping mind, turned his night into a living nightmare.

As Cain stared at the screen of two fighters grappling in the octagon, his mind projected a flashback to the most sinister moment of his childhood.

“Everything just flashed back,” Cain said. “It just came back at full force and I took it really hard.”

Buried in the deep recesses of his mind for nearly two decades, Michael realized he had been the victim of sexual assault.

The sexual assaults began during the period when Michael’s parents were battling demons of their own and were partying frequently. A man named Gordon became friendly with John and Daralynn Cain at the local bar in Perrysville. After noticing Michael sometimes accompanying his parents to the bar, Gordon offered to look after Michael.

Cain’s parents soon trusted Gordon enough that they left five-year-old Michael alone with Gordon at Gordon’s house.

That is when the sexual abuse began taking place, as Gordon took advantage of the young child over a period of several years.

“I was just so young and naïve,” Michael said. “He would say, ‘Hey you wanna come play video games?’ and then he would be like, ‘Let’s take shower.”

The incidents continued for several years before John Cain eventually walked in while the abuse happened.

Gordon was never prosecuted.

Cain struggled to understand how his parents could allow him to be so vulnerable.

“I look at it now and I wonder why the fuck my parents let me go over there,” Cain said. “I held it against my mom for a long time. But I think maybe they were naïve too.”

In less than a calendar year, Michael Cain had lived through a tour of duty in an active war zone and rediscovered the worst imaginable repressed memory.

Despite of his parent’s problems with addictive substances, Michael used alcohol to help him forget about his problems for the evening.

“At that point I was drinking a lot,” Cain said.  

Cain continued to struggle with his demons until he finally reached rock bottom.

“The low point was when I literally had to GPS my way to work from my phone,” Cain said. “I had gone to work a hundred times, but I couldn’t remember because I was wasted. And when I got to work hammered, and one girl pulled me aside and said, ‘You smell like a bottle. You need to go somewhere so you don’t get in trouble.’ At that point I realized that I had a problem.”

As Michael worked to get his drinking in check, he began seeing a therapist through the Navy. During the first session, he could not bring himself to acknowledge out loud what had happened to him.

“I couldn’t even say the words at first,” Cain said. “She had to say it and I would just shake my head to say yeah.”

The war veteran continued to battle his own demons. The 6 foot 4 inch navy sailor felt ashamed that despite his large stature he was unable to prevent someone his parents trusted from taking advantage of him when he was most vulnerable.

“I took it pretty hard because I am this big guy,” Cain said.

Cain thinks there is a belief among many in our culture that sexual abuse only happens to certain types of people.

“People say all the time that sexual assault couldn’t happen to someone like me,” Cain said. “And I struggled with that. But it took me a long time to realize that this can happen to anyone. And I shouldn’t feel bad about it. ”

Six years after not even being able to say the words out loud, Cain now feels comfortable discussing the darkest moments of his past. Cain is driven by the belief that despite all the negative events in his life, he wouldn’t be the man he is without every bump and bruise along the way.

“I use to be this quiet, angry guy even before I remembered what happened,” Cain said. “But talking about it has made me realize everything happens for a reason, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without that.”

Michael Cain, the survivor of sexual abuse, veteran of five tours of duty in the United States Navy and the man who has watched both of his parents die after years of substance abuse, doesn’t want to be known for his struggles.

He simply aspires to make his family proud.

To say that Cain is making his grandmother and sister proud is an understatement.

The kid who was academically ineligible to play football his senior year, and just scraped by to get his high school diploma is now a man and a division two student-athlete less than a year away from walking across the stage to receive his college diploma in Criminal Justice. 

And despite his parents’ own struggles, Cain credits his parents. He believes that many of his best traits are because of them.

“My dad used every mistake as a learning experience, and I try to do the same,” Cain said. “And my mom lived every day like it was her last, the same way I do. We both live with no regrets.”

It was his mother’s passing in June of 2013 that made Cain realize the importance of family.

“Once she was gone, it made me realize how much my family meant to me,” Cain said. “I knew I wanted to come back home after that.”

Cain left the Navy on Friday in August of 2014. He completed the 2,000-mile trek to Ashland by 6 a.m on Sunday. He then competed in a triathlon at 7 a.m that same day and started classes at AU on Monday.

When Cain enrolled in AU he knew he wanted to play basketball. Cain had continued playing on base leagues throughout his time in the military but wasn’t sure the team would be interested in having him. Cain asked for a meeting with head coach John Ellenwood to discuss the possibility of joining the men’s basketball team, hopeful but unsure about his prospects of donning the purple and gold jersey.

“For us it was a no brainer,” Ellenwood said. “Anytime you can add someone like Michael, with his background and character, you do it.”

With Ellenwood’s blessing, Cain began practicing with the team. Cain was primed to make his collegiate debut when another bump in his journey to the stepping on the floor in a regular season game occurred.

During a rebounding drill just before the start of the season, Cain snatched up a board and pivoted to fire the ball up court. That is when he felt a sharp pain in his knee.

Cain had torn his ACL. Cain’s 2014-15 season was finished before it even began.

After traveling around the globe serving our country and battling his own demons to become collegiate basketball player, Cain’s journey was halted just short of the finish line.

But Cain’s path, one that saw him overcome a difficult childhood in southern Ashland County and overcome a roadside bomb in rural Iraq was not going to end so close to his goal.

After spending a season watching from the sidelines and working hard on his education, Cain dedicated himself to rehabbing his knee and getting stronger in the off season. Working out by himself in a local gym in Ashland, Cain often ran into Ellenwood.

Ellenwood noted Cain’s resiliency was a byproduct of his childhood.

“A lot of people would have folded under the circumstances that Mike has been through,” Ellenwood said. “But he has not. He has been a bright light in a situation that was very dark.”

The spotlight turned to Cain on the night of November 20, 2015. With his grandmother in attendance, Cain gave her another reason to be proud when he checked in to a collegiate basketball game for the first time against Silver Lake. While she was proud, that didn’t mean she also didn’t worry about her grandson.

“At first she was worried about me being too old and having a heart attack while I played,” Cain said with a laugh. “But now she is loving it, she watches all of the games and tells me good luck before every game.”

Cain’s grandmother picked a good season to start following the Eagles, as with Cain in the fold AU made their first NCAA tournament appearance in 25 years. Cain saw action three games this past season, snagging one rebound and attempting two shots in six minutes on the court.

Despite the long, winding and brutal road Cain took to becoming a member of the AU men’s basketball team, he has no regrets.

“I wouldn’t change anything that has happened in my life,” Cain said. “I believe everything happens for a reason and I think I’ve had it pretty good. I never would have thought I would even be attending college, much less playing on college basketball on such a great team with awesome teammates. I think I’ve been very blessed.”

Cain’s journey to playing collegiate basketball was bumpier and darker than almost any other player who checked into a NCAA game this past year. But you would be hard pressed to find a guy having more fun than Michael Cain.

Cain hopes to suit up next season for the Eagles and score his first collegiate points.

The odds seem to be against the soon to be 30 year old forward scoring his first points.

But the odds have been against Michael Cain since birth.

And that has never stopped him before.