Nick Schuyler–Corey Smith friendship and training partnership

Nick Schuyler–Corey Smith friendship and training partnership is one of the book’s defining relationships: it joins the ordinary intimacy of gym life to the extraordinary ordeal that ended Corey Smith’s life. Nick first knew Corey as an imposing but modest professional football player, then as a training partner and friend whose humor, reliability, and quiet curiosity made him part of Nick’s daily life. At sea, their shared athletic habits became a source of cooperation, while the progressive effects of cold forced Nick to distinguish Corey’s character from the frightening behavior produced by physical collapse.

Identity and First Meeting

Corey Smith was six feet three inches tall, weighed 265 pounds, and had about 12 percent body fat when Nick met him at the gym. Nick immediately recognized that he was an athlete because of the NFL logos on his clothing and equipment. Corey had gone undrafted out of North Carolina State in 2002, signed with Tampa Bay as a free agent, and played in six of the first nine games of that season before an injury placed him on injured reserve. He could not play in the Super Bowl when the Buccaneers defeated the Raiders, and Nick was unsure whether Corey even received a Super Bowl ring; if he did, Corey did not make a display of it.

Corey’s career combined unusual extremes. He had been part of a championship team as a rookie, yet in 2008 he played for the Detroit Lions team that lost all sixteen games. He was valued as a durable, dependable backup, and his high-school nickname, the Tasmanian Devil, captured the relentlessness that followed him into professional football. Nick’s description emphasizes the contrast between Corey’s physical limitations as an undersized defensive end and the force of his commitment: he often faced tackles sixty or seventy pounds heavier, but kept playing with the same persistence.

From Gym Partners to Friends

Nick was training Marquis Cooper when he invited Corey to work out with them. The three men spent time together four or five days a week, often more than twenty hours in total through exercise and lunch. The relationship therefore developed through repetition rather than a single dramatic beginning: shared exertion made conversation familiar, and the gym became a place where professional credentials mattered less than the work each man was willing to do.

Their training was more demanding than the basic power lifting Corey and Marquis had done in the NFL. Nick incorporated combination exercises, side raises, curls, shrugs, lunges, and other auxiliary lifts to build stamina, endurance, and conditioning while reducing body fat and adding muscle. Corey’s bench press increased by twenty-five pounds in three months; he could perform eight repetitions with 335 pounds. The specific gain records the practical substance of their partnership, while the routine itself shows how Nick’s role shifted from acquaintance to coach and how Corey trusted him with the reshaping of his body.

Corey’s personality made the partnership more than a technical arrangement. He could be quiet and serious until he opened up, and he preferred listening to other people’s stories. He had a loud laugh and answered things he doubted with a grinning, sarcastic “Whaaaat?” He liked brownies and ice cream, had tried yoga, knew how to juggle, tinkered with computers, and deliberately avoided fixed pregame rituals, describing his practice as an “antiroutine” in which he did something different before every game. He also did not drink alcohol. These details complicate the image of the relentlessly physical football player by presenting a curious, playful, and self-directed friend.

When Corey became a free agent after the 2008 season, he remained confident that another team would sign him by training camp, perhaps within the next month. Nick asked whether he was worried, and Corey answered, “I’ll be fine.” The exchange is brief, but it expresses the steadiness that Nick associated with him: confidence without theatricality, and an ability to meet uncertainty in the same controlled manner he brought to training.

Fishing and Shared Risk

Corey’s friendship with Nick became connected to Marquis’s boat before the final trip. A week earlier, Corey and Nick had accompanied Marquis to the same offshore fishing area. Nick knew almost nothing about deep-sea fishing and had only one previous experience, off Virginia Beach at age seven, when he spent the day vomiting without even casting his line. Corey and Nick therefore entered the first trip as outsiders to Marquis’s expertise, bound together by their shared lack of enthusiasm for the physical misery of the return journey.

The ride back was choppy, and Marquis drove at thirty-five miles an hour. Corey and Nick repeatedly asked how much longer the trip would last. When they reached the dock, they were tired, hungry, cold, wet, and smelly while Marquis stayed behind with a friend to ice the fish and clean the boat. In the moment, the two men agreed that they would never do it again. Two nights later, however, they grilled and fried snapper, shark, amberjack, and grouper, and allowed Marquis to tease Nick about disliking fish. The episode shows the friendship’s ordinary elasticity: discomfort became a shared joke, and reluctance did not prevent the men from accepting another invitation.

Before Marquis left for Oakland, he wanted to fish once more. He warned that a cold front was approaching and that the water might become rough, adding that they might not go all the way out. Corey and Nick debated whether to join him, then agreed. Nick later explained that any time spent with those men was fun. Their decision was therefore not presented as reckless bravado alone; it arose from companionship, the impending separation caused by Marquis’s football move, and the sense that a final outing was worth the inconvenience.

Athletic Teamwork in the Water

When the boat capsized, the friendship became a working alliance under immediate physical threat. The men understood the danger of losing the air pocket beneath the overturned hull and began trying to right the boat together. Corey swam toward the stalled motor, Nick swam with him through the swells, and Marquis and Will Bleakley moved toward the bow. They counted down together so that their pushes and pulls would be synchronized rather than opposed, attempting to use their body weight and the motion of the waves to turn the hull upright.

The method failed because the waves smashed them against the boat and every possible handhold was underwater. Yet the failed effort reveals how strongly their gym partnership shaped their response. They did not act as isolated swimmers; they reverted to the coordination learned through years of athletic training. Their bodies, accustomed to synchronized exertion and endurance, became the first available rescue equipment.

The same mutual dependence continued as cold and exhaustion worsened. Nick and Will Bleakley noticed that Corey was sinking lower behind the boat, becoming quieter and shivering while still holding on. Earlier he had been vocal and impatient with Marquis, even asking why Marquis was behaving strangely. Nick stopped that interpretation by telling Corey that the behavior was not really Marquis. The correction later became crucial to Nick’s understanding of Corey: the men’s identities remained present in his memory even as their bodies and minds were altered by the conditions.

At about five on Sunday morning, Corey was floating at the stern, rambling and moaning, answering only after Nick and Will had called his name four or five times. He then developed a sudden, desperate energy and tried to climb aboard by pulling on Marquis’s legs and grabbing at anything available. Nick saw that Corey looked angry and mean, but understood that something was happening to him after roughly twelve hours in the water. Corey would struggle for ten or fifteen seconds, then become lifeless, and repeat the attempt.

The Final Struggle and Its Meaning

Corey eventually positioned himself near the motor, stood up, seized Nick, and threatened him, saying, “Fuck you—I’m a kill you!” His eyes looked wild. Nick’s immediate interpretation was not that Corey had become an enemy, but that the man before him was no longer the Corey he knew. That distinction is one of the relationship’s most important moral facts: affection and recognition survived even when fear entered the scene.

A second later Corey jumped across the motor as Nick straddled it. Nick’s right arm struck the propeller, causing a sharp pain near his wrist, and his reflexive movement pulled his hand backward. He lost Corey without intending to. Nick screamed for Will to grab him, and Will jumped from the stern and tried, but could not pursue Corey far into the rough water without risking separation from the boat. Corey finally seized his life jacket, pulled it over his head, and released it after the lower strap briefly held it in place.

The loss became inseparable from Nick’s survivor’s guilt. Nick later said that the four men had fought, communicated, tried to right the boat, and helped one another until their last breaths; he rejected the idea that Corey had simply given up. He remembered that no one had ignored the others in order to save himself, even though every action took place under conditions in which the body and mind were failing. Corey’s disappearance was thus not narrated as a betrayal within the friendship, but as the devastating point at which the partnership could no longer overcome the sea and the cold.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Nick’s opening account identifies Corey as one of the friends who was as strong, tough, and brave as he was, yet did not survive. Corey’s professional football identity helped generate public attention after the Coast Guard confirmed that four men were missing, including two NFL players. The Detroit Lions later honored Corey by announcing that no player would wear his number 93 during the 2009 season, while teammates remembered the relentless way he worked.

For Nick, Corey remained present through recurring memory rather than public ceremony alone. The accident continually returned through ordinary triggers, and Nick’s recollections preserved both the athlete who could bench 335 pounds for eight repetitions and the friend whose laugh, sarcasm, sweets, computer tinkering, and refusal to speak badly of others made him recognizable beyond football. Nick’s later encounter with LeBron James, who asked about his mother and said, “I thought I was blessed,” reinforced the language of survival without resolving it.

The relationship ultimately changes from active partnership to a permanent absence. Nick continues to think of calling Will Bleakley or seeing him in another person’s face, but Corey’s loss forms part of the same unresolved question: why did Nick live while the other three died? The training partnership had taught the men to push through pain and rely on one another; in the sea, that ethic produced genuine courage and cooperation, but it could not guarantee equal survival. Corey’s significance lies precisely in that tension between athletic strength and bodily vulnerability, between the friend Nick knew and the altered figure cold made him confront, and between teamwork as a source of hope and the final solitude of loss.