Thirty years ago, Joe Ehrmann was a professional football player and captain of the Baltimore Colts. He was known for giving nicknames to his fellow players, but one nickname did not belong to a player. It belonged to the team’s 11-year-old ball boy.

He was nicknamed Brillo, because he had a huge head of hair.

Now, some 30 years later, Brillo is grown up and, in a twist of fate, the two are again working side-by-side, speaking to groups on a subject they feel passionate about.

Jeffrey Marx, who hasn’t been called Brillo for years, became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and happened to get reconnected with Ehrmann when he was working on a story about former Colts players.

What he found surprised him — Ehrmann had become a minister and started a number of community service projects in Baltimore.

All the projects centered on Ehrmann’s belief that America does not successfully teach boys to be men.

“I had never heard anything like this before,” Marx said. “What he had come to learn is all the problems, the typical inner-city ills … were subsets of the biggest crisis in America, the crisis of masculinity.”

Ehrmann will speak on the subject tonight at 8 p.m. in the Union Ballroom. It is free and open to the public.

Since his retirement from professional football in 1985, Ehrmann is the founder of an inner-city community center called The Door, created the Ronald McDonald chapter in Baltimore and launched a racial-reconciliation project called Mission Baltimore as well as a program called Building Men for Others.

“As I began working with Joe, I was working on a simple premise; I had learned so much from Joe as a child I felt there was more to learn from him as an adult,” Marx said. “This was the only book out of the four books I have written that I did not set out to do.”

The book, “Season of Life,” hopes to spread Ehrmann’s message to a larger audience, Marx said.

“I realized this guy has impacted the state of Maryland so much he is basically a state park,” Marx said. “So I thought, ‘If this guy is a state park, I need to change him to a national treasure.'”

Since the book became a New York Times Best Seller, it has certainly impacted a larger audience. Bowling Green’s own Gregg Brandon got hold of it two years ago and the Falcon football team is currently reading the book.

“I read it and it is powerful stuff,” Brandon said. “Really ,when someone dies all that matters is your relationships … if you were ever involved with anything bigger than yourself.”

These are some of the values Ehrmann advocates, which dispel what he calls false masculinity — how men have been told to judge themselves on athletic ability, sexual conquest and economic success.

Instead, Ehrmann focuses on loving others, while learning to be loved and having a cause that serves others.

“Ultimately in the end, it won’t matter how far you can throw a football or how much you can bench press,” Brandon said. “Joe points out that in the end, it is about what kind of relationships you establish — how good of a brother, father or husband you have been.”

From his own experience, Brandon said he could see how the cultural formula for masculinity affects boys as well as young men.

“I can relate it to myself when I was a young kid,” Brandon said. “I always wanted to be the best … I was always striving to beat someone and there is nothing wrong with healthy competition, but when it gets channeled into life issues, it can create problems.”

Brandon worked closely with Mark Krautheim, the associate director of the Counseling Center. Krautheim said he sees men on campus who have these problems.

In the last year Krautheim said a topic he and staff members from the Office of Student Affairs have discussed are the number of violent acts made by men on this campus. He is also concerned with the decreased number of men applying for leadership positions.

“We said, ‘What is going on with our male students?'” Krautheim said. “Joe’s ideas spoke so clearly to me in the work I was doing at the Counseling Center.”

Problems like violence and drug abuse fall back on the pressure we put on men to be independent and never act vulnerable, Krautheim said. This can keep men from talking about their feelings and often makes them feel isolated.

Marx said he hopes Joe’s message will change people and help men realize they do not have to conform to the manly nature society has directed them toward.

Ehrmann and Marx speak to nearly 100 groups each year, from peewee to professional football teams, men’s groups, church groups and universities.

“We have become a team, Joe and I,” Marx said. “[Working with Joe] has been one of the most meaningful and enjoyable experiences in my life.”